My eyes are dry.
His gaze is locked onto my wrist, watching his methodical application.
“For the kuris,” he says.
“The kuris?” I echo, that frown still etched onto my brow. “The people?”
His answer is a curt, soft hum.
A stubborn strand of peachy hair hangs over my cheek, drifting in the faint breeze. “I don’t.”
“You did.”
My mind whirls back to the post. Watching those people be torn apart like that…
I did cry. I did weep.
He’s right.
But he’s also wrong.
I shake my head.
It’s a gesture that lures his attention up to me, those cold studious eyes sweeping over my face.
“I wept forme.”
A slight crease strokes his brow.
“I cried—because… that could happen to me.”
That crease smoothens.
His face is glacier again, beauty chiselled from ice. “Only if you run.”
Run like they did, the captives who were slaughtered. On the bridge, under the assault of raining gunfire, they ran.
My voice is small, “I hid.”
His gaze drags along my jaw.
Slightly, he tips his head to the side as if to better see something beneath my earlobe. His hand leaves my wrist and moves for my face.
The moment his touch finds me, a pulse jolts through my insides.
I freeze against it.
Fingertips dig into my chin, angling my cheek to him, and he considers the length of my neck for only a heartbeat before he drags a streak of balm to it.
The sting is instant.
A guttural sound runs through me. All for a wound, a scrape, a scratch I didn’t even know was there.
“I hid because of the bullets.” My words grit out between my teeth. “And… one of the guards I think was going to kill me.” I don’t know why I tell him this. Maybe I talk through the sting to distract myself. “He thought I ran away, but I didn’t, I was just trying to hide from the gunfire.”
His gaze touches mine, brief, before it returns to my neck. His touch is long from the under-bone of my ear, along the curve of my neck—right to the cartilage of my throat, back and forth, back and forth.
The stinging eases with each stroke, less and less, until it’s starting to feel…
