It was because I simply hadn’t wanted him dead.
And I didn’t want to understand why, because it made such little sense that the truth would probably scare me.
The quaking in my limbs began to fade, tiredness entering in its wake. “What are you g-going to d-do with the boy?”
Harthon’s sigh was burdened. “Try to give him a new life.”
I know what it’s like to think that a bad way of life is the only way of life because of your upbringing,he’d said back in that field, not a hint of dishonesty in his tone. Before that, he’d told me that he cared for his people because they had been wronged, and that he was not a good man. The only connection between the statements was the sentiment that lay beneath them all: pain. I’d learned nothing of Harthon’s upbringing, but no man could become as fearsome and brutal as him only through adulthood.
“If the g-gossipers heard that you not only think, but you also spare young b-boys, they would be r-ruined.”
That earned a short laugh.
“Why d-did you do it?”
“There was no choice, was there?” he answered cryptically, giving away nothing.
“No.”
My eyelids began to close of their own accord, my jaw no longer shaking. Still, his hand swept across my arm as minutes passed in silence. Then something made me whisper, “That was the first time I’ve killed someone.”
That hand disappeared before two knuckles brushed across my cheek. “I’m sorry,” he said, apologizing for the second time tonight. “He needed to be killed. It does nothing to change the goodness within you.”
He gave words to the confused emotions that had flooded me ever since we left that field. I wasn’t a bad person. I wasn’t evil or cruel or like the looter himself. His reassurance was like a balm as those two fingers, tender in their touch, stroked away the memories and lulled me toward sleep.
It was like that, floating in a cocoon of heat with Princeps Harthon wrapped around me, that I plummeted into that quiet void.
* * *
I was warm but alone when I awoke to the smoky gray skies that came just before sunrise. I sat up and scanned the camp for Harthon, only finding sleeping soldiers. My fingers bunched around scratchy fabric that felt thicker than usual, and I looked down to find that I had two blankets instead of one tucked around me.
Harthon had left me his blanket.
But if he wasn’t in the camp, where was he?
Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I slipped from the makeshift bed, rolled the mat and blankets, and brought it to his horse. Then, taking advantage of the quiet, I delved into the trees to find a place to take care of things.
I decided on a longer route back to the camp, my limbs cravingthe movement, and I relished in the early morning quiet as I silently navigated the tangled roots and dried brush. A dull thud spun me to my right. I’d spent enough time trapping to know it wasn’t an animal sound.
My lungs paused.
The same noise came again, and I crept forward, sliding from tree to tree as curiosity tugged me along.
I heard the thirdthudjust as my eyes found his shadowed form, naked from the waist up, crouched before a tall boulder amidst scattered vegetation. His hair was loose and wild, hanging over his downturned face in clumpy, sweat-slickened waves, and even in the darkness, I could see the same white blotches and slashes that marked his arms scattered across his tanned back.
A warrior’s back.
Ridged muscles shifted beneath his skin as he rose in one fluid motion and took two monstrous steps toward the boulder. Face plastered to the rough bark of my hiding place, I watched in frozen fascination as he planted a foot on the rock, drove his other leg up, and flipped backward. His feet hardly touched the ground before he was spinning and launching a knife through the air.
It landed in an impossibly thin sapling with that same dull thud, beneath five other hilts that formed a perfect line.
He walked over to his target, and I openly stared at the defined ridges of his abdomen and the mounds of his chest, which was dusted in dark hair, the moisture in my mouth drying. A deep vee disappeared into his leather pants, and that same dark hair trailed a line down from his lower belly.
I’d seen half-naked men in my village, oftentimes when they returned from bathing in the stream. I knew what strong muscles looked like.
But Harthon…he went far beyond that.
He was built as an animal of prey, powerful muscles honed for agility and speed rolling beneath skin that was marked with violence. It was the unbreakable body of a hunter, a killer—a man who had warmed me last night.
