Page 43 of The Frost Witch (The Covenants of Velora #1)

I could not believe that I had ever entertained thoughts of goodwill toward Garrick the fucking Red.

If the man had ever slept, I would have contemplated killing him just to free myself of the Lifebind between us.

But if he did sleep, he never let me see it.

When my eyes opened in the morning, he was there, cooking breakfast over the open fire.

When I fell into my bedroll at night, too exhausted for even verbal sparring, he was there, banking the flames to see us through the night and ward off any of the mountains’ more aggressive occupants.

I couldn’t even call him a bastard anymore. Not even in my mind. It was too damn derogatory now that I knew about his parentage.

It was only a few hours past midday, and already I was about to collapse.

The first half of the day had been a brutal upward climb.

When we’d started downhill after our midday meal, I’d almost wept with relief.

Only to remember that going down was just as punishing when you had to keep a body as considerable as mine from tumbling head over ass straight down the side of the mountain.

“You do not need to sigh louder to get your point across. I have excellent hearing.”

I had not even realized I was sighing. Though the way my breath came in and out of my chest, with significant weight, suggested I had been doing exactly that. Even my subconscious hated Garrick the Red.

“Of course you do,” I shot back. The fae had heightened senses, just like witches. I fixed my eyes over Garrick’s shoulder. If I looked right at him, I was liable to freeze him where he stood.

He turned to face me, hands braced on the straps of his pack where they rested over both of his impossibly wide shoulders. “Do you want to rest?”

I walked right past him, determined not to admire those shoulders. “Not if you don’t.”

“Stubborn little witch, aren’t you?”

The woods were thinner up here in the mountains, the air as well. It made all of our words sound longer, stilted.

“Do not call me that,” I said between gritted teeth.

Garrick had stopped walking. For fuck’s sake. If I stopped, I seriously doubted my ability to get moving again.

“It is what you are,” he said.

“I am not little. I am a witch. Call me that if you must. But don’t saddle me with an infantilizing sobriquet to entertain yourself.

” I was sweating everywhere. Despite the cold that held Velora in its perpetual grip, despite the frost that ran in my veins, I was so fucking hot.

I unstrapped the cloak from my shoulders and tugged at the buckles that held my leather vest in place atop the wool overdress.

Cool, brisk air found the triangle of my chest that I’d exposed, and I could have wept.

Garrick made a distressed sound in his throat. My eyes fell closed as I savored the bliss of the cold air snaking between the crevice of my breasts. I did not open them to see if he was choking on his water.

“Nicknames do not have to be infantilizing. They can be endearing,” he said, his voice still gruff.

I sighed—loudly, just as he’d said. “And I am supposed to believe that when you call me a stubborn little witch , it is a term of endearment?”

“Yes.”

I was going to murder him. The conscience and indecision that had plagued me for centuries were quickly evaporating. Fuck my supposed gentle heart and its refusal to die within my chest. I dragged my hair forward over my shoulder with one hand. “You are the most infuriating man—male?—”

“I am a man.”

Because he was half-human. That was the side of himself he chose to identify with. I might loathe and lust after him in alternating breaths, but I could respect that choice.

I snapped the cloak from my shoulders, draping it over my arm. “You are the most infuriating man I have ever had the displeasure of knowing.”

I still had to carry the weight of the cloak, but the cool air around my shoulders and on the exposed back of my neck was divine. I could even feel the faintest breeze tickling the nape of my neck as I started forward again.

“I thought we were resting.”

I spun without thinking, shards of ice flying from my palm as I swept it behind me. The daggers embedded in the ground several feet short of Garrick.

Pity.

“You want to fight, witch?”

Damn him. On his tongue, it did sound like an endearment. I could not even chastise him for choosing to use the epithet, because I’d approved it. Not a nickname, but a statement of fact. I was a witch.

Garrick’s eyes were doing that thing again, where they caught the light and seemed to glow. His canteen was nowhere in sight to account for his gruff voice. But he could have stowed it in his pack while my back was turned.

He stared me down, one hand hovering near the hilts of the blades in his leather bandolier, waiting for a response. Apparently, I did not give him one quickly enough for his liking.

“The sooner you learn to defend yourself, the sooner I can actually get some restful sleep,” he taunted.

“I am exhausted. If you want to keep hiking, then let’s go.

Never mind that we could be walking along the base of the mountains, rather than trudging through them.

” A point I’d made a dozen times in the eighteen hours since we’d left the Sacrifice Gate.

To the north of the mountains were thick forests—and the coven lands.

But to the south were the once-fertile valleys of the human lands.

We could be walking through rolling hills instead of trudging up and down literal peaks.

The corner of his mouth quirked into a smile. Not a smirk. A fucking smile. “But you are not as exhausted as you were a week ago.”

“What in the Dark God’s frigid hellscape do you mean by that?” I enunciated the last few words carefully, each one laced with an unspoken threat that I would make good on, reckless or not.

“You are getting stronger every day. Initially, I was worried it would diminish those delicious curves of yours, but your body seems determined to hold on to them.”

Had Garrick fallen down and hit his head? If he had, how had I missed it?

The man had taken complete leave of his senses. He could not actually mean that the reason he was dragging me through the mountains was to build my endurance. Just like there was no plausible way that he had just used the word delicious to describe my body.

I’d seen myself in a mirror plenty of times. I knew I was fucking delicious. But it was something entirely different when Garrick said it.

I had two choices. I could either drop my pack, strip off my clothes, and take up the implied offer in those words. Or I could pull one of the daggers from my waist and stab him with it.

I sucked in a breath, decision made.

I dropped my pack.