I grunted, jolting slightly before holding still to blink up at a strange ceiling. Foggy memories of the last few minutes of the fight drifted through my mind.
Some time had passed since then. I could tell by the fact that my arm and leg were healing. Slowly. Agonizingly. But the wound had closed over and I was no longer losing blood.
That was something at least.
I was still in the barrow. Its magic invaded the edges of my senses.
If I had to guess, I’d say the pit’s caretakers had scraped my broken and bloody body off the sands before throwing it into a dingy storage room.
Unless this was what passed for the infirmary.
I groaned as I shifted, my muscles and bones protesting the movement.
The argument on the other side of the door had grown in volume and intensity in the short time I’d been awake. Whoever was out there was having a conniption fit of epic proportions.
I hoped they won.
“That’s the last time I let a werewolf use me at as a chew toy,” I muttered.
Glancing to my left, I found Baran lying face up on a pallet similar to mine. Wincing, I stretched out my arm to see if he was still breathing.
“He’s still alive,” a man assured me, stirring from the shadows beside my bed and nearly giving me a heart attack in the process. He folded his hands in his lap as he regarded me with gray blue eyes. “And I’d say your earlier statement was a wise decision. Though avoiding situations that necessitate such drastic actions would be preferable.”
I probably looked like a fish with the amount of gaping I was doing as my eyes traveled over features that were an echo of mine. The slope of his forehead and the way his eyebrows transmitted his emotions when he was vexed. Brown hair that possessed the same reddish tint as my own.
“Brin.”
The Fae everyone was searching high and low for. My biological father.
And here he was. In the middle of enemy territory.
I wasn’t sure if I should be impressed at his audacity or worried that I seemed to have inherited that trait from him.
“Hello, daughter.” His lips quirked in private amusement. “I won’t ask if you’ve been well. You look like shit.”
“What are you doing here?” I burst out, shaking off some of my shock.
“Can’t a father check on his daughter when she nearly dies?”
“You’re not my father,” I corrected automatically.
That honor went to Patrick Travers. Parenthood was more than just donating your genetic material at the point of conception.
“Hurtful.”
If I believed for one second that he actually cared what I thought of him, I might feel bad. But old Fae like him couldn’t be trusted to hold the same sentimental attachments as the rest of us.
Brin might actually view me as his daughter, but I doubted those emotions went further than skin deep. I was an interesting puzzle to him. Something that might spark a fleeting fascination. Maybe even a sense of duty. Nothing more than that.
“I thought we’d addressed these feelings of abandonment in our last meeting.”
“You mean the two-minute drive by you did where you introduced yourself and told me it was all for my own good?”
“I seem to remember also saving your life,” he pointed out.
“And I’m very grateful for that.”
Still didn’t make him a father. At most, he was a concerned bystander.
