Page 189 of The Chains You Defy

This was wrong.

Wrong.

Wrong.

Wrong.

When he realized I wasn’t kissing him back, he broke the contact, and I exhaled the breath I’d been holding, my body taut as a bowstring.

“Coir.” Talann’s voice vibrated all around me.

“Please.” Coir whimpered and writhed underneath me, but her expression morphed into something desperate as the male withdrew his hand.

I barely registered the visual exchange between the males.

“Patience, dearest Coir.”

In one fluid motion, Curamoir rose to his feet and, much to my surprise, picked me up. At the edge of my vision, I spotted Talann doing the same with Coir, who took the chance and met him in a bruising kiss.

Remembering the wrongness of the other male’s lips on mine, I shuddered. “What are you doing?”

“We’re moving somewhere more comfortable, little human. Are you fine with that?”

“I’m already pretty comfortable.” My thoughts slowed and became sluggish as fatigue barreled into me, so out of the blue that I almost blacked out. How could I be on top of the world in one moment, deadly tired in the next?

“Oh, shit.”

Why had he cursed?

And why did everyone wear alarmed expressions?

But—too tired to panic. So sleepy—

“Shhh, Nayana. Close your eyes, get some rest,” Coir coaxed, and I was unable to resist.

As I drifted away, disembodied voices reached my ears.

“Sorry. When I gave her the mood-enhancing chocolate, I forgot how much relaxant she’d already received today. Must have been too much for a human.”

“Then you’d better put her safely out of reach and get a healer to examine her. Cantarlann will lose his shit if she can’t participate tomorrow, or worse.”

Their words made little sense to me, and when I woke up the next morning, head pounding, the incident had already slipped my mind.

I’d lost track of how often we’d changed our horses during the last few days. Antas and I had spent all of them and most of the nights in the saddle, frequently riding at top speed, supported by the wind magic Antas wielded.

My uncle was exhausted, stretching the little power he harbored thin, which told me more about how rightfully I worried about the entire situation, even if he refused to admit to its gravity.

We also ate and slept on horseback, taking turns resting, and the closer we came to the Cuirt an Ghra, the more my unease turned physical. My chest wasaching, my short dreams were a cornucopia of weird images, and there was a constant wrongness itching under my skin.

“Something is happening, Dion, is it not?”

“I’ll kill every single one of them if they harm my Nayana.”

Antas regarded me with concern, but I wasn’t able to catch a lone rational thought. Someone was hurting what was mine, so I’d hurt them back a thousandfold, so much that the destruction of Amalach would look harmless next to my retribution.

If the worlds believed they understood only an inkling of how unhinged I was when it came to her, they would soon realize how very wrong they were.

“To witness you like that—”