There’s pain in the frost reaching my flesh, nipping and scratching at me.
It doesn’t distract me from the screams still ringing in my ears, or the blood I can taste in the air over the familiar burning wood of the campfires, or the images etched into the insides of my eyelids.
But it grounds me, keeps me rooted in some scrap of sanity, while I fight off the violence of my mind.
I don’t think I can move, even if he dragged me, and not just because of my aching shin. It’s that the tortures are seared into my mind.
I close my eyes—and I see it.
The detail of it.
My eyes spring back open.
‘Watch.’
I did.
I wish I didn’t.
But if I didn’t, who knows what would have happened to me?
All the fae watched, stood on ceremony to witness it all. The humans, too. So if I had closed my eyes, or turned my cheek, or hid behind my hands, maybe that would’ve put me outside of the warrior’s protection.
Would it have been such a disregard of the rules that it would have landed me at the mercy of the general?
The mere thought of it burns my mouth with bile. The grimace of nausea tightens my face.
Captives are dragging the corpses away, camp is being made, and the general’s speech in her garbled language has ended.
But it doesn’t feel over.
The bile burns in my throat as, with a faint moan, I drop my head into my hands.
All around, the camp is settling. I don’t watch them, but I can’t tune them out, so their faint murmurs and echoed laughs grate down me like spidery, metal claws.
How relaxed and unbothered they must look, sprawling out over the grass, perching themselves on headstones, or like the fucker at my boots, digging through their bags.
I dig my fingernails into my scalp, hard enough to dent crescent shapes into my skin, and I stare down at him through the mists of my cold breaths.
Kneeling at his satchel, he spreads a balm onto his wounded hand, a greyish sort of oil. The scent of root beer wafts up from the small jar opened on the grass right at the toe of my boot.
The pad of his thumb is pressed into his palm at the edge of the bullet wound, and he circles it, around and around and around, and with each circling, the hole just seems to get that bit smaller.
A frown digs into my face.
The flesh…
Hisflesh…
It stretches like hot caramel from one end of the wound to the other, like it’s regrowing or knitting shut.
His thumb still goes around and around and around—until the wound closes over.
It isn’t completely healed. It’s raw and red, stretched and scraped, but… it’s not a hole anymore.
My frown crumples to an ugly sneer—and that is quickly wiped free from my face the moment his hands move out of my line of sight, and the tether is tugged against my wrist.
I drop my hands with a huff.
