I screamed in frustration and pain as the yank snapped my head back and took me off my feet in the same motion. I went up on my toes with my neck wrenched at an angle that sent white sparks across my vision. Both blades were useless—any swing I made would open my own throat.
The male behind me laughed cruelly and reached his free hand for my breast.
“I’ve been waiting for a prize worth fighting for, and ye’re it!”
I felt my stomach churn with fury rather than fear, and I stopped pulling against him. Instead, I stepped back—into him, stealing his leverage and knocking his hand away from my breast—and drove the pommel of my sword back into his midsection with everything I had. His grip loosened.
One breath was all I needed.
I brought the dagger up to the nape of my neck and sawed through the braid. Two hard strokes, and I’d cut off the rope that tied me to my past—to my enemy.
I dropped, spun, and killed him before he had the chance to understand what had happened. On the way down, he clutched at me, at my hair…and I grimly pulled it from his hold, knowing I’d sacrificed it to stay alive.
For one moment I stood there with the braid in my free hand—all those years of all that length, the weight I’d carried and the judgment I’d swallowed to keep it. The thing I’d hidden behind.
I dropped it in the dirt and didn’t look back.
My Mate needed me.
I found him by sound before I found him by sight, and when I finally broke through the press of bodies and reached him, the first thing Vrogul saw was not my face.
‘Twas my hair.
I watched his eyes drop to the ragged, jaw-length ends, and something moved through his expression so fast I couldn’t name it—there and gone, swallowed by the battle stillraging around us. Then his gaze met mine, and there was no time for aught else, because one of Callor’s men was coming at his unguarded side and I stepped into it without thinking, turning the blow aside with my sword.
His back found mine.
We didn’t speak. We didn’t need to. I had sparred with this male, slept in his arms, felt the way he moved—I knew his rhythms the way I knew my own breathing. When he stepped left, I moved with him. When I ducked under a swing, I felt him step over me and drive the attacker back before I straightened.
I took the ones who came in fast and close, where my speed and size became advantages instead of liabilities. He took the ones who tried to push through by force alone. Between us, there was no gap, no blind side, no opening.
We moved like we had always done this together.
Mates.
Destined to fight together in defense of our people.
But the enemy kept coming. And I could feel the inevitable truth of it, even without counting—the way each wave was slower to break, the way the space around us kept shrinking as the groaning bodies of our enemies piled up. Vrogul knew it too; I could feel it in the set of his shoulders against mine, the slight change in his breathing.
We were prepared to die together.
I pressed my back harder against his and held my ground.
