I don’t get a second, not a moment to pull away from the coarse texture, not before Samick has come up behind me, his hand firm on my nape, and he shoves me against the trunk.
The chill of his voice tickles my ear, “All the patience you believe I have, and you don’t consider that there is a limit. You don’t consider what it means to reach that limit.”
The cold whispery threat rinses over me.
My breath shudders into the dark side of the tree, where the light is blocked.
Samick blocks it.
Muscle and stone and marble, towering over me, but curved down to whisper his threat into the air around my ear, “I have killed for much less with a mere touch, woman. You are not immune to my nature.”
The tension on my neck is unbearable.
A cry catches like tangled string in my throat—and the pressure of the trunk against my chest almost silences me.
But I manage a wheeze, “You’re suffocating me.”
Tendons tug and dent under his tight grip. Fingertips digging in more and more. His mouth curls at my ear, “Perhaps I should.”
A cough jolts my chest.
The raspy sound of my voice grates along the coarse bark, “You have been suffocating me.Since the road—”
Samick yanks me back a step, spins me around in a dizzying whirl, then slams me into the tree again.
My spine alights.
Those stars of pain send shocks through my body, heat the back of my head that may or may not be bleeding, and glitter my vision.
I squint through the glare at him.
Shadows haunt his eyes, a clash of green and white, like the colours are shifting right in front of me.
I can make out his frown, the faint lines between his eyebrows—but the tension in his jaw hasn’t eased.
“I have protected you.” His lip curls, matching the snarling gravel of his tone. “Fed you. Clothed you.” His teeth bare at me. “But you say I suffocated you?”
The strike against my head was so sudden and sharp that it takes too long for the waves of dizziness to leave me.
And it was so consuming I didn’t even feel his hand slip around my jaw, clutch tight, and angle my face with his.
“You did.” I breathe easier now that I’m not being fucking crushed, but the lungs in me are so damaged that they won’t be soothed now until I feed on that inhaler.
A defeated scoff jolts me. “You don’t know what it’s been like—what it is to live here with you all. You think because you fed me that I should be glad?”
I blink up at him.
Those pesky tears still fall.
My voice trembles with the ache swelling in me, “You have no idea what it’s been like for me. You might have fed me, and clothed me—but I’ve been alone, Samick. I’ve been alone through all of this, all of your conversations, all of your camps, all of your walks, and when you butcher your way through towns and people and cities—and I’m dragged along for it all, and all I want…” My voice breaks, it pitches into a squeak, “all I want is to go home.”
His lashes lower over clashing eyes; a battle between green and frost.
“Not home to your world,” I whine, and I feel the cold in the air biting at my slick cheeks. “I want to go home to my flat—with Bee. I want my records, my vinyls, my books, my bugs—”
“Bugs?”
His icy voice is a sword through the air—and it startles me.
