My brow knits.
Don’t blink if you fancy humans.
Still, he doesn’t blink.
Ok…
Well, that was the best bait trap I could think of.
It convinces me he can’thearmy thoughts.
Maybe he just senses them, feels them somehow—
He loses interest in watching me.
Turning his pale cheek to me, he sets out another jar on the pew, on the left side. “Sit.”
I frown at him.
“Here.” He faintly lifts his chin to the pew in front of him, the clear spot on the right side. “Leave the boots.”
The breath huffs at my mouth in a cloud before I redress down to the socks.
I grab my rain jacket as I drag myself to the pew. My arms punch through the sleeves as I drop down, feeling the warmth of the oil already kneading and knitting into me.
I basket my legs, keeping my sock-clad feet off the cold grass, and my longing look lingers over the boots left on a frozen patch of soil.
The cold warrior takes my wrist in his hand.
The hot red flames of the torch dance over the translucent hue of my complexion and darken the scrapes and bruises that mar me.
The warrior unthreads the rope from my wrist.
It slackens from my torn flesh, and the relief is fast to loosen a breath from my lips, until the rope is gone—and it thumps to the ground.
I consider the angry flesh left in its wake. Scrapes and dried blood and bruises as black as the darkness itself.
He considers it, too. Turns my wrist over in his hands, eyeing it closely, and his murmur is so soft I hardly hear it, “Weak.”
It’s an instinct, an automated response, and it comes out in a whisper before I can stop it, “Fragile.”
His eyes lift—and tunnel into mine.
I freeze all over.
Stiff on the pew, I become a statue in the cemetery, breath pinned to my chest—and I wait. I wait for his strike, I wait for the break of my wrist in his grip…
But nothing comes.
A muscle slashes over his cheek, a jaw clenched much too tight, and he firms his grip on my wrist. His other hand reaches for the jar of greyish ointment on the pew.
With aflick, flick, flickof the thumb, the lid unscrews.
The stink of root beer hits me.
It’s a strange bitter medicine smell.
I recognise it.
