My mind hadn’t flown that far yet.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.” Nadya shrugged her shoulders, and it looked awkward and strained.
Another stab of pain carved Ryker’s heart. I wanted to reach out and touch him, but I couldn’t. Not now, when he was facing a snake in his own land.
“When I carried you through the tunnels, wounded and barely standing on your feet,” I said as a horrific realization settled at the base of my spine. “You scratched your axe against the walls. You were drawing those attackers to us.”
To me.
“What can I say? I wouldn’t have cried a river if we’d gotten rid of you,” she said flippantly.
“I see,” I said, despite the hurt I shouldn’t have been feeling.
I’d risked my life to save hers, only to have her calling death upon me.
“How could you do it? How could you endanger the crater?” Ryker asked, struck by her gall. “We offered you shelter. You became one of us.”
“I swore my allegiance long before I came here.” Her grin turned twisted and brutal. “You think food and a soft bed would change that?”
“What about the support? Kind words? Believing in you?”
Her strange grin trembled, but didn’t fall. “You’re a fool if you truly believed.”
Ryker didn’t lose his calm. Not on his face, not in his energy, tightening his hold onto that patience.
“Then what would it have taken?” he asked, the curiosity radiating off him almost brimming with desperation.
What could he have done differently to change the path Nadya held so tightly onto?
There he went, blaming himself again.
I blamed myself, too. For not seeing her sooner.
She’d played her part of hurt, lost, and misunderstood well. Even Dax, who hadn’t suffered her too much, looked at the entire scene with wide, surprised eyes, an annoyed twist to his lips–probably because he hadn’t uncovered her plot faster.
“It doesn’t matter,” Nadya said petulantly. “It’s done.”
“It is not done,” Ryker said. “You’re young–”
“I’m only a few years younger than you and I’ve done a whole lot more,” she spit out.
“Really?” He tilted his head. “Do enlighten me.”
“You’re a pawn,” she said, the words sounding rehearsed for so many times, it was no wonder she’d started to believe them. “You’re weak.”
“How so?”
“You should have gone to war.”
He raised his brows, the first tendrils of anger finally bursting the bubble of composure. “You might have noticed I was gone for a few weeks. Probably used that time unwisely.”
“Not now.” She grimaced. “When your crater’s power was in danger. Youyielded, Commander. Just like they warned me you would do. I was beginning to think you weren’t as feeble as they said and you proved them so right. Guess I was a fool, too–along with everyone here who youliedto.”
Whispers bubbled around us. They halted as soon as Ryker lifted a hand.
“It’s true,” he said. I could feel the muscles of his back constricting, but he went on, undeterred, finally facing a truth I, for one, thought should have been faced long, long ago.“I negotiated a truce with the Northern Clans to protect my people.”
The whispers sharpened. Some understanding, mostly shocked.
