Kaelen chuckles. “When you’re right, you’re right, Bern.”
“What are we going to do?” Bern asks me.
“We need to swim out of here,” I say reluctantly. “The problem is that I can’t swim.”
“Yeah, I kind of got that when you almost punched me in the nose while I was trying to rescue you from drowning,” Kaelen says wryly.
“Oh, th-that’s good,” I say fervently. “Keep embarrassing me, because I warm up a little when I blush.”
His eyes narrow, and he leans toward me. It seems like a strange time and place for kissing, but I’m okay with it. When I raise my face to his, though, Kaelen touches my forehead and frowns.
“You’re bleeding and ice-cold. Bern is in worse shape. We need to get out of here, and we need to do it sooner rather than later, or we’ll be too cold to function.”
“I agree.” I hear my words slur, but since I can’t really feel my face, I don’t let it bother me. “How are we going to do that?”
“We have to swim.”
I look down at the water rushing past beneath my boots.
“I just told you I can’t swim. Bern can’t, either—not that his arm works, anyway. So, how are you going to manage with both of us?” I point at the jagged opening in the pit’s wall where the water rushes out. “We have to go that way, because otherwise we’d be fighting the current. But there’s no light in that tunnel. We’d be swimming in the dark—”
“Your amulet,” he says.
“Mostlyin the dark, at least until the amulet quits lighting up, like it did with the wolves, and there’s an even bigger problem. Much bigger problem. We—”
“Don’t know how long the tunnel is, how big it is, if there’s any air to breathe if or when it narrows,” he says. “I know. But I also know that we have no choice.”
“Maybe our friends will rescue us.” I look up at the opening to the pit. “There’s rope in the wagon. They could throw it down and—”
“If they could, they would have d-d-done it by now,” Bern says, his voice not much more than a whisper. “We have to assume the worst.”
Paintwists through me at this obvious truth I’ve been ignoring. “We can hope for the best.”
“We can always hope for the best,” Kaelen says, twisting to take off his jacket. “But we need to act on the information we have now.”
Despite the overwhelming danger and threat of imminent death, I can’t help but stare at his muscular chest in his wet, clinging shirt.
“Um.” I swallow. He’s ridiculously gorgeous. It’s unfair, really.
He glances at me, and then his expression turns smug. Smug and … hungry, when he studies my own wet clothing.
“I—”
“I know,” he says, his eyes determined. “Not the time or place, but wearegoing to finish that discussion, Solitude Grace.”
“Me and which Kaelen?” I mutter.
“S-Solitude?” Bern smiles a little before sadness rises in his eyes. “So pretty. Lil’s name is—was—Lilybelle. Almost as pretty as she was.”
Then he slumps against me.
My breath stops, and I shake him. “Bern! Wake up. Wake up!”
“Soldier!”
Kaelen’s snapped command must reach the military training ingrained in Bern, because he visibly struggles to open his eyes.
“Yes, sir,” he mumbles.
