“If–” I licked my lips, a growing horror sprouting in my chest. “If it’s trying to protect me again…what’s waiting on that battlefield?”
Something that even this strange, dangerous land thought I couldn’t survive.
A chilling silence descended upon us all. My power blazed and sizzled deep inside of me, as if it wanted to coil around Ryker and prevent him from leaving as well.
“It might have sensed a kidnapping plot like Evie’s.” Ryker’s eyes sparked harder. “It let the rest of us pass.”
That was true.
The fear shaking my breaths quieted. If the passage let him, Dax, and Geryll pass, as all the other warriors, they were safe.
IfSolkar’s Reach was truly trying to protect me and not enacting vengeance for the way my power had challenged it.
I rubbed my frozen cheeks. “We need a plan. Fast. Before anyone notices something’s wrong.”
“We do.” Ryker’s gaze travelled from me to the lip of the entrance.
I saw the hesitation.
Felt it in his fractured breaths.
His entire being vibrated with indecision and responsibilities he couldn’t shake.
“Don’t even think about it,” I said, unflinching. “You’re going to war. You’re not risking everyone’s lives to babysit me.”
He still looked torn, eyes sparking as his own personal war raged inside of him. The world was pulling us apart again.
I gulped down a centering breath and stepped closer to him, uncaring that Dax’s eyebrows flew up.
Ryker watched me approach with the astonishment of a man who’d been deprived of good surprises for too long.
“You asked me, from one leader to another, what I would’ve done,” I whispered, only for his ears. “I am telling you now, GO.To protect is to endure. The crater’s magic is bigger than all of us. If it thinks I’m safest here, we have to listen.”
Literally.
Because there was no way out, not for me. At least not now.
Even if I had trusted Dax’s winged contraption, the thing mostly glided downwards.
Ryker exhaled through flared nostrils. His hands rose toward me, but he fisted them at the last moment.
“You’ll be safer here,” he muttered to himself.
“I will be,” I pressed. The warriors might not bother with me, but their gazes clung to their Commander constantly. “You need to leave.”
Even as I said it, my entire being rebelled. If I was safer here, then so would he, instead of risking his life–
“Please,” I begged myself to stop this insane urge and him to fulfill both of our duties.
His shoulders slumped, defeated.
He nodded.
Once.
Curt.
Enough to make me relax.
