“I was just sitting by the fire with Tharn,” she whispers. “It was completely quiet. And then Kol just slammed a command through the entire mindspace.”
I stop pulling on my boots. A cold, incredibly sharp drop of adrenaline hits my bloodstream. “What command?”
“He’s cutting the daily water rations,” she says, her voice flat. “By a third.”
My brow furrows in the dark. “He just decided this? Without speaking to anyone?”
“He’s thedra-dam,” Jacqui mutters, leaning her weight against the cavern wall. “He didn’t speak. He just... projected the order. Directly into the heads of every single warrior in this cave. Total, undeniable, absolute silence. Tharn won’t challenge it. None of them will.” She pauses, pushing a tense hand over her face. “I came to you because I need you to help me come up with a plan. Some way to siphon off the excess and stockpile it totake the pressure off Alex in the sick bay. The unmated women cannot survive on two-thirds of a ration, Erika.”
My jaw clenches so hard my teeth grind together. “He’s really cutting it by a third.”
“A third,” she confirms. “Zan is already hauling the excess out of the drinking pool to seal in the emergency skins.”
“Why?” I ask, my heart beginning to hammer.
“I don’t know. Kol is projecting nothing but the order. He is a complete wall.”
I stand up, my hands curling into tight fists. “There is no plan that magically creates water out of thin air. We are already drinking a baseline minimum. We cannot tighten that any further.”
The Drakav might be able to survive a month on a single mouthful of dew, but human kidneys do not work like that. A third less water means rapid dehydration. It means Alex gets immediately overwhelmed in the sick bay. It means we die.
I do not even finish tying my boots before I am marching toward the center of the cavern, walking directly toward the massive, terrifying warlord.
“Erika,” Jacqui hisses from behind me.
I ignore her.
Every single warrior around the fire stops moving the instant I cross the threshold.
Zan, who is holding an oversized hide waterskin, freezes. Haroth goes utterly still, his ears flattening back tightly against his skull. Another called Keth turns, glowing golden eyes locking onto me.
The silence that drops over the circle is so thick I can feel it pressing against my eardrums. The air in the cavern turns incredibly thick. I do not need a telepathic translator to know that the mindspace just went completely, violently still.
Kol turns slowly.
He looks down at me. From this angle, he is colossal. A sweep of rough, tan hair falls around the severe angle of his jaw. The thick ridges of his status markings curve over his broad shoulders, tracing the deep, muscular swells of his golden chest. He is an absolute mountain of raw power, but the brutal, fierce symmetry of his face is overwhelmingly, aggressively masculine. His amber eyes lock directly onto my face and his glow immediately brightens. It flares hard enough that the searing heat of it presses directly against my skin from a full arm’s length away.
My stomach does an immediate, incredibly violent flip.
All at once, completely without my permission, a liquid wave of heat rolls straight down my spine and pools thickly low in my belly. My feet actually scrape an inch forward against the stone, my entire body craving the severe heat radiating off his chest.
I lock my knees and force my spine straight. I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper, using the sharp spike of physical pain to forcefully override the humiliating urge to walk directly into him.
“You changed the water,” I say. I mix English with the harsh Drakav syllables I’ve managed to scrape together over the last month. “S’kahn. Toral.”
Water. None.
The warriors around us go even more rigid. Kol goes completely, unnervingly still.
His nostrils flare slightly as he drags in a slow breath. He looks at me the way a starving predator looks at a very small animal.
He looks exactly like he wants to eat me alive.
“S’kahn...mine,” Kol grinds out. He forces the human words up his throat. His vocal cords sound like they are physically tearing. “I...give.”
“I am not questioning your authority,” I snap, my voice climbing higher than I want it to as I jab my finger toward his solid chest. “I am questioning yourmath.”
He tilts his head slightly, his brow furrowing as though the word math does not compute with survival logic.
