“Doesn’t bother me, Commander. I’ve made my peace.” I wrap a hand around the steel blade, forcing it down.
“What do you want, Rexxan? I'm leaving soon, before you tell me to. And if you ask me to apologise to Wornen, I’ll put this knife somewhere a whole lot more unpleasant than your head.”
"Wornen is in three separate pieces in a hessian sack. I'm here to ask if you're alright, Renna."
She laughs, dropping the knife altogether. I return the gesture.We’re getting somewhere. "Don't pretend you care, Rexxan, it's patronising."
"I do."I really do.
"This is just business," she snarls, quoting my own words to her. She’s emanating rage from every pore of her body.
"What he said isn't true."
"Isn't it? You said yourself you want me out of your kingdom as soon as possible.”
I do, because for some reason, being around her makes my chest ache, wanting for things that it should not be wanting for. "I see. I understand your frustration."
She laughs coldly, tipping her head back in agonised exasperation. The shadows of the trees over the starlit sky reflect in her eyes. "You're a shell, Rexxan. No personality. Just the same, monotonous responses that you give to everyone else. Do you? Do youreallyunderstand my frustration? No, you don’t, but you just chose a response from your default list of six sentences. You have no idea what it is to be me, or to be any of us hunters.
“You have no idea what it is to be turned away at every door, and for what reason? Because my parents didn't care enough to give me a chance in life? You're the same as the rest of them, whether you think you're better or not, you're just the same. You'll let us live on your borders, but only in return for the bloodshed ofmypeople!" She shouts, eyes burning with fury as she points at her chest.
I go to speak but she isn’t finished; the embodiment of feminine rage, arms outstretched wide as she berates me. Her eyes glitter with unshed tears, but they are not sad. They are angry. They are incandescent. They areexhausted. "I travelled weeks to get here, just to ask you all for one ounce of respect. And now I'm supposed to smile and thank you all for the privilege and the opportunity? So fuck you! Fuck everyone in your counsel who thinks that the blood in my veins, in my brother’s veins, in myhunters’ veins, is disposable!"
She’s yelling now, heating the air around us with her anger. She swings her two blades at me, the whoosh of steel through the air serving as my only warning as she tears the skirt of her dress to fight me. I catch them with just enough time to stop her from slicing my head off my shoulders and our swords clash with a deafening ring of steel.
She is agility, but I am strength. She spins away from my sword, and in the time it takes me to blink she’s behind me. But I know every trick in the book, so I turn and jump the blade that slices at my legs. Her swords clash against mine in the air above us and I flick my wrist to pull hers down. My sword is an inch from her chest, the only thing between the blade and her skin is the thin silk of the dress that I’ll remember for the rest of my days.
“Surrender,” I say, my eyes burning into hers. I turn my sword so it’s horizontal over her chest, allowing me even closer to her. The forest is dark, I can see every freckle, every eyelash, every delicate movement of the pulse in her throat. It’s stifling, this tension between us. It has been from the second I shot her. It steals the breath from my lungs and floods every vein in my body with desire.
“Over my dead body,” she whispers, her words brushing my lips.
“It will be, in a minute.”
She leans forward, and in a horrible moment, I do believe my sword is going to pierce her chest. But Renna moves faster than the lightning that illuminates the sky, and all my sword gets to taste is the cold air around us. We fight for five more minutes. It’s enraged, and it’s unnecessarily violent. She’d give a hurricane a run for its money; utterly relentless. Tired of it now, I swing my sword at her with everything I have, watching both of hers clatter to the ground as she falls to her knees from the impact.
She is defeated, but she is not broken. Her chest rises and falls with heavy breaths, still in the show-stopping dress. I drop to my knees in front of her, tipping her chin up. Dark, winged makeup lines her eyes, sultry and seductive, but the brown eyes beneath it are laden with emotion.
“I shouldn’t want you like I do, Rexxan,” she whispers, honest as ever. Her fingers trace the scar on my face, and it feels like she’s committing my features to memory before a goodbye. “Does this hurt?”
“Every minute of every day.”
She’s so close.So close.Breathing life into the fire within me that I thought long-extinct. “I don’t believe I should want you like I do either, Renna.”
“But you do,” she murmurs, her eyes snapping back to mine.
Her face is elaborately painted with silver moonlight and black shadows, and in looking at her eyes I feel something I haven’t seen for a long time; empathy. “But I do.”
“I should go.”
“You should go,” I agree.
She doesn’t move.
Neither do I.
Chapter12
Old Scars (Renna)
