Beside me, Samick looks…off.
Months, I’ve been with him—and not once in that time have I ever seen him look worried. Not like this—this quiet, rigid tension.
There’s something in the way his eyes flicker around, scanning every shadow lurking behind every tree.
Movement shifts around me.
Arwyn, Shark, Mika encircle me.
Not loosely. Not casually.
They form a shape around me, a diamond. Tight, deliberate. Every angle covered.
Samick’s words of warning before we left the prison echo in my mind—and all I can think is,Rust.
I don’t look, but I know he’s there, somewhere in the shadows, tracing us through the icy woods.
This must be it.
All that time, all that waiting, all that scheming.
This is his chance to take me out.
Among the trees, in a tired unit where half the fae are barely awake from that medicinal powder—like Mika, on my left, with her heavy lashes and parted mouth, as though the sheer amount of muscle strength it takes to close her lips is just more than she can afford—and we’re all spread out.
My heart sinks down to my writhing gut.
I wonder if Samick can feel it, if my fear is an annoying sensation crawling over his skin.
Then his face vanishes, because everything abruptly goes dark.
The torches are lowered. Faint orange flickers through the trees are gone in a heartbeat, and we’re plunged into darkness.
It’s so not the time for this.
A ragged breath escapes me, like the tension in me is trying to restrain any sound I might make, as though to breathe means to announce my exact fucking coordinates in the dark.
That tension extends outwards.
There’s a tautness in the blackout, like stretched rubber bands ready to ping at my skin, and even through my layers of warm, dry clothes, my skin pebbles.
It should be quiet.
But I hear too much.
Trees creak in the winds, foliage and ice crunch under the weight of bootsteps, someone slips up ahead, and even the breathing of the fae that were injured in the hail is too loud—too raspy.
Not all of them were ready to move on.
Especially not to walk this terrain of foliage and broken clumps of ice that my ankles wobble over with every careful step.
I wonder if we’re making our way back to the camp—but then the thought is jolted from me as I lurch forward.
A quake rattles me.
My boots root to the frosted soil—and I stiffen.
Samick does, too.
