Effortlessly, his fingers weave through the tied rope, quicker than the first time he had to untie me. This braid is much less intricate, so it’s only moments before the tether falls with a slap to my legs.
The cold warrior gestures me up.
A sigh sags my shoulders before I roll my weight onto my boots—and that’s as far as I get before he’s reached over the edge of the cart and looped his arm around my waist.
The fright jolts in me, a grunt that’s fast to silence as he hoists me out of the cart and sets me down.
My boots thud down on the gravel—and the moment they do, his arm is gone.
For a heartbeat, I just… stand here.
Gazes are dragging all over me, head to toe, some cold, some too close.
I shrink back from the stares.
My retreat comes with a slight step closer to the cold one, as though he’s a shield, but really, he’s just the least monstrous beast towards me, specifically, in a swarm of evil.
The icy haired female turns her back on us, and her plaited hair lashes behind her like a whip.
She treads for the nearest hot spring, prancing from one boulder to another, like there’s an edge of delight she finds in it.
The shark fae follows, the one with yellowish teeth that’s sharper than a fistful of knives, but his steps don’t glide like hers did, he just walks directly to the steamy pool.
The cold fae steals the rope, firm, into his grip, then drags me along with them. He moves slower than the others, and I know it must be for my benefit, my uneasy and calculated steps from rock to boulder.
I’m not as surefooted as they are.
He makes that concession for me, keeps a patience that I’m sure is as taut as an overstretched violin string ready to snap.
But it holds and—as my boots come down on the flat rock that’s like a ledge overhanging at the shore of the pool—the female has already made herself comfortable on a curved boulder, and the shark one has started to peel off his leathers.
I don’t get a moment to consider a spot to sit on the rocks before the warrior turns on me.
I stagger back a step, but the heel of my boot thuds into a rock, and I have nowhere else to go but to fall on my ass.
I blink up at him, wide-eyed.
His gaze is firm and very fucking readable.
There’s a warning in it, one that bolts my muscles to my spine—and not a second later, his fingertips press into my middle.
That slight pressure folds me into a slow sink to the ground. Then I’m too low, the pressure of his fingertips gone, and my bum thuds to a smooth, flat boulder.
That anger from before, when he suffocated me with the powder and had me pinned down on the forest floor, lingers. It echoes in the cold look aimed down at me, and he might as well say it, it rings so clear.
‘Stay right fucking there.’
I do.
Bum planted, I draw my knees to my chest and stay on the flat boulder.
Still, the glacier feel of his stare doesn’t waver. It chills through the protection of the oil and tickles my face.
Holding my gaze, he peels the strap of his satchel over his head, then tosses it to the rocks. It only just thumps when he’s tugging back another strap from a single shoulder—and my backpack is next to land, right at my boots.
I aim a frown at it.
It’s only now I realise I don’t have it on me, that he’s had my bag the whole time I slept off the powder in the cart.
