“The King isn’t afraid of anything.”
“The King is afraid of you.” His hand comes up, hovers near my face. Doesn’t touch. “It’s afraid of what you represent. A person who chose to care about the warden. A person who could anchor me to a life beyond the forest.”
“I’m not an anchor. I’m a bounty hunter who’s in over her head.”
“You’re the first person to stand against the King’s temptation and win.” His voice drops. “In all the years I’ve held this binding, no one has done that. They all broke. They all chose the easy path. You didn’t.”
I don’t have an answer for that. Don’t have words for the way his presence makes my skin tingle, for the heat that’s gathering low in my belly, for the desperate, stupid, dangerous want that’s been building since the first moment I saw him.
So I don’t answer at all.
I reach up. Close the distance he’s been maintaining. Press my palm against his scarred cheek.
His eyes flutter closed. A sound escapes him—not quite a groan, not quite a sigh. A primal, raw note that makes my blood run hot.
“We should rest.” My voice comes out rougher than I intended. “The King will come back. We need to be ready.”
“Yes.” But he doesn’t move. Neither do I. We stand there in the Heartgrove, surrounded by bones and ancient horror, my hand on his face and his breath warm against my fingers.
“This is complicated,” I say.
“Everything is complicated.” His eyes open. Meet mine. “That doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”
I drop my hand. Step back. Force myself to breathe.
“Rest. We’ll talk about what’s wrong later.”
He nods. But as I turn away, as I find a spot among the roots to sit and try to sleep, I feel his gaze on me. Burning. Wanting.
Mirroring exactly what I’m trying not to feel.
TWENTY-THREE
THAROS
Sleep doesn’t come.
I sit against the massive root at the Heartgrove’s edge, watching the woman who should have killed me when she had the chance. She’s curled on her side a few feet away, her back against the bark, her blades within easy reach. Her eyes are closed, but I can tell from her breathing that she’s not sleeping either. The rhythm is wrong—too shallow, too controlled. She’s thinking.
About what she almost did. About what I told her. About the thing that’s still pulsing at the center of this cathedral of bone and root, waiting for another opportunity to strike.
The King is quiet now. Pushed back, contained, nursing whatever passes for wounds in an entity that’s more will than flesh. But I can feel it watching. Feel its attention like a pressure against the binding, patient and hungry and endlessly, terribly focused.
It spoke to her. Showed her visions of her dead partner trapped in the roots. Offered to release the suffering if she would just drive her blade into my back.
And she refused.
I don’t understand that. Can’t make it fit into any framework I’ve built since the binding claimed me. People break. They betray. They choose their own survival over abstract concepts like loyalty or trust. I’ve seen it happen more times than I can count—watched wardens before me fall to the King’s whispers, watched hunters become prey, watched allies become weapons in the hands of an entity that knows exactly how to exploit weakness.
But Xela stood with a blade in her hand and the King’s voice in her skull, and she chose to trust me instead.
The thought won’t stop circling. Won’t let me rest.
I watch her shift, adjusting her position against the root. The wound on her arm has stopped bleeding, but the bandage she wrapped around it is dark with dried blood. She’ll need proper treatment if we survive this. Proper rest. Proper food.
Things I can’t give her. Not here. Not now.
“I can feel you staring.” Her voice cuts through the silence, rough with exhaustion. “It’s unsettling.”
