But he did not admonish me any more than that. He reached out. I imagined his hand trembled, but that must have been my own wobbly vision, because when his fingertips stroked my cheek, they were warm and steady.
“I am already dead,” I reminded him.
I felt his sigh on my skin. “You know what I meant.”
My pain was physical, but Garrick’s was mental. Of the two, I’d have chosen the physical burden every single time. I’d spent hundreds of years watching those I cared for dwindle away until only one remained.
I could not presume to know who else Garrick had in his life to care about. We hadn’t shared those sorts of secrets. But I knew that he felt something for me.
The least I could do was show him that I’d survived. I commanded my muscles to move, determined to raise myself from the ground under my own power. I made it to one elbow before my body collapsed beneath me and I was back on the layered furs.
And that divot was still between Garrick’s brows.
“Do not try to sit up. Stay exactly where you are. I will heat you some broth.” And then to my familiar, “Watch over her.”
Isanara snorted as she settled in at my side. I didn’t try to lift my head to see, but I felt her lay hers across my stomach.“As if I haven’t been doing that for the last two weeks.”
“Two weeks?”My tortured throat thanked me for confining that exclamation to my mind.
“Your wounds were—are—severe. But it was the infection that nearly took you.”
That accounted for the delusions of burning alive. But not for everything else.“How did we escape the Devotion Gate?”
Isanara did not respond immediately. My stomach hollowed out, dread competing with hunger.
“Xyta was going to kill you. But then… Ramkael stopped them. Neither of them offered an explanation. Then Garrick carried you through the fire.”
She was withholding something. Not quite lying—I did not know if she even could lie to me, nor I to her. Not with the unequivocal access that our bond as witch and familiar granted us. But there was more that she was not saying, and I suspected it had to do with Garrick.
I remembered the enchanted fire flashing in different colors behind my tormentor. But everything that happened after Xyta threw me into the wall was nothing but a haze of feelings and sounds.
“And then what?”I asked. I let my eyes close, the effort of keeping them open frustratingly noticeable.
“And then he carried you…”
But I fell asleep before she could finish her sentence
I woke to two strong hands braced beneath my arms, pulling me up with more gentleness than a man his size should have been able to manage. Warmth encircled my back and my sides, and those strong hands released me only to encircle my arms.
I tried to stifle the groan, but my lips and body and mind were not all back on speaking terms yet. Muscles that had not done their jobs in weeks protested by sending spasms of pain through my body.
“Don’t try to hold it back,” Garrick said, the warmth of his breath sweeping over me. There was the hint of cinnamon that had lined my dreams for weeks. “I’ve heard it all.”
“That is not comforting.” Thank the Dark God that, positioned behind me as he was, Garrick could not see my cheeks as they burned red from embarrassment. My keen sense of smell informed me that my clothes were unsoiled and my skin was clean. Which meant Garrick had seen to myeveryneed.
If he had not been there to hold me up, I probably would have melted into a puddle of embarrassment right there on the ground. A frozen puddle. But a puddle, nonetheless.
Garrick ignored my comment, wrapping one hand around my waist so the other could retrieve something beside him. He balanced a steaming bowl of soup carefully in our laps.
“Do not knock it over,” he said over my shoulder to Isanara.
“As if a dragon could be so clumsy,”she hissed. But she did remove her head from my lap and settled beside me instead, her body half on the furs.
I tried to lift my hand to reach for the spoon Garrick balanced on his thigh. But my body refused to obey. Garrick did not even seem to notice the effort. He reached for the spoon, dipped it into the bowl of broth, and then smoothly raised it to my lips.
My hunger overwhelmed my pride, and I opened my mouth.
Garrick the fucking Red was feeding me soup with a spoon. It was the most delicious thing I had ever eaten.
