Who was I kidding? I gazed at her, mesmerized by the droplets of water trailing her collarbone, dancing down her chest to meet the steaming water. I was never letting her go. And Stig would not be long for this world. She would be safe because I was going to fucking end him.
A knot of unease gathered in my throat as a vague memory struck me, intruding on my revenge fantasy. Just a whispery-soft echo of a feeling, a sense of something I’d felt from her when I was trapped underground. Tamsyn … with another. Tamsynwantinganother. Tamsyn forming a bond with someone else.
As repellent as the idea was, I realized she had thought me lost. Forever gone. I could not expect her to have waited for me. Not after so long.
She nodded jerkily. “Well. How about I share one lesson I learned with you right now? Perhaps the most significant thing I have discovered? If you are keen to hear it.”
“Of course.” I offered her a smile. “Enlighten me.”
She inhaled, the cords of her throat working. “The pride is not for me. I cannot spend the rest of my life living among them. My home is in Penterra, helping the people there. Helping humans, which, I realize, is a serious transgression to dragonkind. And that is not to say I reject my dragon. Or that I don’t want to help dragonkind, too. I just think I can help both humans and dragons best in Penterra.”
I nodded slowly, thinking about that, turning it over in my head.
“So let’s do that then. It is settled. You come back with me.” As I had hoped for all along. “We will oust Stig and reclaim our home together.” I brushed a hand along her shoulder idly, letting the caress slide to dip down her back in a leisurely stroke. My fingers met raised, bumpy flesh—and that was … different. New.
She stilled beneath the touch.
I stilled, too, slow dread slithering through me.
“Tamsyn?” I whispered, and then I was up and moving, turning her over in my arms to look, to see for myself.
Her back was a nightmare. A landscape of pain. Suffering etched into every crisscrossed scar. Someone had whipped her, leaving her skin beyond recognition—just a sea of pink ridges and valleys. There must have been so much blood. It was a shock she had survived such abuse.
My lips worked, trying to get out the words, trying to communicate the horror and anguish I felt staring at the proof of her own pain.
“Who did this to you?”
She trembled beneath the shaking graze of my fingers and tried to move, shrinking away from me. “Fell, no … I know it’s ugly.”
I turned her to face me, holding her shoulders tightly in my grasp, my voice a hoarse torment. “Nothing about you is ugly. Do you understand me? You canneverbe ugly. You are fire and light and all that is beauty. And I am yours and you are mine.”
She nodded jerkily, eyes wide on my face.
“Now, who did this to you?” I pressed. I would have the name of the one I would delight in killing in slow, agonizing degrees. No quick end for him. He did not deserve that.
The sight of her pain destroyed me. It wrecked me to know that while I had been suffering, so had she.
They treated me fine.Apparently she had not been sofinein the care of the pride, after all. That was one fat euphemism if the condition of her back was any indication.
“Was this Vetr? Did my brother do this to you?”
Her eyes widened, and she shook her head wildly. “No. No! Vetrwould never hurt me! He would never do such a thing. He’s not like that.”
And in her voice, in her loud insistence and defense of Vetr … I heard something else. Something that gave me pause, that sent a cold trickle down my spine.
Her voice lowered, speaking more calmly. “You recall that I mentioned I had seen Stig.”
I tensed, nodding.
“Stig did this. He wanted me to confess. To show my dragon so everyone would believe him.”
I held myself tight, hands clenched as she told me about the rekon and what had happened when they went south. “So no,” she finished. “Your brother did not do this to me.”
“Didn’t he?” I challenged. “He let them take you. He let it happen.”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t like that.”
I stared at her intently. I had a flash of my brother’s face.Myface. Had he used our likeness to win her over, to beguile her? Or did I just want to think that because it would be worse to consider that he himself had enticed her, persuading her to believe him good and worthy.
