I’m tight as a bowstring.
We have so little time. Everything can crumble at any minute.
No more messages about Vera came from the Talbots. And Noire’s spies haven’t found anything new either.
The terror that grips my lungs makes it impossible to breathe.
What if it’s too late?
What if I can’t save her?
Jax’s head swivels towards me. I shake my head and snap at him before he even opens his mouth. “Mind your own damn business.”
He raises his palms in the air defensively. Kazh eyes us both.
With a pounding heart, I watch her. She keeps her hands neatly folded over the head of her cane. The fingers of the top hand spasm briefly.
I frown.
That’s odd.Did Kazh get hurt recently, or something?
Kazh’s grip tightens, and I lift my eyes to meet her sharp-as-a-blade gaze.
“It’s foolish, what you two have done,” Kazh murmurs.
I exchange a glance with Jax. He looks amused.
“Knowing you, I’m not surprised, shithead,” she spits at me before I can say anything. She turns her sharp gaze on Jax. “Butyou. I thought you had more than two brain cells in that pretty head of yours. Apparently not.”
Jax’s eyes widen, and he bites his bottom lip to stop himself from smiling.
I sigh. “What do you mean? What’s so foolish about freeing Jax from prison?”
Kazh turns her face away from us, towards the small window. “By pleading with House Dzuni to allow him to bind his life to yours, you put a target on his back. Now, the whole Ekios knows you’ve got a weakness,General.”
My stomach swirls with unease. “No. That’s not how we presented it. Noire said it’s an ancient ritual?—”
“Bah! I don’t care what he says,” she snaps. “You think there aren’t whispers about you two? That the Order of Ezkai, House Dzuni, or Caligos don’t know he helped you win the trials?” She faces me again and sneers. “How do you think it looks when the General Slayer who assassinated the last General helped you win the trials, huh?”
I blink, at a loss for words.
“And you put him up in a private cell and with personal guards in prison? Sneak around to see him late at night? Even spend the night there?” Kazh shakes her head. “If you have to ask me what’s so foolish, then maybe I did a bad job training you after all.”
My cheeks burn. Anger and shame threaten to choke me. But I know she’s right.
I was too in my head to see it in the moment. But when she puts it like that…
Kazh waves her wrinkled hand between me and Jax and says with a voice that sends an unpleasant shiver down my spine, “This…there’s no world or scenario in which it doesn’t end in a tragedy.”
My stomach sinks.
Oh gods.I hope she’s wrong.
I exchange a glance with Jax. He looks mildly worried. But from the storm raging inside his chest, it’s clear he’s more thanmildlyworried.
Another unexpected side effect of this damn fucking bond is that I feel him, at all times. Despite my damn shields.
Without saying anything else, Kazh turns away to watch the mountains outside her tiny window.
