His lashes lower over his piercing stare.
The twitch of his mouth gives away his annoyance—maybe his disgust at how close I got—before he drops his gaze to my lifted boot.
It’s only now that my weight slammed down on it, now that the bone is screaming behind my flesh that I’m reminded of the man trampling my shin.
The lift of warrior’s icy stare chills me. But what shrinks me harder against the door of the truck, what curves my shoulders and silences me is his growl—
“You lied.”
SIXTEEN
I didn’treallylie.
I shook my head when he asked if I was hurt, so what? Not like I felt the throbbing of the bone in my shin while I was pinned under his cursed gaze, and all the blood and warriors around were maybe a little distracting.
This fucking guy.
He takes grudges and overreactions to a whole other level.
His grip on the tether is ice, and I meanice. Frost crisps over the fine, silken threads about an inch from his bleeding fist.
I don’t know what I make the face at exactly, whether it’s the actual fucking frost forming under his grip, or that paint for blood that, honestly, grosses me out.
The cold warrior doesn’t so much as glance at me. That gloss of his cheekbone flickers with the torchlight, and he stares straight ahead at the city.
But the clench of his jaw is his tell.
He’s still pissed about my ‘lie’.
So, he doesn’t acknowledge the faces I make at him and his gross blood, or the huffs that sag me, or the weight shifting off my sore leg every time I forget the ache and try to stand up straight, which is more than I care to admit. But without my weight on the leg, my shin doesn’t sting—and so I forget.
I’m too sucked in by the organised chaos around me.
Runaways were chased down, and the stragglers are being dragged along the highway to the back of the unit. Their jackets rise against the friction of the road, and when that happens, the screams start—because flesh is dragged over the cold snow, the dislodged gravel, and the coarse asphalt.
My neck cranes to look back at the captives.
New faces are among them.
Those ones are spattered with crimson blood, their eyes are wider and wetter, and they look around like they don’t quite know what to do with themselves.
Not like theycando anything.
Not with the guards reforming the tight circle around them—the guards still standing.
One is dead.
Not sorry for him, he fucking deserved it.
Rot, bitch.
But the others are still kicking.
The one with the chest wound stays at his post. That familiar moss is smeared over his chest.
But the one with the gut-shot is nowhere near the captives or his position with the guards.
I find him on a crate, leaning back against the wall of it, another fae inspecting his wound.
