“Not that there’s time to talk,” Rada said with a strained cheerfulness I’d never heard in her voice. She grabbed her saddlebags and began rifling through one of them. I glimpsed packaged herbs inside and a velvet bag she opened to count a few loose gemstones before tying it shut again. She’d had those since we first met, most of them stolen from a dragon’s lair in the tunnels through the mountains near my home.
I didn’t recognize the last thing she put on, though I’d seen something similar before. It was a nautilus necklace, a shell the size of a small plum, on a fine golden chain. She slid the chain around her neck, tucking the nautilus between her breasts with a relieved sigh.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. What was that thing? While I wondered, she took out a pair of her special boots, made of thick leather with laces that her Beta kneeled to tie. “Right. Time to go on our way and let the warlord get back to his new Omega.” Her tone was cool as she stood, the Beta helping her. If I hadn’t seen her hand tighten on the hilt of the knife at her waist, I would have thought she was truly unaffected.
“A new Omega?” Alexios’s mouth fell open, his face filled with disappointment. Rada shrugged, turning her back to me, but the air swirled with the scent of burned mint.
For some reason—I had no idea why—I answered the question in the Beta’s eyes with a slight shake of my head. He took a breath as if to ask it aloud, but I shook my head harder.
“Where are you headed?”
“Does it matter?” she replied saucily. “Help me sit, Alexios. I promised the warlord something.”
He lifted her with as much ease as I would, his strength at odds with his size as he placed her on a fallen log. His movements were every bit as smooth as a seasoned warrior, perhaps more so. I had no idea who he was to her: a servant, orguard, or lover. Even though he wore a priest’s robes, he’d called her his mistress.
“Mistress! What are you doing?” he hissed as she drew her knife and rolled her black sleeve up her arm, revealing the starflower tattoo.
“Fulfilling a promise.”
I wanted to stop her; my soul was roaring at me to lunge toward her and wrest the knife away. This was wrong.
This wasn’t how we were supposed to end.
Her silver eyes lifted to my face, tears brimming on her lashes. She’d told me once she’d never cried for a man. That she would never weep for me. Had that been a lie, too, like so much of our year together? “Sorry, Gorgeous.”
RADA
Everyone knew I was a world-class thief, a fantastic spy, and a halfway decent assassin. But not many knew I turned into a complete numbskull when I was around Goran.
Seeing him again started up the fuzz in my brain and the ache in my core. It was all I could do not to get caught staring at those massive, broad shoulders that had made the perfect fucking handles when I rode him. Those full lips that nested in his unbelievably soft beard snared my gaze, as they always had. Those deep blue eyes that had stared unblinking at me for almost all my firsts clung to me, as if he couldn’t look away and was committing everything to memory.
Damn me back to the gutters I’d come from. I was in no way over him. My first lover.
Smelling him, that wild mountain scent that took control of my Omega nature and forced it to the surface, carried me back to the cave we’d been forced to sleep in. It also reminded me exactly why I’d left him and stayed the hells away from Alphas ever since.
He was dangerous for me to even breathe around. His sheer presence had almost driven me into heat a dozen times all thoseyears ago. But I’d had my mission to finish, and I’d known he was my only weakness, so I’d run. More than once, my anger at being weak was all that had kept me from crossing the entire fucking world to find him, throw him down on the closest flat surface, and fuck the distance between us away.
Not that I could throw the giant, painfully sexy warlord down.
I could trip him, perhaps, then hold him down and lick him from head to toe, like one of the candied ices he’d once fed me back in Wargate Hall.
Fuck.No, I couldn’t have Goran. I’d made a new, terrible promise, and I felt it tugging at me like a hook had been sunk deep into my soul. There was only one direction I could run, and I sure as all hells wouldn’t drag my love there with me. Even if he didn’t love me anymore.
So I tucked my tongue behind my teeth, grabbed the first knife that came to hand, and pushed up my sleeve, hating myself more with every heartbeat.
He hated me, too. I could see it in his expression, frozen in a roar that he was barely suppressing. I closed my eyes, trying to remember when he’d looked at me with a love so pure and clean, it had made me feel like I might be worthy of it someday.
But not today. “Goran, your debt to me is paid. Our bond is sev?—”
“Mistress!” The only thing faster than me with a blade was my valet. I’d barely nicked the skin at the bottom petal of the starflower vine when he had me in his arms again, the knife tucked away. “Listen!”
The wind had changed and carried the sound of hoofbeats to the small clearing. Dozens of them, approaching fast from the south.
Goran mounted his warhorse and whispered down to us, “Run to the river, a mile northwest. I have warriors there,waiting by a stand of tall birches. Give them the code word. I’ll keep this group busy to give you time.”
“Come with us,” I urged, even as Alexios was pulling me to the north. “There have to be thirty mounted troops or more. You can’t fight them all.”
Goran’s lip curled with absolute disgust. “You always did see me as weak.” He glanced at Alexios. “Protect her, Beta. I’ll be there before long.”
