“Do you miss me?” she asked again. Her words came to him soft as a caress, calling to him as dangerously as the sirens who lured sailors to their deaths. But he’d been the one who’d allowed disaster to happen last time.
Too young to think past the need to have her when she’d given herself so easily to him.
Not this time.
“Quinn?” She said his name as though no one had that name but him. “I’m asking a simple question. It’s just me and you.”
Why did her words sound like music? She wasn’t singing.
Should he tell her he thought of her only twice a day?
When he was sleeping and awake.
That he’d never touched anything as soft as her skin since parting ways or that he still remembered the way sunshine had come through the open window of the mountain hut and shimmered around her when she’d leaned over to kiss him?
He should lie, but he couldn’t bring himself to hurt her, when she was easing his pain. “Yes, I miss you, but that doesn’t change . . . a simple fact. I’m Belador and you’re Medb.” Sworn enemies. “You should hate me. I should never have taken advantage of you.”
She kept soothing his head with her hand and laughed. The sound came and went as though fading in and out. “I was fully a woman when I met you.”
“You were eighteen. I was older than you—”
“By two years only.”
“—and should have kept my hands off.”
She placed a kiss on his head, and gentle coolness spread across his forehead, dropping the headache to a moderate ache. He relaxed his shoulders for the first time in hours.
Kizira chided him in a cheerful voice. “Your memory must be failing, and such a shame to age so poorly at thirty-three.”
He smiled at her jab. Some worry pressed at his mind . . . something he’d just had a grip on a moment ago.
Whispering in his ear, she told him, “Irecall when we met that you fell tomycharms, not the other way around.”
“So you used majik on me then?” He couldn’t recall, but he should. His memories bumped into each other in a confusing tangle.
“Only my personal charms,” she assured him. “Now you wish me to think that only worked because you were so badly injured?”
Pieces of the memory poked at him.
He’d been alone on patrol in the mountains surrounding Chechnya and found a village destroyed by Medb warlocks. When he heard the scream of a woman being attacked, he intervened only to be captured by three warlocks who turned Noirre majik on Quinn before he’d been able to engage his mind-locking powers. He hadn’t developed the skill much at that point. They beat him to his knees.
Then two warlocks had held him in place for the other one to torture so they could peel his mind open.
Quinn hadn’t known at the time that the woman he’d saved, Kizira, was a Medb who had just been given her first task on her way to becoming a priestess. She was to capture a Belador and bring the warrior to her queen. A dangerous task for any eighteen-year-old woman, but Kizira had never been an average young girl.
She’d told him later that no warrior who fought so honorably should die by torture. So she’d interfered with the three warlocks, forcing them to stop hurting Quinn.
That had been a grave error on her part. The warlocks had been trained to kill any traitor in the Medb, no matter who.
To interfere with their handling of a Belador had sealed her fate without judge or jury.
They’d dropped Quinn in a heap of torn flesh and broken bones to turn on Kizira as one.
Quinn had rallied the minute they’d redirected their Noirre majik at Kizira. He’d opened his mind, reaching out in a rage of energy he used to quickly overtake the mind of two warlocks, dropping them where they stood.
The other one had been so intent on Kizira that he’d failed to notice the greater danger gaining his feet behind him. When Quinn had finished, all three laid scattered on the ground. He’d taken one look at a shocked Kizira and collapsed on top of the pile of bodies.
When he’d next opened his eyes, he’d found that Kizira had hidden him away in the mountains, where she cared for his battered body.
