I gaped at him. “You were acting crazy!”
“I was trying to protect my favorite cousin,” he said primly and sheathed his dagger. The ferocious man who was ready to kill for me was gone as fast as he had appeared.
“Don’t let Clara hear you say that.”
“I would never.” He kept looking at me strangely, as if seeing a spirit.
“Stop it.” I swatted at him. “It’sme.”
“I was wrong.” Dax hummed low in his throat and tilted his head to the side. “You seem different.”
He had changed, too, and not for the better. The shadows underneath his eyes had drained all the easiness from him and the slump in his shoulders hissed of defeat.
“Losing one’s Clan does that to a person,” I muttered.
“You haven’t lost–”
“You must be freezing,” I said quickly. “I almost turned into an icicle the first time I came here.”
“Changing the subject will not help.” He crossed his hands in front of his chest, the leather of his coat crinkling. It was strange seeing Dax dressed in anything other than his pristine suits or the imposing ritual robes. “But it is ungodly cold here. Your Commander has strange tastes in accommodations. Where is he, by the way? I was half expecting him to decapitate me as a welcome.”
“Protecting his city,” was all I said.
After the troll incident, I didn’t know who–or what–was listening.
Something devious was festering in Solkar’s Reach and nobody could be trusted until we found out what was really going on.
“He should, with the war coming.” He gave me a grave look. “And it is coming, Allie.”
Another shiver coursed down my spine. My heart wanted to protest, but my mind knew the truth.
The Serpents–and whoever was helping them and destroying our lives–would attack.
“He’ll come home soon,” I said, a pang of longing blooming inside of me.
A ridiculous one.
He’d only been gone for less than a day, yet my heart galloped at the mere mention of him as if we were long-lost lovers separated by an ocean of time.
“So this frozen wasteland is nowhome?” Dax raised a haughty brow. “The Commander reallyiswelcoming.”
“It’s not a wasteland. And you can trust him,” I said. “He protected me when nobody else could or wanted to.”
The humor vanished from Dax’s gaze, replaced with shadows I hadn’t seen there before. This wasn’t the ruthless darkness of a warrior or the calculating glint of a mastermind.
No, this was shame, an emotion I knew too well.
“I wasn’t talking about you,” I said quickly. “You had your own mission–and your own arranged marriage to deal with.”
He huffed. “That blessed union will never happen as long as I have breath in my lungs.”
“The Clan Council will not stand for that,” I warned.
“The Clan Council first needs to find me before they can punish me. They know where the rest of you are, but the Council–and my future fiancee–have no clue how to find me. Problem solved.”
“They could punish the Protectorate.” There I went again, protecting a Clan who didn’t want me.
“It won’t come to that. I have it on good authority that the magistrates have bigger problems than my whereabouts.”
