Slowly, he tears the page out of the book, then balls it in his fist. The look he spares me is ice as he tosses it at the flames.
A scoff comes from my left.
Arwyn must still be awake—and clearly paying too much attention to us.
Nosy prick.
I don’t acknowledge him.
My jaw tightens before I roll my tongue around my cheeks—then, with a huff, I throw the empty trail mix box into the fire.
Arwyn murmurs something ugly and serrated, and whatever he says is funny to Samick, because a small smirk curves his pink mouth—
And it vanishes as quickly as it came.
Something else takes over his face.
Shadows cast over tensing muscles, a clenching jaw, a brow furrowing.
Slowly, he turns his cheek to me, slashed through with a dark shadow, and he looks out to the blackout beyond the camp.
I sit up straighter, stiffer.
There’s a faint creak at my side.
I cut a glance over at Arwyn.
The leather-bound book in his hand is creaking with his tightening grip—and like Samick, his focused stare is aimed at the blackout.
My face wrinkles.
Arwyn’s hand…
It’s tight around the journal, the one he writes in sometimes, but it’s the goosepimples crawling up his arms that turns my veins into threads of ice.
I turn a tightened look on Samick.
A flurry of ice spurs in my chest.
The shadow slashing over his cheek is darker now. The tension in him is so tight that his muscles look bolted to his bones.
Arwyn speaks, and not a heartbeat after those two curt words, Samick is pushing the sketchbook off his lap—
It thuds to the earth.
My brows raise and I stare down at the toppled book, the leather-bound cover parted, exposing the pristine pages inside.
Samick is a lot of things.
A beast, a feral creature, an icy monster—
But he is also neat. Careful. Organised.
Not once in all the time I’ve been his ‘ward’, as he calls it, have I seen him disrespect a single item he owns.
Especially not the sketchbook.
To see it on the grass, spilled open, and his boot coming down on it, is enough to stun me.
