Familiar, pale, glossed in blood, but without those fingernails that are sharp as talons that all the other warriors have. This hand has ordinary fingernails, like mine, only dark, somewhere between grey and black.
The relief swells in me with a choke.
The tears didn’t stop the whole time I’ve been hidden here, but something about just the offer of his hand, seeing the unblemished smooth pallor of it, spills more down my face and wobbles my mouth.
It’s a sudden release from that cold, rigid fear that’s had me in its grip for too long.
Weighted breaths escape me as, slowly, I slide my ungloved hand over the cold road.
The rawness of my fingers is an ugly red against the cold, blotchy and blemished, and it’s a stark contrast to the perfect complexion of the offered hand.
Ungloved, I touch my fingertips to his.
A shock zaps between us.
His hand jerks away, fisted.
I freeze.
Breath pinned, my muscles bolt to my bones, and I blink on the sudden distance between our hands.
I felt it, too, that little shock of skin touching, of static charging—then zapping.
His fist relaxes before he reaches it back under the pickup truck. There’s no shock this time, not as his fingertips touch mine, and he stills, as if waiting for it to come again.
I slide my hand over his, until his grip comes around my wrist, a wrist that is raw and torn by the tether tangled around me.
The warrior stills.
For a beat, he holds my wrist and the pad of his thumb presses into a particularly nasty scrape, one I must’ve got in all the falling and screaming and flailing, or even when I was trying to loosen my backpack.
I don’t remember feeling the cut, the scrape deep enough to bead blood over my freckled skin, but it’s not a dangerous cut. It’s all dried up now, congealed and dotted along the scrapes.
The warrior seems to think the same, the cut is not a concern, because his grip firms before he pulls back his muscled weight.
I come sliding out over the road.
The screech of my rain jacket is grating enough to set my teeth on edge, and it goes on until I’m sprawled out in the open.
I melt into the slush. Just lying here, sprawled, my cheek now resting on a padding of snow.
My breathing eases in the sudden security I feel with the warrior standing over me—the one who stops the other fae from coming after me.
I don’t need to throw people under the bus to survive, not with him here.
The relief of it has me too relaxed on the road before, still kneeling, his grip loosens on my wrist and moves up to my bicep.
A grunt is tugged out of me as, unkindly, he yanks me up off the ground, then shoves me to sit against the truck bed.
The bum of my sweatpants is fast to soak, all the way through to the wet and sticky tights clinging to my backside.
But that feeling is nothing compared to the cold burn of his glacier eyes.
My throat thickens at the sight of him.
This bloody, gruesome vision of ice.
The coldness of his voice is always so fucking distant, so detached, “Where is your glove?”
