“I don’t know what you mean.” My fingers clench tightly around the wool fabric.
His mouth gives the barest kick at the corners. “You’re a terrible liar.”
“Am I?” I wrap both arms around the blanket, hugging it against me. I suppose I should be grateful he thought to bring me one. “Then you should be able to tell that I’m not lying when I say I won’t spread tales of you or your kind. I will keep the secret of your existence from the world...”
He considers me with a hard, unreadable expression. “What you say now can differ from what you do later.”
“Isn’t that true for everyone? There comes a point when yousimply have to trust,” I challenge. “Like I trust you when you say I’m your guest and you won’t harm me—”
His voice comes at me, quick as a whip. “You have no choice but to accept my word on that.”
I can’t help it. I shoot a glance back to the tunnel I was contemplating escaping through moments before. Risky or not, it feels like a choice.
“You don’t want to take your chances out there. You won’t make it,” he says, following my gaze. “I’m bred to survive the Crags, and it’s nearly done me in a time or two.”
I look at him with interest. “You nearly died out there?”
He nods once. “I was young. Without a pride. Weak. Starving. Before I found this cavern. Before the others joined me and we formed our own pride.”
My gaze skims him. His powerful body fills out his black tunic and pushes against the seams of his leather trousers. The idea of him ever being weak seems impossible, and I want to know more about him, about the time when he was lost and alone and near death.
He continues. “Even if the Crags don’t kill you...my wrath will not be something you wish to face when I catch you. And Iwillcatch you.”
I bristle. He’s as cruel and merciless as I first suspected. He might not have slaughtered everyone in Isstad, but that doesn’t mean he’s harmless andgood. “And I’m to trust myself safe with you now? I should just roll over and accept my fate here among you?”
“Do as you’re told. Don’t run away and you will be fine.” He motions to a bench. “I don’t even tie you up at night.”
“Should I have expected that?” I demand indignantly. “You said I was a guest, not a captive.”
He looks at me in such a way...as though I’m some poor, deluded soul and I realize there is no distinction for him between the two.
“You don’t understand, do you?” He lowers his head with ashake, loose strands of dark hair brushing his jaw. “After all you’ve seen this day, you fail to graspwhatwe are...and where you are.”
I swallow against the sudden tightening in my throat, instantly seeing a flash of those dragons in the sky, cutting through the air faster than wind, breathing fire...destroying my home, obliterating the only life I’ve ever known and hurling me into this: a new life that scares me so much I have difficulty pulling air into my lungs. It’s an image that will forever be there, waiting for me every time I close my eyes.
Had it only been a day ago?
It felt like years since I first spotted dragons in the sky...since they brought me to ground. Since he swept me into the sky and brought me here.
“The others,” he continues, “think you should be tied up, at the very least.”
At the very least.
“Of course they do,” I murmur. Theothersvoted for my death. That is not such a leap from tying me up like a dog to keep me from running away.
He steps forward suddenly, the motion full of menace. Firelight casts his face into stark lines and hollows. My wary gaze searches, seeking something in him but finding nothing.
Because there is nothing.
Nothing he is willing to reveal to me. He is wholly unknowable, and this only adds to my fear. Not being able to know, to guess, to predict...
“You’re alive,” he rasps. “Fed. Warm. You have a place to sleep.”
Self-preservation warns me to stay silent and nod—to bury my defiance the way they bury their dragons, only coming out when summoned.
Still, I hear myself whisper, “Is there not more to living than that? That’s just...existing. Not living.”
Is that not why I’ve been searching for a way to break my curse all these years? Because I want more from life than what he described?
