AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Shay welcomed the silence this time as they reached steeper terrain and began picking their way up the mountainside. Some of the rocks were so big, she had to maneuver them with care, finding handholds farther up and pulling herself to the top like a monkey.
As time went by, and the climb continued, the muscles in Shay’s legs began to scream, and her arms shook so badly they felt like rubber. The scar tissue in the muscles of her shoulder and neck began to ache, like little bolts of lightning prickling into her head and one side of her face. Another migraine was coming—joy. She tried to ration her water, but she was parched. The sun only seemed to get hotter, even as afternoon rolled around and it began its descent, gradually turning the trees and rocks studding the landscape into stark silhouettes.
“You sure you can make this one, short legs?” Roman said from right behind her. Shay assessed the rock she would need to climb to get up to the next level—higher than any of the others she’d scaled.
She dried her sweaty palms on her shorts, the material stiff with salt. “I got this.”
Sucking in a breath of dry air, she scaled the rock, the ridges digging into her skin. The rock was so hot, it nearly burned her, and there were blisters on her palms that threatened to burst and bleed.
She was nearing the top when she slipped, the rock slicing deep into her palm.
A muffled cry tore out of her, and her stomach plummeted beneath her feet as she fell, straight into open air—
She hit something hard, but it wasn’t ground or rock—it was Roman. His arms wrapped around her, and he cursed, staggering from the impact as he braced himself against a rock lower down—stopping both of them from falling to certain death.
He held her for a minute, her chest rapidly rising and falling under his arm. The fall had taken her by such surprise, her body so fatigued from walking, that she was suddenly shaking—all of her was shaking, not just her arms and legs. Even her lungs were quivering, and a metallic taste coated her tongue.
“You alright?” Roman’s question was tense.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re bleeding.” He lowered her down, setting her on her ass as though she were a doll, and ripped a strip off the bottom of his shirt.
“If you keep ripping your shirt, you’re not going to have any shirt left,” she warned, eyeing his sleeves.
“We forgot bandages.”
“It’s just a scratch—”
“Oh please, you’re bleeding enough to attract every monster in the whole fucking desert.” He squatted before her. “Now give me your hand so I can deal with this and we can get going.” He held his out, palm up. He had a lot of scars on that hand, a lot of calluses.
She relented, placing her hand in his. It was warm and dry and as rough as it looked, and Shay hated to admit it but…she liked the size difference between her hand and his.
Uh-uh—no way. Scratch that right now. There was no way she was letting herself like anything about Roman, even just his hands.
He poured water on the cut first—from his bottle, not hers, she noticed—clearing away the grit that was embedded in the wound. That wound was deeper than she’d realized, but her hellseher healing would fix it in a matter of hours. Didn’t stop the pain, though. He swiftly tied the strip of fabric around her palm, his movements far more gentle than she’d expected from someone like him.
“You should’ve told me about your hands,” he scolded.
“What about them?”
He grabbed her other one and turned it palm-up. “They’re all peeling and covered in blisters.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re resilient,” he corrected. She’d take that as a compliment. He helped her to her feet, taking hold of her forearms instead of her hands. “For someone so small,” he added.
Shay extracted her arms from his grip and stepped up to the rock that had nearly killed her. This jackass was going down.
Instantly, Roman was there, shadowing her like an eclipse of the sun. “What do you think you’re doing?”
She threw up a hand. “Climbing—duh!”
“Nice try, Shay.” The sound of her name on his tongue—instead of ‘small fry’, ‘pup’, or ‘Cousens’—sent a prickle up her spine. “We’re not about to have an instant replay of that bullshit that almost killed us.” Shay highly doubted the fall would’ve killed him; he might’ve called her resilient, but she knew her limits. And it was his body that was durable. Her size and the pain she lived with daily had limited her in ways most hellsehers never had to contend with.
She licked her cracking lips.“What am I supposed to do then?”
He took off his backpack and set it on the ground.
