“Yes, you do,” she insisted in a whisper. “I just didn’t tell you my title. Please, I don’t want you to get hurt because of me.”
There was a final bang, and Amma threw herself between where Damien and Kaz stood and the slamming open door.
“Ammalie!” A muscled body came at her and pulled her in, and the familiar smell of Tia’s oiled-up armor enveloped her along with the woman’s warm embrace. Stiff beneath it, she was stunned as soldiers filed in behind the woman, not an unfamiliar sight for the bodyguard to command, but then she saw the Brineberth crest across their chests and heard many swords sliding against their scabbards.
As Tia tried to pull her toward the entry, door hanging half off its hinges and frame splintered, Amma pulled back much more violently than the guard had ever experienced. “No!” she pushed against her, loosing herself and turning. “Wait, stop! He’s not—”
Damien stood, both hands up, and not swathed in the aura of a spell or drenched with his own blood for casting, though he was glowering darkly at the six men who had surrounded him, weapons drawn. At his feet was Kaz, donning his sweater and growling, but still no more than an annoying, little dog.
Amma breathed the heaviest sigh of relief, a hand to her chest, then she drew herself up to her full height. “Put your swords away,” she said in her most authoritative tone which was little more than a wavering squeak.
A few of the guards looked at her, and one of them hesitated, but the blades were still levied at Damien’s throat.
Amma squealed with an indignant huff. “Isaid, put them down!”
“Ammalie,” said Tia gently from behind her, a hand falling on her shoulder, “you must—”
“No,theymust.” She swung back to Tia, her face going hot, blood rushing past her ears. “Tell them to stand down. Now.”
Tia stared back at her, hard. Amma did not even blink. Then the guard’s eyes’ softened, her lips tightening into a flat line, and she nodded. “Sheath your weapons. Stand down.”
Every muscle in Amma’s body relaxed, and the dizziness hit her all at once. She stumbled, she swooned, and she fell forward into Tia’s arms where she promptly threw up all over the woman.
An hour later, Amma could scarcely believe she was standing back in Faebarrow Hall. The only thing she could believe less was how well she had lied with such a hangover coursing through her body. This wasn’t at all how she had planned to return, not being recognized by the barkeep to the seedy Too Deep Inn and garnering a whole troop of soldiers to break down the door to her rented room, and definitely not standing next to the man who had kidnapped her out of her bed in the middle of the night, especially since that man did not actually exist.
She had made it look like a struggle before she left a moon prior—she may have been small and meek, but she would have put up a fight if someone had come to take her. She fled in the night under cover of darkness, dressed in things she’d collected from Perry, one of only two people in the keep who had known her plan, and sneaked away with both his and Laurel’s help, like they had helped her so many times in the previous years to sneak out and go to the Grand Athenaeum. Now, those wild adventures seemed like childish games in comparison.
But she had thought quickly even as a hangover pounded her brain. Before the guards moved to arrest Damien, and before the blood mage moved to destroy them all with infernal shadows, Amma announced that Damien had actually rescued her from the clutches of evil that had originally taken her, and he was being so kind as to escort her home. When she was asked what they were doing there, in the dodgy end of Faebarrow instead of coming straight to the keep, she feigned another swoon, and cried out that she needed to see her beloved parents and to bring her savior home to be properly rewarded.
Damien had gone mute for this, but Amma could see the discomfort crawling all over him. It didn’t help that Kaz had been emanating a constant, low growl the entire time, but his appearance as a pet did manage to mitigate some of Damien’s threatening aura. Abductors didn’t tote around tiny dogs.
Then they’d marched through the streets and to the keep, its inside wide and welcoming and warm but a blur, through the receiving hall, and were finally herded into the ready room for privacy where only her parents stood.
Her father swept her into a too tight but loving embrace, crushing her to his barrel of a chest, whiskers tickling her face, and then it was her mother’s turn to hug her, so much softer and more delicate with her thin limbs, but full of the warmth and love she had always known. Her mother whispered into her ear how terrified she had been, how she had no idea what she would have done without her, how much she missed and loved her, and by all the gods what a horrible state she’d come back in. Guilt washed over Amma so fully she nearly drowned right there, but instead she resorted to breaking down into fat, messy tears.
The sobbing dried up, however, when she heard her father thanking Damien who had, as of yet, not said a single word. The baron asked Damien’s name.
Amma jerked out of her mother’s embrace. “Father, this is Da…Day,” she said quickly, then swallowed back a lump in her throat. She looked at the blood mage whose violet eyes had been injected with true fear for perhaps the first time since she’d met him. “Day Raven…heart.” It was almost as stupid as his actual name, but it would have to do.
Then the fear in his eyes adjusted to a withering look before quickly correcting into the charming smile she’d gotten so used to. The one that she liked.
“Day Ravenheart,” her father repeated in his jovial baritone, clasping onto his arm and shaking it while clapping him on the opposing shoulder with the other. Her father had always been tactiley expressive and made no exception with strangers. “Apologies for nearly getting you killed, good sir. We had reports of our daughter being absconded with by someone with your particular visage. Little did we know, you were only returning her to us.”
Damien anxiously glanced down to his hand still clasped in the man’s, then back up. “Ah, yes, well, lots of that going round. But that is what we did. Return. Together.”
“And thank the gods. I cannot even bear the thought, our fragile, little Ammalie, lost in the wild,” her mother lilted, gracefully slipping her father’s grasp away and pulling Damien into a hug under which he stood completely stiff. Then, because it was exactly what her mother always did and this situation would be no exception, she planted an elegant kiss on his cheek. “We owe you everything,” she said, voice like a song and sincerity in her eyes as she stepped back to stand beside her husband.
“Oh, no, ah…” Damien swallowed. “It was luck that we met at all. She is more than capable, and I imagine would have made it back to her home even quicker had I not slowed her down.”
At that, both her mother and father laughed, and not in the polite, public-facing way they’d been taught to, but actually, sincerely, guffawed.
“It would have been quicker,” Tia cut in as she stepped into the room after having cleaned off Amma’s vomit, “had you come straight home instead of resting so close last night.”
“Last night?” Though her mother’s smile did not falter, her laugh cut off abruptly, and her eyes took onthatlook.
“Sir Ravenheart is being too humble,” Amma blurted out, grabbing onto his arm and squeezing it while grinning back with too many teeth at her parents, hoping they would forget Tia’s interjection. “That’ssolike him. The countryside wasawful. There were werewolves and draekins and we even had a run-in with a demon.”
Her mother gasped, pressing delicate, long fingers to her chest, but her eyes flashed when they fell on Amma’s hands still touching Damien. Amma quickly released him.
