While his back was to me, while he was saying something cocky and unbearable?—
I drove the knife toward his side. He was exposed, vulnerable.
Lightbringer roared to life. She was in my mind, in my chest, vast and immediate and filled with absolute authority, the bone-deep certainty of the ancient and primal.
“We don’t murder our mates.”
The blade wrenched.
It twisted in my grip, still driven with all the killing force I had behind it. I had one terrible lucid second of understanding exactly what was about to happen?—
The knife drove into my thigh.
It cleaved flesh all the way until it struck bone, so hard the tip turned, and the world contracted to that point, and I heard myself cry out from far away, and the stone floor came toward me.
I had failed my family. And it hadn’t been him who stopped me.
It had been my dragon. The one who wouldn’t speak to me, who wouldn’t fly with me, whose sense of being trapped with Fear had mixed with mine.
When it mattered, when I had made my choice and driven toward it with everything I had, she had finally made herself known. On his side. Not on mine.
Now Tay and Lidi and my mother would be lost.
Agony came over me like a wave.
He turned, his eyes wide with fear and panic. There was something raw across his face, something uncontrolled and unfamiliar.
“Cara!”
He leapt to catch me, dropping his blade that dripped with monster ichor. It clanged against the ground as he wrapped his arms around me.
His arms came around me. He bore me to the ground with gentleness, then his hands were moving over me, fast and careful, as he checked my wound.
“How did this happen?” The frantic quality of his voice was something I had never heard. “Cara, stay with me. I need to?—”
His hand went to his belt. His fingers found the leather flap. Found it loose. Found the empty place where the vial had been.
“I’m a fool.” Horror in his voice. “It’s gone.”
The blade pulsed with agony. “Take it out.”
“No.” He was already moving, his arms certain around me. “You’ll bleed out faster. I have to get you back. Get you to a healer.”
He lifted me. Smooth despite the urgency, his arms steady, and my head fell against his shoulder. I stared up at the labyrinth ceiling, trapped in the terrible tenderness of being carried by someone I had just tried to kill. Someone who does not understand it yet but will.
The world was a hot blur of pain, and I could not think through how to lie to him. How to keep him on my side. How to get him to help Tay and Lidi once he knew I would kill him for their sake.
He was what I needed right now. I hated him for that, and I hated her, the dragon who was supposed to be mine.
“How did I lose it,” he said, moving fast through the dark, speaking half to himself. “I checked it before we left. I always?—”
He stopped speaking.
His arms didn’t loosen. His stride didn’t break.
His gaze fell to the blade buried in my thigh, the hilt jutting up, blood leaking around it. That relentless mind was turning, making sense of where the knife had come from, the angle, the force to drive it so deep.
Then his horrified gaze rose to mine, and I turned my face into his shoulder so he could not see what was written there.
