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“You can’t stop me. Asena said we have to act quickly.”
“Skylenna! I’m the one that won’t be able to handle it. I can bear my own pain and suffering every hour, every day. But it’s your pain I won’t survive. It’s your suffering I won’t be able to endure.” His large hands grip the sides of my face with unfiltered vehemence. Even the act of admitting this weakness is gutting him from the inside out. “I have enough guilt to carry on my back. I refuse to add to that weight by hearing your screams echo the walls of that demonic prison.”
He’s searching my eyes for understanding. A rare moment to plea for my help. To beg for my obedience.
I throw my arms around his neck, slamming my body against his. The need to quell his anguish is burying me, crumbling my stubborn behavior to rumble beneath our feet.
“I know,” I whisper, tucking my face into his neck. “I know. It was hell for me to watch them hurt you when I was powerless to stop it.”
He smells of cedar and a crackling fireplace. Of home and warm hugs. Of everything I’ll ever need.
“But I need you to believe in me the way I have always believed in you. I need you to treat me as your equal.”
His jaw sets. “I won’t be able to control myself if I see you in pain.”
“Control is one of your strengths,” I tell him. “You’re going to hold it together until we get what we need. You have to let me be strong too.”
The way his shoulders droop in defeat tells me I have won. That is an argument he won’t combat. He lets out a sigh of pure exhaustion against my braided hair.
“If at any moment it’s too much for you, I’ll put them all in an unmarked grave. Do you understand me?”
I nod, but I can’t let him go. Not yet. Not now. The asylum is about to unwittingly let a wolf into their pasture of sheep.
And they’ll never see it coming.
16. “I promised someone I wouldn’t go in there until the time was right.”
After several days of hiking and little sleep, we make it back to the Red Oaks.
We know it’s not long now until we make it back to Emerald Lake. The asylum where we met, and the source of energy that pulses like a cancerous tumor between two great mountains.
The little conversation we’ve had has been about the basics. Food, water, shelter. And the only time he seems alert enough to give me his full attention is when I plucked a red flower. He whirled on me, yanked it out of my hand and gawked at me as though I kicked a baby.
“Phoenix stem. It’s poisonous!” he grumbled, turning around to keep walking.
And that was it.
Dessin is distracted. He works out details to our plan in his head, sometimes mouthing words to himself, arguing silently with a voice in his mind. But a creeping suspicion claws into my chest when I look at him. I’ve known him long enough to spot the moments of genius. Careful calculation. Master puppeteering. Details of his plan. Not our plan.
The burning frustration harbors heat in my chest while I give myself a headache trying to figure it out. We just discussed this. We agreed that this time, I would be in on the secrets. I would be an equal.
Am I really so stupid that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with a master plan? Or is this an ego thing? He’s this strong and powerful man that doesn’t need to waste his time explaining ideas to some woman.
We’ve made it back to the lagoon with the gigantic red oak towering over the clearing. It’s warmer this way, so we remove our coats and boots to change them out into our packs.
Dessin leans over to close up his pack and I chunk a pine cone at the back of his head. It hits the target with a light peck! His head lifts slowly. Only just barely caught by surprise.
He turns to me. An annoyed sidelong glance. “Can I help you?”
“Yeah! As a matter of fact, you can!” I throw my pack down. “What’s wrong with me?!”
With a single blink, his annoyance is replaced with confusion. He opens his mouth to answer. Then closes it just as quickly.
“Because there must be something, right? Am I mentally handicapped? Am I slow? There has to be a reason why you’ve humored me with a dummy plan and have been spending days creating a new plan that I can’t be a part of!” I pause for him to answer this time.
“Skylenna—” He stops short. Sighs. “We don’t have time for this.”
“Can’t you walk and talk at the same time?”
