Page 62 of The Frost Witch (The Covenants of Velora #1)

I could have slept forever with his warm body pressed up against mine.

I did not remember taking off my gown. More upsettingly, I did not remember him taking off my gown.

But curled in the warmth of the bed, the fire crackling, and Isanara snoring softly by the hearth, I was ready to make a memory I would be able to recall.

Garrick curled his arm around me, drawing my backside flush against him.

Even asleep, I could feel the hard length of him nestled between the cleft of my bottom.

Slumber became less and less appealing by the moment.

I lifted my right thigh, the one resting on top, and slid it backward over his calf to increase the pressure of his cock against me.

The hand he’d draped around my waist tightened on my stomach, holding the rounded, soft curve like it was too precious to possibly let go.

I arched into him, hungry for the heat of his breath on my throat?—

I leapt from the bed, dislodging Garrick’s arm with a heavy thump on the mattress and a mumbled curse.

Isanara’s claws dug into the wooden floor as she jolted awake.

The bed frame creaked under Garrick’s shifting weight.

But all of those sounds faded into nothing as my awareness honed in on the one that had dragged me from my languid fantasies.

For a moment, I thought I’d imagined it. But then the door creaked again.

I blasted it open, the force of the frost slamming the door into the wall and then freezing it in place.

I wanted to see the attacker who was foolish enough to come for me, a frost witch of the Midnight Coven, Lifebind of the notorious bounty hunter Garrick the Red, conqueror of four Gates, and chosen by the dragon Isanara.

The firelight reflected off of wine-red hair.

I did not stop to analyze how he’d gotten through a door lined with three heavy metal locks. I didn’t think at all. I felt. I felt my power rising to defend me and mine. My body began to move, slipping into the choreographed maneuvers that Garrick had drilled into me for weeks and weeks.

My belt was long gone, but I found the knife already in my hand.

It had been tucked beneath my pillow. I threw myself at Nash.

He’d lost the element of surprise and he did not know the contours of the room.

He knew I was a witch, but he understood none of the nuances of my power, nor had he seen the hours I’d spent training with Garrick.

Once, he would have had an advantage. Now, I would punish him for being arrogant enough to ignore both Garrick and my warnings.

He swung the greatsword wide. I threw myself sideways, one hand reaching for the wall to brace the impact.

The tip of his sword caught my shift, tearing a wide gash in the linen.

He was more than competent with the sword, but it was a large and unwieldy weapon.

I shoved myself off of the wall, putting the table and chairs between us.

He’d have to come around them to reach me, and those few precious seconds would give me an advantage.

“A table won’t be enough to save you,” Nash said, bracing his hands on the first chair that blocked his way. “Or your little dragon.”

It was the absolute wrong thing to say, and not because of the floor-shaking roar that ripped from Isanara.

“He’s mine,” I declared to Isanara.

For once, my familiar did not argue.

Nash sprang to my left, going for what he presumed was my weaker side. But my power flowed just fine from both of my hands.

I sent shards of ice at his face with my hands while I kicked out the chair from my side of the table.

Nash swiped aside my frozen missiles with his sword but stumbled on the chair.

I saw my advantage. Ice spread across the floor, sweeping his feet out from under him as I dove in with my dagger aimed squarely at his chest.

His sword arm tangled in the legs of the chair, but he deflected me with the other, sending me sprawling.

I slammed my elbows into the floor beneath me, forcing myself back up, but before I could gain my knees, Nash crashed down on top of me.

I thrashed wildly. I had to knock the sword away.

If he got that blade against a vital organ or artery, I was dead.

My hand found his arm. I forced all of my power into that one hand, freezing him the way I had Alize.

He shrieked, wresting his arm away, but his knees on my chest kept me pinned.

He ripped back the sleeve of his tunic to reveal the dark splotch where the skin had already begun to die. “You frigid bitch.”

He punched me in the face. Blood flooded my mouth. Before I could react, he’d knocked my dagger from my right hand, leaving me without a blade.

“I spared you,” I gasped out between blood-filled breaths. I did not know why I said it; there was no good in him for me to appeal to, no mercy.

“Do not blame me for your foolish mistakes. I thought that witches were ruthless. Then I met you and I realized that was just a tale told to children to keep them in line.” He leaned down, pinning an arm across my throat to cut off my air supply. “You are weak.”

“Strength takes many forms.” Isanara had remained silent, honoring my request to fight this battle myself. But she gave me those words.

“Strength takes many forms,” I repeated aloud, letting her strength of spirit meld with my own. “I only have to be strong enough to beat you.”

“When you die, your dragon will answer to me.”

He’d robbed me of my blade. But I still had a weapon. And he’d assumed that my left hand was too weak to bother pinning.

I formed the ice dagger in my palm, fusing it to my hand so he could not knock it loose, and raked it down his face from forehead to chin.

Blood spurted, the warmth of it shrinking the dagger as he rolled away.

I released it, letting the chunk of ice fall to the floor, diluting the pool of Nash’s blood.

“Dragons answer to no one,” I seethed.

I let myself savor the sight of him hunched over on the floor, cupping his face and moaning. But the second he moved to face me, I released all control.

Frost poured from my hands, glowing a faint, pale blue as it swirled around him. It speared into his ears, mouth, and nose. Into the socket where the eye I’d destroyed had once been.

I felt the flakes coalesce inside his lungs and in the arteries of his heart.

In one last moment of lucidity, Nash turned to me. He looked at me with one ragged, murderous eye. I saw only what he’d done to the woman in the stable. What he’d tried to do to me. What he’d promised to do to Isanara.

I turned the frost to solid ice.

His heart stopped. His lungs could not pull air. I stood over his frozen body, holding my power in place until every organ ceased to function and not a single spark of life remained in his body.

The once warm blood on his face and hands sparkled, transformed into a deep, glittering scarlet.

“So, you do know something about dragons.”

My gaze snapped to Isanara, her body cast in an eerie silhouette by the flames of the hearth behind her.

The spikes on her back stood up, raised like the hairs of a cat when riled.

Her delicate snout and curved horns seemed longer, more imposing than ever before.

She’d been ready to come to my aid, I realized.

If she’d truly thought me in danger, she would have thrown herself between me and Nash. She would have sacrificed herself.

I hit my knees.

My breath came hard and fast, the blood in my veins thrumming wildly.

I fell forward, catching myself on my hands.

I slid through the frozen shards of Nash’s blood, ripping open little wounds across my palms. The blood began to thaw, the scent of it more noxious with every second.

My heart was going to explode out of my chest. No—that isn’t possible. My heart does not beat anymore…

Not my heart. My power. It was going to explode out of me, take out everyone and everything?—

“Breathe, Koryn.”

Garrick’s thigh pressed into mine as he knelt at my side. He picked up my hands, lifting me back to sit on my heels. His hands engulfed my own, his warmth finding the power within me and soothing it back into submission.

It was just enough for me to remember the techniques that Tomin had taught me.

I forced my eyes open, scanning the room through the watery mist that clouded them.

I counted off items as I saw them. One—the unmade bed, two—the rusted shutter hinge, three—the torn fingernail on Garrick’s left thumb.

I closed my eyes again, focusing now on the sounds.

One—the crackling of the fire, two—Garrick’s thundering heart.

I opened my eyes and focused on what I could feel.

One—the rough callouses on Garrick’s hands where they stroked mine.

Slowly, so painfully slowly, I regained control. My power quieted. So did the blood thrumming through my veins.

Tears streamed down my cheeks.

“I killed him.” The rough sound of my own voice surprised me.

Garrick squeezed my hands. “You have killed before, and you will kill again. Killing should never be easy. You should feel every single death. Even when it’s necessary, and even when you don’t regret it.”

I couldn’t do any more than nod. That was what made me different than the rest of my coven. No matter how long and how hard I tried, killing had never become easy. A witch’s duty was to coven above all others, but my heart yearned for humanity and all its messy intricacies.

My shoulders slid and I leaned forward. Garrick met me halfway, pressing his forehead to my own.

We stayed there for minutes that might have turned to hours, sharing one another’s air, regulating until I could begin to make sense of the hell that had unfolded around me—the hell I’d wrought and that I’d have to live with.

In some ways, it was more intimate than the kiss we’d shared hours before.

My breath turned shaky again. I’d kissed him. Dark God below, I’d done more than just kiss him. I’d been ready to let him take me right there on that table, before thirty humans and my familiar. And more than anything, I wanted to lean in and kiss him again.

As usual, I had no control over my mouth. “Earlier, in the common room, I shouldn’t have?—”

Garrick drew back, breaking the connection. My hands tightened around his, reflexively trying to keep him with me. He did not pull those away, but it was impossible to miss the small sigh that slipped between his lips. “Forget it. You were intoxicated by your own spell.”

But I could not forget his words any more than he could take them back. Things had been shifting between us for a while. Somewhere between the Lifebind and the weeks spent in forced proximity traversing the Seven Gates… the Lifebind was not the only thing holding us together any longer.

Yet in more dangerous, more irrevocable ways, nothing had changed.

I was a witch. An immortal.

He was a half-human bounty hunter with ties to the fae court.

The conflict between us subsumed the gates and the Lifebind. I hated half of who he was—the same half that he hated. Witches, humans, fae, our shared presence on Velora had done nothing but lead to harm and curses and death.

Garrick and I were too small to fight that. And even if there was something bigger, something more between us, we were bound to the Seven Gates.

If I made it through the gates, I would be restored to my coven. If I did not, I’d be dead. There were no happy endings waiting for the pair of us. Faerietales belonged where they’d always been—in my long-forgotten past.

I watched Garrick’s throat slide as he swallowed at the same time I did.

Neither one of us needed to say the words. We understood each other too well for that. We may be different in every measurable way, but we were both what Velora had made us.

I fought back the emotions and the power, unwilling to let them loose again.

“Why didn’t you intervene?” I asked, rocking back on my heels, desperate for any conversation to distract me from my thoughts.

Garrick released my hands, but he did not move to stand. “What do you call this?”

I huffed out a half-laugh. Isanara appeared at my side, tromping through Nash’s blood and over his body without any regard for the man whose soul had once resided inside the frozen shell. He deserved none of her regard, anyway.

“I meant before, when Nash attacked. You just…” I wasn’t quite sure where he’d been. I had not even thought of him. My focus had narrowed to protecting Isanara.

“I knew you could handle yourself.” The corners of his mouth turned up in a smirk, but it lacked something. “And now you know it, too.”

I had no answer to that. I thought that had been the purpose of all our sparring and hiking in the mountains. I reached down, caressing the tender scales between Isanara’s curved horns. But Garrick reached for me again.

“Not just here.” He stroked a hand over my forehead, brushing back the sweaty strands of hair. Then he slid two fingers down my face, past my chin and collarbone, between my breasts. “And here.”

I could not bring myself to correct him, to tell him that it was impossible to feel in a heart that no longer beat.

“I don’t think I can sleep any longer,” I said instead.

Garrick nodded and handed me my cloak. “The storm has passed. Let’s go.”