“My home.” His jaw tightened as he unfastened the buckles of his breast plate.
Slowly, she retracted her daggers. The dark silken sheets lay torn. Downy feathers and tufts of cotton poked through the holes.
He moved back across the room, buckles clinking as he freed their clasps. His bracers thunked as they hit the floor. Leaning heavily against his dressing table, he unwound the blood-soaked leather from his wrist.
Her stomach knotted. She ran her own finger under the rip in her jeans where his sword had cut her. The wound was tender, but healed. Touching her forehead, she found the abrasion from the dwarfs’ manhandling also mended.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she said.
The last of his wrappings fell away. His sleeve slid back, exposing a thick red gash across the inside of his forearm.
“Save you, you mean?” He smirked, picking up the bloody rag from the bowl again. “I didn’t intend for you to fall. I misjudged the distance to the ledge.” He scowled as if angry with himself, and then shot her an equally furious look. “Not that you should have fought me in the first place.”
“Why did you bring me here? Are you holding me prisoner?”
His smirk returned. He shook his head as he ran the rag over his arm and then squeezed the blood into the bowl. His voice fell to a low, dark register. “You should’ve told me... about the Prince.”
“Don’t you mean your brother?” She put her feet on the ground, testing her legs. Leaning a hand against the overlarge bed, her legs, though sore and weak, held as she stood.
One handed, he lifted the pauldrons from his shoulders, up and over his head, grimacing. She resisted the urge to help him.
“Don’t you have someone to assist you?” she asked.
The shoulder armor fell to the floor with a whoomp. “I couldn’t risk them seeing you and alerting my father to your presence. I’ve already had to shut out my counselors.” His eye twitched as if he felt the telepathic connection pushing against his brain. “But they won’t stand for it for too long.”
He lifted his other arm, where she’d cut him along the bicep. The fabric of his shirt clung to his skin. With strained concentration, he began unwrapping his other forearm.
“Why did you protect him?” His tone was so wounded her chest convulsed with guilt.
“Kaelan is innocent,” she managed finally.
“Kaelan.” His gaze held hers captive. “Is that what he’s called?” More leather massed in a coiled bundle at his feet. “And where did you find him?”
“Lavana’s dungeon. You didn’t know? He was the Prince she had locked up there.”
The blank look in his eyes told her that he hadn’t known, but then he chuckled. “Of course. He traveled the Shadow Realms once you were free of the dungeon. That’s how you moved so far so quickly.”
He checked the wound on his bicep again, gripping the edge of his breastplate, a furrow on his brow.
Teeth grinding, swearing at herself inwardly, she shuffled across the room and grasped the shoulders of the breastplate and backplate, lifting the scaled armor over his head. It was not nearly as heavy as it looked.
“I would kiss you, but my face hurts,” he said once the armor was off.
She smiled thinly at the swollen and bruised state of his nose. “It’s an improvement. Gives you character.”
Her thumbs ran over the black scales. She gazed at her warped reflection in the shining plates.
“What kind of scale is this?” she asked, placing the armor on the form by the dressing table.
With more pained expressions, he peeled off his shirt. “Dragon,” he said. “Kura sheds them. She allows us to collect and use them.”
“Kura? The dragon you set upon Froenz?”
Bruises and welts spoiled the length of his lean torso, but it was the tattoo on his back that captured her attention—a mighty tree rendered in clean, black lines, a dragon wound about the trunk, shooting fire up over Endreas’s shoulder, spilling it down his chest and arm.
“The dwarf lord made his choice.” His head turned away.
As he tended his wound, she studied his tattoo, the muscles of his broad shoulders, the curve of his back, the jutting edge of his hipbone... the hollow inside of it.
