The faintest curl touched his mouth. “Then at least they’re honest.” His eyes drifted close once more, hands finding their home beneath his head. “Just go relieve yourself. Quickly.”
I patted his head, grinning when one eye peeked open to glare at me. “I’ll only be a few minutes,” I promised. “And then you can go back to bed, princess.”
Before he could answer, I jolted upright, sidestepping the flames as I moved toward the trees.
“No wandering,” he grunted.
With three fingers pressed to my brow in promise, I slipped past Nezra’s illusion. The barrier vibrated as I crossed it, its heartbeat momentarily in tune with my own.
The air outside it was thick, firelight replaced by a breath of raw soil. I glanced back, where Ronan lay exactly as I’d left him, lashes lowered, chest rising slowly, hands tucked behind his head like these woods, and everything in them, weren’t hungry.
As if they weren’t watching.
I found a thick oak, deeming its trunk wide enough to hide me, and crouched into its shadow, letting the moss bite into the soles of my boots.
I should have felt safe hidden here but the murk of night, the silence it brought, felt too deep. My arms found their way around my chest as I listened, for whatever was hidden, to give themselves away.
The branches overhead bent closer, knotted, twisted, reaching for me like fingers. I blinked when one of them shifted.
Something was here.
Not near enough to touch, but enough to feel. A weight at the end of my senses like an unseen hand pressed to the base of my spine. I glimpsed back, through the black weave of branches, to where Ronan was stretched by the fire. It was nothing but a calm, unlit forest now.
The chill clung to me as I hurried back through the trees, toward where the illusion beckoned, like a tear in the world’s fabric. The magic caught the moon’s glare, a glimmer too precise to be natural, reflecting where it shouldn’t be.
I pressed through, the veil parting over my skin, and when I stepped back into camp, I paused. The fire still crackled, low, andempty.
Ronan wasn’t there.
My stomach dropped, eyes immediately shooting to Elva’s tent where it lay undisturbed. No footprints, no scuff of boot or shift of fabric to suggest anyone had moved.
Then a sound scattered behind me. Steel slid free before I had the thought to even draw it. I spun, dagger gleaming, every nerve taut—
Ronan stood, half shrouded in twilight, shirt untucked, hair disheveled.
My grip on the blade tightened. “What are you doing?”
The scarred brow lifted, before he smoothed back the strands dangling in his face. “Just stretching my legs.”
I didn’t lower the dagger, not when his expression gave nothing, the glow of both fire and moon making his features dance between him and another form entirely.
He chuckled, then strode past me, as if I hadn’t caught him lurking, and dropped back to his place by the flames.
After a heartbeat, I joined him.
The warmth licked my skin, but the shiver I’d carried in the woods didn’t leave me. And as Ronan sat across from me, wings now gone, gaze fixed on the embers, I couldn’t shake the thought—
That whatever I’d felt out there...had followed me back in.
The moon drifted toward the faraway mountain’s serrated crown, a slow, taunting descent into dawn. We sat beside one another as smoke curled above the dying fire, its flames rooting red into the graying sky.
The more I studied Ronan’s features, the more I noticed the constant clench of his jaw, the furrow carved deep between his thick brows. Like the weight of it all refused to leave him even in the calmness.
“The Wraith.” It drifted from my thoughts to my tongue, and off my lips too easily.
Ronan’s head shot toward me. “What?”
“Your name.” My hand drew down his body. “The one that makes you so utterly terrifying.”
