A darkness comes over Ormus.
But he has no retort.
Or he has no courage.
He leaves.
And Samick returns to watching the faintly pink fish—
Until another calls his name.
The warrior comes out from the trees that shroud the left side of the bay.
Jyrki.
And he has his human with him. His evate.
Tesni spoke of her at the camp before the wave came.
Samick never noticed the human before. Never looked at the warm tones of her skin, or the eyes that seem too large for her face.
Eyes that are larger now that she is being hauled across the shore, past the captives with only three guards to surround them.
Jyrki is rough with his evate.
Fist buried in the scruff of her jacket, he drags her down the shore. The tips of her toes graze along the sand, all the way to Samick.
The evate is thrown to the sand at his boots.
Samick lowers his frosty gaze to the shivering human.
The fear brims her eyes with tears. Her hands fist in the sand, as though she can steady herself against her own violent trembles, against those violent rolls of terror colliding through the air.
Samick leans his weight back onto a boot. A slight retreat from the irritating surges of her turmoil.
Humans are unrefined with their feelings. Too disordered.
Jyrki’s eyes darken into blackness. He turns that lethal stare down on the woman. “She was fleeing. Again. But this time, not alone.”
There is an eternal ice that lives in Samick. It is frost on his bones, winter sheathing his muscles, a chill that cools his insides.
It never thaws.
It is a part of who and what he is.
Yet, for the first time in his existence, he feels it…splinter. As though cracks are fracturing the ice.
“Your human escaped.”
Those cracks spread through his entire body. Every bone, splintered.
It is a new sensation.
A confusing one.
And an utterly wretched one.
It is more than hope. More than relief. More than pain.
