“You smell like a bar.”
Zadyn is asleep beside her, an arm slung over her lap while Kai snores from her other side.
I try to keep my voice soft. “Can we talk?”
She stares at me for a long moment. I stare back, willing my racing heart to stand down. With a sigh, she slides Zadyn’s arm from her waist and steps outside to stand by the dying fire. Her posture isstandoffish—arms crossed, staring into the embers—and I don’t blame her. I stuff my hands in my pockets, letting the quiet wash over us.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she finally says. “Like I’m damaged goods.”
“I don’t think you’re damaged goods.”
She hits me with an incredulous look.
“I don’t think you’re damaged goods,” I repeat. “Look, I’m—I’m sorry for being an ass.”
The words of a poet.
Her expression turns pained. “I never expected you to be angry with me for doing what I had to in order to survive.”
“I’m not mad atyou,” I whisper, turning her to face me. “I amlividwith myself for letting this happen. I should have gotten there sooner, I should have never let you be taken in the first place.”
“None of that was in your control,” she protests, lowering a fraction of her armor.
“It should have been.” My fingers brush over the scratches on her cheek and my heart clenches. “So many things should have been different.”
I lose myself in those eyes as they coax the truth from my unwilling tongue.
“I should have told Derek I couldn’t marry Sorscha. I should have stopped pushing you away at every turn. But the worst thing I did, the thing that haunted me every second since you were taken”—I step closer, gazing down at her—“is that I never told you I love you.”
A single tear slides down her cheek and I catch it with my thumb, erasing the evidence.
“If you had died not knowing?—”
“I knew.” She shakes her head, her fingers sliding into the crooks of my arms. “I knew.”
I slip my hands into her hair and almost groan as my lips brush against hers.
Finally.
Furi chooses that moment to release a loud, disgruntled sigh. Ourmuscles lock, freezing us in place. Narrowed green orbs track me from behind Serena, filled with judgment as I wait for her to decide where we go next.
“We should get some sleep.”
Disappointment floods me as she draws back. I nod and follow her back into the tent, cursing the dragon in my head.
I watch the even rise and fall of Serena’s chest as she sleeps and allow myself to think of what might have been if I had just stopped fighting.
If I had realized in those moments of quiet solitude when her image danced across my mind—when I found myself following her scent without meaning to, when I couldn’t stay away, or worse, that I didn’t want to—that something in me was shifting, melting.
If I had just accepted that she would be the unraveling of my life’s design, maybe I would have had a fighting chance.
She is a storm. I would have been safer in the eye than trying to outrun her.
23
SERENA
I’m a vile, wretched creature.
