Page 57 of The Jasad Crown (The Scorched Throne #2)

My mistake was in thinking an unleashed Arin would fight the way I did.

Where I descended into a fog of instinct, reacting as my blade demanded and surrendering to the skill of my body, Arin led with his mind.

He was a lightning strike, not a storm. Precise, fatal, and terrifying to behold.

His body flowed with a grace and focus I would never master, not in any number of lifetimes.

It was awe-inspiring. Infuriating. Unbelievably attractive.

I wiped some of the sand from my cheek and shook myself. Indecent thoughts about the man currently slaughtering my would-be murderers was a normal reaction to almost being eaten.

No reason to allow Arin to have all the fun. I hurled myself into the fray, leaping onto the back of a soldier rushing Arin and tackling him to the ground.

“Did you enjoy the show?” Arin growled, wrenching a soldier to his knees and snapping his neck. The body listed, spraying sand as it thumped to the ground. In his last seconds, I could have sworn I saw relief in his eyes.

I caught the blade Arin tossed me and grinned. “Immensely.”

Between the two of us, we finished off the remaining soldiers in record time. When the last soldier fell, I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand and gazed at the corpses strung along the shore. How many? Fifty? A hundred?

My heart pounded, my breathing erratic from the exertion and the unrelenting heat of the sun.

Arin slipped off his coat and threw it over his shoulder.

Somehow, his vest had remained unscathed in the melee, the black clasps over his chest buckled tight.

Without glancing at me, he strode over the bodies and headed for the woods.

Very mature. I followed him, enjoying the flex of his broad back as he maneuvered around the graveyard he’d created. “Too late to pretend,” I called in a singsong. “The dulhath said you went looking for me.”

Tension feathered across Arin’s shoulders. He was more wound up now than he’d been while facing a small army.

“Where are we going?”

He continued walking at an arrogantly fast clip, and I struggled to wade through the sand after him. Blocking me out was his grand approach, really?

“I don’t have my magic here! And I am guessing you found out you aren’t able to drain magic, or you wouldn’t have needed to kill the dulhath with your knife. We need to work together to get out of the Mirayah, and your theatrics are not helping anyone.”

Arin stopped to pick up a rock and wipe it on a dead soldier’s sleeve before tucking it into his pocket. Not a glance or syllable in my direction as he strode off once more.

Releasing an embattled sigh, I bent and scooped a handful of wet sand. I patted it into a ball, drew my arm back, and threw.

The ball of sand hit the back of Arin’s head and exploded. I had the rare pleasure of watching the Nizahl Heir halt in his tracks as sand dropped in clumps into the collar of his shirt.

“Do you want me to be in your debt? Is that why you keep saving me?” I snapped. “Keep your favors. I can take care of myself.”

At last, he turned around. “Debt?” Disbelief sharpened the word to a deadly point.

Fury spilled over him, the sudden rush of it startling me a step back. The white scar on his jaw seemed to glow with his anger. “How do you expect I would collect on this debt?”

Arin advanced, stalking toward me with the single-minded intent of a wolf cornering its kill.

“You tie me to a wall and beat me bloody, you abduct me, your kitmers drop me into a cursed realm I have managed to avoid my entire life, and then you allow a dulhath that you released to nearly eat you!” By the end of his rant, Arin’s voice had risen to a roar.

“I wish I had a good reason for saving you. I wish it was logical or rational, informed by any semblance of reason. I wish more than anything my first thought when I emerged from the water was not of you, that I hadn’t been prepared to tear through every grain of sand and burn every tree in this damned place until I found you. ”

I stared at him, truly speechless for possibly the first time in my life.

Blood rushed to my head, blurring the edges of my vision.

Gripped with the same sensation I had felt while watching Arin rip apart the soldier in Mahair who had tried to kill me, two contrary forces struggling to meet in my head.

“I didn’t allow the dulhath to nearly eat me,” I mumbled, dropping my eyes to the sand. “I tried to bite him first.”

Catastrophe lay pressed between us. One step forward, and we would dissolve into it.

“You don’t have your magic here,” Arin repeated, as though my words had only just penetrated.

My throat felt too brittle to contain the forces vaulting for freedom from my chest.

“You sound relieved. Were you afraid you’d lose again?” I said shakily.

Arin stepped into my space, forcing my gaze up. “You torment of my soul,” Arin growled. “I am afraid I will win.”

Without my magic’s pressure against the back of my head, I could hear myself think for the first time in a long time.

I could identify the ache spreading through me, burning through the layers of armor I had carefully built around myself from the minute I watched my mother get dragged into Bakir Tower.

His honesty undid me; what remained was unbearably fragile.

Something raw and ruined that hurt if I tried to pick it up.

The last real piece of me, protected for longer than I’d known it still existed to protect.

A thumb grazed my cheek, and my wet eyes flashed open to find Arin mere inches away, his hand curving around my face. With a jolt, I realized he was touching me, bare skin to bare skin.

“Stupid risk to take,” I managed. “Even in the Mirayah, my magic could still have killed you.”

“Yes.” Arin smoothed his thumb over the tear beading in the corner of my eye. “It could have.”

Frigid water lapped around my ankles as the tide advanced across the shore.

“Do not toy with me. This—this is the last piece of my heart I have left, do you understand? I don’t know how to protect it once it is outside my body.

If I trust you and then you cast it into the dirt, it will be the death of both of us.

What is left of me will kill what is left of you. ”

“I am becoming oddly partial to your death threats,” Arin mused. “I seem to hear in them different words entirely.”

“Then you should have your ears checked,” I muttered.

“Essiya,” Arin sighed. “Look at me.”

I sniffed, wiping my nose with my sandy sleeve and swinging my gaze back to him.

Arin undid the top button of his shirt, revealing a triangle of smooth skin.

As I watched, Arin wrapped his hand around something beneath his collar.

His gaze traveled over my head, as though inspecting a problem manifesting in the horizon.

I waited, mystified, until his features settled in weary resolution, and he dropped his hand.

A tiny violet-and-black fig necklace laid against the pale skin below his throat.

The necklace I’d bought off the Omalian merchant during the second trial. The necklace I had gifted Arin the night of the Victor’s Ball.

He kept it.

Arin of Nizahl, who did not tolerate a loose stitch or a crooked collar, who inspected every grain of dust that dared settle over him, had been wearing a cheap piece of Omalian jewelry under his punishing layers of clothes.

No eloquent words or theories or complex pieces of strategy could explain it.

I never stood a chance.

I grabbed the sides of his ridiculously perfect vest and yanked Arin forward, closing the remaining distance between us. A laugh rumbled through the chest pressed against mine, warming me down to my toes.

I calculated my odds of reaching his mouth, and I was strongly contemplating climbing up his chest like a nisnas when Arin exercised an ounce of mercy and lowered his treacherous, beautiful mouth to whisper, “Tell me what you want, Suraira.”

I flushed, my grip on his vest tightening. “I want to pull your arrogant head off your smug should—”

He kissed me.

A hush stole over my mind. The world shrank until only Arin remained. Only Arin and the arm he slipped around my waist, drawing me tight against him. The heat of his mouth, reducing me to ash as rapidly as a feather dropped into a hearth.

I gasped as broad hands gripped the back of my thighs and lifted me. I allowed myself to go pliant, wrapping my legs around his waist. When air became marginally more important than exploring the swell of Arin’s bottom lip, I dropped my forehead to his cheek as I caught my breath.

Arin began to walk at a purposeful clip toward the woods.

The sun had dropped to the middle of the sky, its piercing glare softening in its descent, burnishing the sky in streaks of blue and pink.

White foam crawled higher up the beach as the tide rose, water spilling closer to the woods with each wave.

As the tide receded, it devoured. The corpses disappeared into its embrace, sinking beneath the clear blue waves.

“You can’t carry me across the sand,” I protested. “Put me down before you drop us both.”

Arin spared me a scornful glance, and I rolled my eyes. “Have it your way,” I grumbled, and set to pressing my lips to the column of his throat.

His grip on my legs tightened, and Arin walked faster.

As soon as we stepped into the woods, darkness enveloped us. The temperature plunged, and I was suddenly glad for Arin’s plethora of clothing. The wind carried the acrid scent of recently burnt wood, and a fainter, sweeter smell.

My knees slackened as I slid to the ground. Without exchanging a single word, Arin and I moved in tandem, rotating around each other as we assessed the scene. The ground rumbled beneath us. A shriek pierced the quiet, tearing a gash for the ensuing silence to bleed through.

The beach had vanished. The woods closed around us in every direction, trees stretching as far as I could see.