He looks up from the fire, his long fingers curled around a dagger he’s using as a cooking utensil. His face is as indifferent as ever. I wonder vaguely where he got the food and if it was before or after he knocked me over the head. “Going back to starving yourself?”
I could hit him. I could damn the consequences and throw myself across the campfire and claw at his eyes and kick at his ribs until he finally forces me to stop. Which he’s already proven more than willing to do. Violently.
My blood pulses, pooling in hot waves at my temples and cheeks and neck. “Does it make you feel good to have to knock women over the head to get them to do what you want? Does it make you feel tough and powerful?”
Shaw raises an eyebrow, the only sign of surprise he’ll give. I know that now—that all I’ve learned about him has only been exactly what he intended. Every so called ‘weakness’ I’ve spotted have all been purposeful. Carefully designed to make him appear more human. Less monstrous.
Didn’t he warn me it was dangerous to assume everyone has the same heart I do? Why did I refuse to listen?
“Dark Worlders really do get off on violence. On inflicting their pain on others.”
Shaw’s eyes flash. Not with shame, but with unfettered rage. A moment later, it’s gone, replaced by that same arrogant smirk that drips from his lips. “You were going to get us both killed,” he replies, his voice low and even.
I shake my head, stomping toward him. All thoughts of appearing meek and compliant have eddied from my head, driven by the pulsing heat that has always lived inside me, but I’ve never had a word for. Anger. Anger at my parents, at the whispers, at the universe itself—anger I’ve always held close to my heart, buried underneath a Similian exterior. Close enough that it twisted into something that crashed and crashed and crashed, terrifying in its depth. Now, it sparks beneath my skin and ravages through my brain until I am staring out at Shaw from beneath an ocean of it.
“You were going to getyourselfkilled. All you had to do was let me go and we would both be safe.”
Shaw laughs, the sound humorless and ringing. “You know nothing.”
“You’re a hateful, disgusting creature! You couldn’t stand being outsmarted by a Lemming, couldn’t stand losing your preciousprize!” My voice rings in shouts now. I have the odd sense of stepping outside of myself and not recognizing the wild, savage girl that stares back. As if I’ve allowed the beast within me to take form and now it will never be caged.
Shaw stands up and it’s only then I realize how close I’ve moved to him. He towers over me, his frame lithe and powerful. Every bit the predator I first imagined him to be. “You knownothing.”There is nothing of the teasing arrogance that usually laces his voice. Now, it is only icy wrath. “Do you have any idea what army that was?Whosearmy that was?”
I stare back at him, refusing to relent even as my mind whirls.Whose…
Shaw’s grin shapes itself into a condescending sneer. “That’s right, Lemming. An army does not mean peace. An army doesn’t mean order or lawfulness. An army means money and power and who has the most of it. And trust me, you do not want to know what the man who leads that army does with pretty young girls like yourself. You don’t want to know what that man does toanyone.”Shaw’s features are a mask of glacial rage, remote and terrifying in its intensity, and I suddenly realize that the Darkness Shaw purports lives within him is not a metaphor—it is a living, breathing, horrifying thing that is barely contained beneath his human skin.
Though I am standing directly in front of him, he looks through me, as if I am nothing more than a mirage, whatever he sees far more corporeal to him than I am.
A moment later, he thrusts a hand through his hair with a labored sigh and settles back into himself, but a moment is all I need. I was wrong about Shaw’s humanity, but I was not wrong about this—whoever leads that army terrifies Shaw and not in a distant way. Shaw’s fear is intimate. Known.
“You may think whatever you wish, but I will never apologize for keeping you out of that army’s way. I have enough respect for life that I would work to keep a dung beetle from that man’s path.”
“Enough respect for life?!” I yell incredulously, throwing my hands on my hips. “You respect life and yet you find it palatable to abduct me? Force me across your Covinus-forsaken land?! Tie me up and pierce my skin and knock me unconscious?!” The words tumble out in a violent fervor, my voice rising higher and higher with each tally of Shaw’s wrongs against me.
Shaw presses his lips into a thin line of disgust. “Of course I don’t find kidnapping to be ‘palatable’,” his tongue twists sardonically around the word, as if it is almost too ridiculous to repeat. “But this is Ferusa, Lemming, and I will do whatever I have to do to keep the ones I love safe. I will steal and lie and hurt as many times as I need to, because there are things in this world that need doing and sometimes, there is no one else to do them. I will tear myself to shreds, become exactly the monster you imagine me to be, and you don’t get to judge me for it. You have no idea what it takes to survive. No idea that this world demands your very soul. And you would gladly give it, same as I.”
“I wouldneverdo the things you’ve done. It is not the world around you that matters! It’s your choices and values in the face of hardship that do.”
Shaw laughs, throwing his hands up. “Oh, you think you have morals and values, do you?” His eyes are oddly bright, fervent and burning. “You have absolutely nothing! Morals and values are made so by challenges and you, my dear Lemming, have never been in a position to test them. What if you were starving? Would you sit back and die? Or would you fight someone else and take what they have?”
“I would starve rather than harm someone else!”
He tilts his head, reading something in my face that I’m afraid I haven’t given freely. “What if someone you loved was in danger? What if they were the one dying?”
I feel as though he’s stripped me bare.
Love.
The word feels dangerous and tempting, remote and yet intrinsic all at once. It is too full, too wild. It isn’t a word allowed within the Boundary of home, and yet, isn’t it exactly what drove me into the Dark World in the first place? My undying loyalty to Easton. Also called love.
And Shaw—gruff, violent, terrifying, Shaw—he loves. Loves fiercely enough that it drives him across every moral line he encounters. Can anything good come from such a powerful force? A force that upends everything you believe in.
Shaw circles my good wrist with his long fingers, holding it between us. The rope burn is stark against the pale inner skin. A stark reminder of everything Shaw is willing to do. “The truth is, you don’t know what your morals are or what lines you will cross. And I know all too well there are no lines.”
The heat of his skin against mine makes it hard to find the sharp edges of my thoughts; for a second, everything is frayed and blurry.
“Who is in danger?” I finally ask.
