“Woman.”
My insides frost.
I blink my wide eyes, once, twice.
“Tess-nee.”
My lashes glitter with the tears that cling to them, and my sight blurs between blinks.
The breath that shudders from me is a grated wisp of mist in my face.
Bee’s words are tangled strings in my head, woven and muddled around my brain. I try to cling onto them, to remember what she told me, remember the promise of almost safety—
But the frosty growl of his voice speaking my name has me clutched too tight in an invisible fist, a grip of pure, tense horror.
My chest trembles with the shuddering breaths.
Slowly, I lift my gaze higher, up the fitted leather of his trousers, like tar running over boulders.
Even in the dusky light, it’s clear that he’s packed with sheer muscle.
The tears fall from my lashes and trail down my raw cheeks.
I blink, wet, on the glisten of weapons fastened to him, short knives holstered to his thighs, a waist-belt of daggers and knives of all kinds, some a chalky black substance I don’t recognise.
My mouth wobbles.
The crinkle of my gloves comes as I fist my hands on my lap, as if to better steel myself.
I don’t want to look at him.
I don’t want him to summon my gaze to his with the mere growl of my name, barbed and foreign, and I don’t want to be here at his boots.
The ice is trickling through my insides.
A fear I’ve never felt before, too cold to fight, too rigid to speed my heartbeat, I feel stuck in a moment of time, trapped in a mist, and the echo of his implied command is static in the air.
He said my name, but it was a command.
It was alook at me.
My breaths grow ragged, harsher and harsher the higher I lift my gaze.
The warrior stands over me, waiting.
His belt melts into more leather, more tar streaming over boulders; a chest that’s chiselled from solid ice and stone.
The abrupt end of his leathers at his clavicle meets a marble-like complexion—and I look up at him from beneath wet lashes.
The breath utters from me.
The light rinses over one side of his face, unnatural in its smooth texture, not a pore or a fucking blemish on him, and it’s utterly inhuman.
The pallor of his hair is a touch warmer than the coldness of his complexion.
But it’s his eyes that strike down at me, swords drawn, a frosty green that trembles my spine.
There’s no hint of alliance in the way he’s looking down at me. No scrap of warmth or understanding, no friendliness—
