They drag me out the back door.
“Maybe we should hide her in the woods until Rath gets back,” Hatthar says.
Iloni is gnawing on her bottom lip. “My brother is going to be—we should hide her, give him a few days to calm down before he sees her. I don’t trust him alone with her ’til he’s thinking with his head and not his tiny cock.”
My unease returns. “Didn’t he mate?”
They stop walking and look at me. “Are you a fool?” Lathhan says.
“How can he mate when he’s already mated?” Fiuthen asks, speaking slowly as if uncertain I’m entirely right in the head.
“You can't be serious. That doesn't count.”
Iloni glares with feminine outrage. “Blood was shed in front of witnesses, oath made. It counts. Or do you plan to ruin my brother’s reputation as well as publicly humiliate him?”
“We were children.” I sound like a squawking bird. It’s undignified.
The boys exchange a look while Iloni glowers.
“We were all youths, and we were all there,” Fiuthen says. “We don't care that we were children. Blood was shed, an oath made in front of witnesses. We are the same people now that we were then, even if we're older.”
“And no better,” I snarl, losing all patience. A part of me had wondered if Rath would see it like that, but most of me assumed he’d moved on. Why wouldn’t he? I was nothing.
Fiuthen sighs. “You can choose to repudiate your oath. Rathhur can choose how he responds to provocation.”
“I’ll fight.”
“Resistance,” Lathhan murmurs, giving me one of his chill, malicious looks, “is a pleasure.”
Iloni smacks him upside the head. “OneFae great-grandparent, and your bloodline is fouled for generations.”
That sentence right there decides me. I want a partner who sees me as an equal, not as prey, not as somethinghe craves or owns. Rathhur has always been possessive, territorial.
“I'm not staying,” I say. “I can't see anything between us ever ending well, and he'll always only see me as the weak half Human he has to protect or cage or terrorize.” I turn and start walking away.
Iloni grabs my upper arm. “Where do you think you're going to go then?”
“I'm out of money and supplies. I can't go back to the Outlands.” Not with Maezii, who I more or less stole. “I'm going to the Sorting.”
They surround me. Like old times.
“No one is going to let you run, Ky’a,” Hatthar says. “Rath’ll hunt you down.”
“Let her go,” Iloni says, and the males back away, stiff with protest.
I turn and stride down the street.
“Don’t leave,” she calls after me. “You don’t want him to hunt you down. He haven’t changedthatmuch.”
When I reach the cabin, I slam the door shut, hating the shudder that runs through me. Mytormentor wants to hunt me down, I’ll show him that a midwife can do more with a knife than open a female’s belly to get out a baby.
I can open a male’s too, except all he has inside is guts.
THREE
“We’re leaving,”I say as soon as I enter the small kitchen.
The short Human female currently scrubbing cupboards that were already mysteriously clean, in a cabin mysteriously free of dust, droppings, with linens clean and mysteriously put away, stops.
