"You are throwaways," she said with a dark smile. "Your own people cast you aside so they might live."
"You're the same as us," one of the men challenged.
"Don't mistake my situation as the same as yours," Eva said. "I threw my people away, not the other way around. I'm a tagalong. Do your job, and they'll treat you fine. Don't do it and face the consequences."
She whirled, faltering momentarily as she found Caden lingering behind her, his eyes thoughtful as she pushed her way past.
"Have two of ours escort them down," he rumbled in a deep voice.
Eva tried not to feel anything as she retreated toward the section Ollie had claimed, kicking herself for going over there in the first place.
It wasn't the first time one of the Lowlanders had called her a traitor. It wouldn't be the last. For some reason, they took it as doubly offensive when they found a woman in the same position as them. Only she was more accepted. Trusted and treated with respect.
Call it envy or hatred, the end result was the same. A foot in both worlds yet part of neither.
"Do what I say when I say it," Caden's dark voice said next to her. "When are you going to take your own advice?"
She snapped her gaze to the commander, fire lighting deep in her belly at the amusement and condescension she saw in his expression. "I'm a tagalong, not a throwaway," she said, using her own term. "I chose the Trateri, not the other way around. No one forced me to be here. I do what I want."
CHAPTER EIGHT
Eva’s dreams that nightwere full of dark things, scenes that had never happened. At least not in the way she dreamed them.
A rope was slipped over her head and her family watched with impassive eyes as she was dragged out of the house by the man whose proposal she’d spurned, while the rest of the village cheered.
Her feet tripped over branches as the villagers clustered around her, shoving her toward the still barren fields. They screamed for her blood, their faces twisted, monstrous, no longer human.
Suddenly she stood in the middle of a circle of people, her bare feet sinking deep into the frost-bitten dirt. It clutched at her, dragging her down until escape was impossible.
She faced her family as two men with the heads of revenants tied her arms behind her back. The constant shwick of a stone sharpening the blade that would end her life made her shiver and quail. A whimper escaped her.
“Why are you doing this? You know me,” she cried.
“The sacrifice will run,” a deep voice rumbled from the pack. “We will chase and when we catch her, we will water our fields with the blood of the fallen.”
Tears dripped down Eva’s face as she begged her mother to stop them. She looked frantically at her father. “How can you let them do this to me?”
