Mina made that vow bravely but when I drew close to her again, her eyes widened in alarm. The hand I had at the back of her neck tightened and then I dragged it through her hair, the strands tangling around my claws.
Her lids lowered briefly at my touch.
She felt it too. The…need. She’d felt it in the fog too, just as I had.
Maybe I wasn’t the only one succumbing to this madness. Maybe she’d be right next to me as we both fell.
“I welcome it,” I growled. “Cut me as deep as you want,sarkia. But I will never let you go.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Disbelief went through me.
“Why keep me here?” I asked the infuriating horde king before me. “Just let me go if you hate me so much!”
He pulled away, his hand leaving my hair, and he rocked back on his heels next to me.
“There’s no reason for me to be here beyond your own desire for revenge.”
“Wrong,” he murmured, his voice soft. “There is plenty of reason for you to be here beyond that.”
I looked at him then.Reallylooked at him. He was in a strange mood tonight. Colder. Angrier. And yet…his touch had always been gentle on me.
He’d bathed, his wet hair mingling with the broth I’d spat at him. He didn’t reach for a cloth to wipe himself with. Instead, he crouched low. And instead of the tunic he’d worn in the Dead Mountain upon his capture, tonight he was bare-chested like his warriors, only dressed in trews that clung to him like a second skin.
My mouth went dry at the sight of his golden flesh. Because without a tunic on, he seemed even larger. Muscles that human men didn’t even possess braided underneath his flesh. Scars, which shimmered golden underneath the moonlight, crisscrossed over almost every inch of his body.
So many scars, I thought, my lips parting. And when he turned to pick up the spilled broth bowl from the ground and replace it on the tray?
I must have made a surprised sound because he turned to regard me, cutting off my view of the plethora of raised scar tissue that hardened his back.
Whipping marks, I knew.
Dozens, perhaps evenhundreds, of them.
“Wha-what happened to your back?” came the soft question, slipping from my lips before I could stop it.
“Vorakkarmarkings,” he answered, surprising me. “The last test of the Trials.”
The Trials?
Vorakkarmarkings?
“Do you not like the sight of them,sarkia?” he asked next, that voice gentling into a purr as he loomed closer. “Do they frighten you?”
I couldn’t get a read on him again.
“What doessarkiamean?” I asked him again, avoiding his question.
He answered me this time, only his answer left my spine stiffening against the pole I was tied to.
“It meanswitch.”
An incredulous, ragged breath escaped me. Then delicious anger, mingled with a sting of hurt, returned to me.
“You’ve been calling me a witch this entire time?” I asked.
“Lysi,” he replied easily. “Because that is what you are. You wound your magic around me tight in the fog and you haven’t let me go ever since.”
