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Chapter fourteen

W eariness settled heavy in our bones while we made camp inside a small grove of maple trees.

Our plans to stay overnight in the village had been thwarted.

The villagers were afraid to talk to us.

They wouldn’t accept our food. With all our efforts to help proving futile, not one of us could stand to stay there a moment longer.

To my surprise, everyone but Gavin laid down and fell asleep before I even tried. Well aware one pair of eyes was burdened with worry and locked on me, I stayed up, standing with my arms crossed before the fire, making every effort to burn the memories from today into my heart.

I wouldn’t forget the fear, hunger, and destitution of the innocent people I should have been able to help.

I looked up only when I heard steady footsteps and knew it was Gavin. His worn leather jacket was spread out on the ground beside me.

“Sit.”

I stared at the jacket. “On you—your jacket? It—”

“Sit, Ella.” Unwavering will persisted in his gaze.

I hesitantly obeyed, lowering myself slowly, to not do further damage to his jacket.

As soon as I was seated— “Give me your feet.”

“What?” I choked.

He squatted before me. “Do you think I don’t see you limping?” He gestured to my legs. “You’ve been in pain every day for the last week, and you’ve said nothing. Give me your feet.”

“You really don’t need to—”

“Let me take care of you, Aryella.” His brow was furrowed with ache—torment, maybe—as he added, “Please.”

It was the first time I’d heard him say that word. I had a feeling he didn’t have to plead very often.

With a quick glance over his shoulder, I made sure the others were asleep. I didn’t need Gemma or Ezra to be disappointed in me for letting him get so close. When I was confident they wouldn’t see, I heeded his demands.

He started with my left foot, removing my boots, then my wool socks. His strong, long, and rough fingers rubbed the top of my foot in firm circles down to my ankle, repeating from the base of each toe.

I closed my eyes and sighed, letting my head fall back between my shoulders. “I suppose I better enjoy this while it lasts.” I snorted. “I’m sure the army commander won’t have the time or patience to give me a foot massage.”

“He will if he knows how lucky he is.”

A fluttering in my stomach caused my pulse to stutter. Guilt, for even mentioning my betrothed when Gavin… he did not seem to like it.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. His flaring nostrils were the only sign of emotion on his stoic face. “I don’t know why I— I shouldn’ t bring him up, I—”

“You don’t have to apologize for saying what you feel, Ella.” He kept his firm grip on my foot and moved his thumbs to the bottom, beneath my toes. “It’s your life, I’m just happy to witness it.”

“You’re quite the wordsmith to night .” I hissed when he pressed a particularly sore spot, and the pain was glorious. “You’ll have to tell me what I did to earn such treatment.”

His lips twitched, but something else—regret, maybe—got in the way. “Your compassion for those people…” He huffed out a humorless laugh. “Not many would bother.” His strong fingers dug into the aching arch of my foot, eliciting a moan that I had to bite my tongue to repress.

I studied the furrow of his brow, how the scar over his right eye crinkled on his cheek when he focused. Heat pooled in my stomach. Merely from the strength, the pull of his touch. The fear he could evoke contrasted by the care he took with me made me feel like I wanted him to keep touching me.

I forced a swallow and shoved it down. I was betrothed to someone else. I couldn’t feel this way.

“Simeon wouldn’t bother?” I pressed on.

Another dark, humorless chuckle. “No. Simeon would not bother.”

“How well do you know Simeon?”

“Too well.”

I lifted my eyebrows in surprise and added that to the list of questions I saved for another time. I was too tired and emotionally drained to process anything about my ancient sorcerer father.

“Well, you did,” I said softly. “You bothered.”

“Don’t give me too much credit.” He smirked. “It’s what you wanted.”

“No.” I tilted my head at him and smiled. “You would have made the call on your own. You’re a good man, Gavin Smyth.”

True. At least, I knew it was true. From the pause of his hands and the widening of his eyes, I could tell he believed otherwise. Maybe no one had told him he was good for quite a long while .

“I think he doesn’t like himself very much,” Caz had said.

I frowned. That Gavin would stand by my side in the face of terrible horror, the worst of humanity, was something I would never forget.

But I was also disturbed by the look of indifference he’d worn when faced with such a brutal sight, and I feared for him.

I was afraid of what he had seen and done and endured and what it had done to him.

To see a man gutted and hung up as a feast for crows and be wholly unbothered…

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yes,” he answered.

“You told me you’re good at killing.”

“Yes.”

“How many people have you killed?”

“Don’t ask questions if you can’t handle the answer.”

My stomach dropped. I could handle more than he realized, but did I want to?

“Would you…” I shuddered, terrified by the potential truth. “Would you kill… for me ?”

He didn’t hesitate. “I already have.”

I flinched and resisted the urge to retreat from him. Because I should, not because I wanted to.

He shifted from my left foot to my right, where he repeated his ministrations.

“Why?” I breathed.

He pressed into another beautifully painful spot. “You are my queen.”

That answer again. There was more, but I didn’t know how to find it.

Maybe if I helped him find peace or happiness of some sort…

“After all this is over, after I’m deemed ready to lead by Simeon and delivered to Elias, what will you do?”

“Does it matter to you?”

“I just…” I swallowed a lump of emotion in my throat. My cheeks flooded with heat. “There has to be a way to repay you for all you’re do ing for me. I’m sure I can find a way to give you whatever it is that you want.”

His strong fingers brushed across the top of my foot. “I can’t have what I want.”

“Really?” I lifted a critical brow. “You said you do what you want, and that certainly seems to be true. Why can’t you have what you want?”

He slid my wool socks back onto each of my feet, closed his eyes, and confessed, “Because the whole gods-damned world has been hellbent on taking what I want from me— what’s mine— for a long fucking time.”

My throat tightened. “Your wife?”

He gave no answer but met my gaze with a hot intensity.

My stomach threatened to upheave its contents. With the way he looked at me, it was easy to forget about the mystery woman he’d told me about. He looked at me like she didn’t exist. He looked at me like there was only me.

“I’m sorry,” I rushed out. “I hope you can find it in you to let go of the pain. If you want to,” I added, forcing a swallow through my throat. “If you can.”

“I don’t let go, Ella.” Goose bumps rose up on every surface of my skin at the biting iciness of his tone. “Ever.”

A melancholic longing sluiced through me, and I withdrew from him out of impulse.

“Thanks.” I stood and willed my voice to be steady. “For the feet.”

But he fastened his hand around my wrist, holding me in place. And then he rose, towering over me, mere finger lengths away. I could feel the heat of his body. His cedar and leather scent was so close…

“The first time I lost what I wanted, I was young and na?ve.” He locked eyes with me.

My breathing came out weak and stuttered.

“I let my guard down and it slipped through my grasp, but that will not happen again.” His fingers twitched around my arm.

“I may never have what I want the way I want it, but the day I let go will be the day I’m buried as deep into the fucking ground as they can put me.

Even then.” He lifted his knuckle to graze my cheek where I felt heat pulsing.

“I’ll be damned if I don’t try to crawl my way back out. ”

I was wholly disarmed beneath the intensity of his stare and weight of his words. Despite his brutality toward the world around us, I felt safe with him to want things I’d never known how to want.

My feeble knees threatened to undermine me. I stared at his mouth—full, symmetrical lips, rich with color, framed by a soft, dark-brown beard. I wondered how those lips felt, how they tasted. Those lips were parted like mine.

Hungry, maybe, like mine.

But one word echoed through the heady fog of my mind, loud and clear.

Wife. His wife. And what he wanted, it— she —would not slip through his fingers again.

“Good—” I stumbled over the word, withdrew my arm from his grasp, and cleared my throat. “Good night.”

After crawling beneath my quilt, I was afraid to look back.

***

I descended a staircase of elegant black marble, curved around a brightly lit, grandiose foyer.

I felt like I was floating. But not the fun, light, airy kind of floating.

No, I couldn’t compare this sensation to flight.

Parts of my body felt elsewhere. Dispersed throughout the room, fractured at odd angles, like broken bones or shards of dull glass no longer capable of refracting light. Parts of me void of life.

And at the bottom of the stairs, Phillip and Oliver lay dead in pools of blood.

I screamed in the dream, but no sound came out. When I inhaled, the breath cut off halfway to my lungs. I was stuck on that staircase. Stuck in scattered pieces with half-breaths like I had been stuck in that golden casket and—

“Aryella.”

I heard him, but the emptiness was swallowing me whole.

“Open your eyes, Ella.”

I woke the moment I felt his hand on my face. My breath caught in my throat at the sight of his protective form kneeling in the dirt. The fire flickered behind him, stars were bright in the sky, but I saw only him.