“I didn’t know it was possible to drown standing up.” I open the driver’s side door and get in, wincing when my bare shoulders touch the scorching leather.
Riven folds into his seat and manages to close the door, but his ridiculously long legs are everywhere. I watch as he attempts to find space for his knees, then shake my head. “Lose the grasshopper physique. If I pass out from heat exhaustion and wreck, you’ll impale yourself on your own joints and turn into a shish kebab.”
“I don’t know what that is?—”
“Chunks of meat on a spike.”
“Innovative,” he grunts, glancing out the window where several people are stumbling around the parking lot, searching desperately for their cars. “A human might see.”
“The windows are tinted, Riven, it’ll be fine.”I crank the air conditioning all the way up while he considers it. “And with this heat, they’ll assume you’re a hallucination.”
“How far away is the gateway?”
“With a working car, about an hour and a half.” I toss my hair over the headrest, adjust the mirrors, and punch the directions into the car’s GPS. By the time I’m done, Riven has chosen comfort over caution, and his familiar amber form is once again riding shotgun.
I don’t comment. I also don’t relax until we’re past the Atlanta city limits. There’s no lane splitting on four wheels, and the traffic is brutal.
“Your wings,” Riven says. “Is it difficult to keep them contained?”
I drum my fingers against the steering wheel. “Difficult? No. Uncomfortable? Yes. Especially if I keep them tucked away for too long. On a normal day, I hardly notice, but if I’m in danger, they go rogue.”
He hums, keeping his gaze focused on the horizon ahead.
“How are you holding up?” I was worried the plane would make him sick, but I forgot all about his motion sickness while we were in the air.
“I’ll survive,” he says drily. “It’s better without the stop and go.”
I nod. “Drinking something will help. I’ll find a place to grab dinner.”
We slip back into silence for a while before Riven clears his throat. “When your wings switch form, does it hurt?”
My eyebrows shoot up. No one’s ever asked me that before. “The change itself doesn’t hurt,” I tell him. “I’ve cut myself with them before, though, and when we fought at the Mouth of Hell, I got a few burns.”
“From setting me on fire?”
I grin. “Yeah. Once the flames are no longerattached to me, they’re dangerous. I’m not fireproof, so any secondary contact hurts like a bitch.”
Instead of being pissed off by the reminder, Riven chuckles. The deep, rough sound makes me shiver. I cover the reaction by messing with my air vent, but I’m not sure he buys it. I wouldn’t.
The night we faced off in the cage, his laughter terrified me. So much has changed since then. It’s hard to wrap my head around it.
“Why did you decide to help me?” The question bursts out of me, too sharp to be mistaken for casual curiosity. “In the tunnels. When Crag was hunting me.”
Riven’s made helping me a habit, but we both know things shifted between us that night. The night he sent me to die, then changed his mind.
I still wander those twisting halls in my dreams, screams echoing off the stands, my heart pounding against my chest. At the time, it didn’t matter why he did it—his motivations were secondary to my survival—but now... Now I need to know why.
I’m not sure he’s going to answer me. The clock on the dash tracks his silence, and I watch the digital readout change twice before he clears his throat.
“I ask myself that every day, darling.”
A non-answer with a tinge of regret. I could choose to be offended, but I keep my mouth shut instead, some sixth sense telling me he’s not done.
I’m too hungry for his answer to risk losing it.
“You’re mesmerizing when you fight, did you know that?” He’s right next to me, but his eyes are unfocused, his mind far away. “I thought it in the cage, then again in the arena. Your instincts combined with the stubbornness? Beautiful. Every time you survived, I wanted to cheer. I told myself it was because I enjoyed watching you fight.Something changed, though. Your fights stopped making me happy. They scared me instead. Terrified me, really. I was vulnerable.”
My throat is dry but Riven keeps his gaze locked on the horizon. I wonder if it’s making it easier for him to be honest with me.
