Zeph’s and Ryn’s features both close off, and it’s like watching the curtain shut on a movie theater screen. They both clamp down so fast. Zeph suddenly gets real interested in peeling not-watermelons, and Ryn puts all his attention into starting a fire and building a spit. I push away from Treno so I can position myself closer to the growing fire and its warmth. I didn’t realize I was so cold until right now.
“Don’t think that avoiding the subject is going to change the fact that your spying sister betrayed you and your people and then slit my throat.” I rub my neck but immediately stop, it hurts. I feel like I’m bruised, and I picture a black patchwork of bruises surrounding the new scar accessorizing my neck. Maybe my voice isn’t fucked up solely from sleep. Did she do damage? I try to palpate my neck again, suddenly feeling like I need to know just how bad it is, but it feels swollen and too tender. The scratchy material of the blanket I’m wearing suddenly feels like sandpaper against my skin when I move, and I want it off of me.
“Any extra clothes hidden in some well-placed wooden chest inside this cave?” I ask, recalling the well-stocked cave Zeph and I holed up in after our lake tour and subsequent crash landing. I don’t see one around, but they got these blankets from somewhere.
Zeph puts his peeled fruit on some kind of wooden looking plate and rinses his hands with a skin of water. He reaches behind his head and pulls off the gray tunic he’s wearing. He chucks it at me, and it smacks right into my face and falls uncaught to my blanket covered lap. I shake away the image of his well-muscled body and ignore what it does to me.
Apparently, my body is too tired to move much, but not too tired to appreciate my asshole mate’s muscles. The wordmatesnaps me all the way out of my daze, and I pick up the shirt and sniff it. I’m totally checking to see if it’s clean and not at all going for a nose full of his rich masculine scent. Nope. I don’t care if he smells like Bvlgari and bitterness, and I can do laundry on his abs. He’s a bad fucking dude.
I pull the gray shirt over my head and then try to reposition the scratchy blanket under my now cotton clad ass, using as little energy as possible. Pieces of meat are placed so they can start cooking over the fire, and I try to keep my eyes off the other pieces of meat walking around this massive cave, being all surly and shit.
“So you guys treat me like crap, lie to me, and keep vital information from me all because you thought I was a spy. Meanwhile, neither of you detected theactualspy in your midst. I take it you and your sister weren’t close?” I ask Ryn, watching as he tenses while putting more meat on sticks to cook. “She was pretty adamant that I stay away from you,” I go on. “I thought it was because she wanted to fuck you; guess I read that all wrong.”
Ryn doesn’t say anything.
My stare moves from Ryn to Zeph. “You should have let me kill her when I had the chance,” I tell him, anger and unmasked accusation leaking into my tone. “If you hadn’t stepped in and saved her, maybe all of this could have been avoided.” I gesture—or at least try to gesture—at the cave all around us, but my weak muscles don’t want to cooperate with the level of drama I’m trying to achieve. It’s all I can do just to sit here...sitting up. I glance over at the grot berries and contemplate plugging my nose and just going for it. My weak state is really starting to worry me.
“What are you talking about?” Ryn breaks his silence and asks.
“Your sister tried to kill me while pretending it was a training exercise. I’m pretty sure Zeph purposely kept Sutton away from me, because he’s a petty little shit, and put Loa the Betrayer in charge of training the kiddies,” I explain.
“He had his hands all over you,” Zeph snarls from the other side of the fire. The flame’s shadows dance over his skin and muscles, and a flash of him underneath me as I use his solid chest for leverage and fuck him hard and fast pops up unbidden in my mind.
“Oh right, and you didn’t have your hand shoved in the top of some female practically fucking you in front of everybody?” I counter, reminding him of the lap trophy he was playing with that night of the festival. “The difference between you and me that night, is that I didn’t know you were my mate...you did.”
“Is nothing sacred to you?” Ryn snarls at Zeph.
“It was just Neece. I didn’t do anything with her, but I had to keep up some level of pretense while I was waiting foryouto bring back answers,” Zeph defends. “Sutton crossed a line. I could smell his want from a league away, for rut’s sake. Neece knows her place.”
“Oh, I’m sure she’s very good on her knees,” I snap at him. “Loa fucking challenged me, and then you stepped in to save her ass when she lost! Stop pretending like Sutton was the problem, and not you and your bullshit issues with trust!”
“My issues with trust?” Zeph growls. “I have to be careful. You’ve been in our world for less than half a sun cycle and you think you know the dangers we face? You have no idea what we’ve been through.”
“I know enough to get why you’d be cautious. But I was your mate. Where was the trust in that? That should have meantsomethingto you. It should have allowed for some benefit of the doubt. You threw me out,” I scream at him, my voice and soul suddenly feeling raw and painful. My throat throbs, begging me to stop talking and abusing it even further.
“You tried to Ouphe bend me!” he shouts back.
“Are you fucking crazy?” I demand, furious. “I didn’t do anything to you other than attempt to make you stop trying to fuck me after I said no. It was just an instinctual reaction to what you were doing!”
In a flash of movement, Ryn is over the fire and attacking Zeph before my eyes can even focus on what’s happening. I’m so shocked by the burst of action and the violence of it all that it takes me several heartbeats to react. They’re a blur of fists and movement, and the sound of punches landing and threats being spewed fill the entire cave until I’m drowning in them. They’re brutal in their attacks against each other, and I can feel the promise of blood and death in the air.
I try to stand up and then curse my useless, uncooperative body. I crawl over to the pile of grot fruit and shove handfuls into my mouth in hopes that it will help me get up and try to stop this. Pained bellows and enraged growls bounce off the cave walls, and panic surges through me so potently that it steals my breath. I swallow down as much grot as I can between dry heaves and terror-laced tears. I hate Ryn and Zeph right now, but I don’t want either dead.
I’m on the verge of doing the last thing I want to do right now, which is letting Pigeon out and hoping she can somehow stop them, when Ryn and Zeph both explode into their gryphons. Instantaneously the massive cave seems small as the two gargantuan beasts circle and snap at each other. The setting sun fills the cave with oranges and purples, and it makes Ryn’s huge white and gray gryphon look like it’s splattered with watercolor. Zeph’s all black sky shadow soaks up all the different hues like they were never there in the first place, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think I was watching the night and the sunset themselves fighting.
I search for the steel vault I trapped Pigeon in at my center, but before I can do anything else, both gryphons leap up and take off one by one through the hole in the cave roof, like cyclones of rage and torment. I stare at the open ceiling and surrounding cave, an imprint of fury and pain now seemingly stamped over every surface. I feel like I’m choking on the hate both of them just expelled, and I hold my chest and try to get up.
I scream when a hand clutches my wrist, stopping me from moving. My head snaps over to find Treno staring at me with concern. Fuck. I forgot he was here for a moment. Fear and relief slam into me as his blue and purple gaze settles on mine.
“Let them go. You’d just get hurt trying to stop them. They’ll sort it out.”
I can practically hear the unspokenone way or anotherin his statement.
“They can’t kill each other without hurting you,” he adds, answering my unvoiced worry about how far the fight can go. The flash of hurt in his eyes as he relays this information bitch-slaps me back into the cold reality of betrayal and lies, and I hate that in this case,I’mthe perpetrator of Treno’s pain.
My eyes flick back and forth between his mismatched stare. I’m suddenly so fucking sorry and so fucking happy to see him that it’s like the two overwhelming emotions crash together inside of me and explode out in a sob that opens the dam, and I have no choice but to come flooding out. I wrap my arms around his neck, and shakily he sits up and pulls me into his lap. My guilt and sorrow pour out of me, and I hate that after what I’ve done to him, he’s still willing to hold me while I leak weakness all over him.
I know that he’s hurting. I can feel it in our connection, and yet here he is, holding me, reassuring me silently with just his mere presence that I’ll be okay. I hate my frailty more in this moment than I have in any other. I’ve floated through this world, delusional and purposefully naive. I’ve refused to open my eyes, to trust my instincts, to see what was right in front of me, and now everyone all around me is hurting and fighting.
