The cut on my palm won’t stop bleeding. Every time I think it’s finally clotting, I trip, my fingers curl, and the wound tears open again. I’m losing too much blood, and I don’t know why because it’s such a small wound. It drips down my fingers, leaving a trail behind us that anyone could follow.
Anyone except the people looking for me.
There’s a lightness in my head, a weakness in my limbs that has nothing to do with the exhaustion pulling me down.
I can still feel his mouth on my palm. The heat of his lips. The rough, wet drag of his tongue through my blood and the waythe sensation spread up my arm and sank into places it had no right to touch.
The way my body responded to it. My back arching toward him. The sounds I made.
The memory keeps rising and every time it does, my stomach turns over and shame crawls up my throat. I shove it down. It comes back. I shove it down again.
Morning light filters through the canopy in pale, watery shafts. Yesterday, at this time, I was in my bedchamber, laughing with Nella. I was excited and happy, counting down the hours until the hunt.
Yesterday I turned twenty-one.
Today I don’t know if I’ll live to see twenty-two.
He hasn’t looked at me since we left the hollow. Not once. I might as well be a sack of grain he’s hauling to market. But even with me hindering him, he moves through the forest like he belongs to it. His bare feet find solid ground where mine find only roots and loose stones. Every few minutes, his head turns, scanning the trees.
The forest floor rises and falls beneath my stumbling feet. My ribs grind together with every breath—shallow, careful breaths because anything deeper sends pain lancing through my chest. I’ve started timing my inhales to my footsteps, searching for a rhythm that doesn’t make me want to scream.
It’s not working.
Twice more I go down hard, knees slamming into the earth. Both times, he drags me up without stopping or turning, without any sign that I exist at all. The second time a sound escapes me, but he doesn’t react. He keeps walking with one hand locked around my arm.
I could be dying, and I don’t think he’d notice … or care.
My vision grays out. The trees blur together, trunkssmearing into shadows, and I have to blink hard to bring the world back into focus. Blood loss, hunger, and the fear that’s been eating me alive since yesterday, are burning through the reserves I have left.
But people must be looking for me.
I hold onto that thought. Wrap my mind around it and cling. Brennan and Wil won’t leave until they find me. They’ll find the hollow, and the broken collar. They’ll find the trail we must be leaving.
They will find me.
Theyhaveto.
Then, as though my desperation has summoned it, a horn breaks the silence.
The sound is long and clear, and echoes through the trees. A note that signals a search, not a hunt. Iknowthat sound. I’ve heard it before during small game hunts on my father’s lands.
My heart slams against my broken ribs so hard the pain makes me gasp.
Another horn answers the first from further away. Then another, fainter still.Threehorns. A coordinated search. Multiple parties working through the forest.
They’re looking for me.
A dog barks somewhere—that eager, excited sound that means it’s caught a scent. Men’s voices follow, too far away to make out words, but close enough to hear.
“They’re looking for me.” I don’t mean to say it out loud and it hurts to speak. “They’re going to find me, and then they will kill you.”
He stops.
The sudden halt sends me sprawling forward, and his grip on my arm tightens, fingers digging into the bruises he’s already left. I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste blood,choking back the cry that wants to escape. His head turns toward the sounds and tilts slightly. A predator scenting prey.
The dog barks again. Closer now.
Hope surges through me so hard my knees nearly buckle.Brennan. It has to be Brennan out there. He won’t give up until he finds me. When I was seven and got lost in the palace gardens, he searched for me for hours until he found me asleep under a hedge. He carried me back to my room without waking me, then sat in the chair by my door until morning.
