Page 72 of Dream Reaper

That’s what it was.

Slavery.

Wrapped in a guise of peace.

“We can’t ask them to go back, Jerrid. You can’t send them away unless you have some place to send them. A safe haven where they can go.”

His eyes rolled closed, his chest rising and falling beneath their still clasped hands. “I fear there is no such place in Rhuin.”

Silence coiled around the three of them as Brynja and Ava exchanged long, tired looks. Because he was right. There were no guarantees. There was no safe place for any of them. Trouble had a way of finding folks.

“We can’t run from this,” Brynja said, as if reading her thoughts, feeling her hopelessness. “We don’t have anywhere to run to. Our only chance is to fight this thing and win. To protect our home. This is our home, dragon shifter, and we won’t abandon it.”

Ava’s blood cooled a little at her adamant decision, but she was proud of her too. Proud of her for fighting for her makeshift family. For these girls who weren’t her responsibility and yet had somehow become just that.

“I want to help,” Ava blurted.

“How?” Jerrid asked gruffly, almost coldly. “How do you intend to help, Ava? You’re just going to get yourself killed.”

Heat flared in her belly, and she yanked her hand out from beneath his, leaning back on her heels. “You don’t know what I’m capable of.”

He held her gaze, mouth tight at the edges. “Neither do you. You’re not equipped for this. You’re just making things worse. You need to go.”

Tears pricked behind her eyes, but also something else… It took her several heavy breaths before she could put a name to the emotion.

Rage.

She was angry—so very angry with him right now. Angry that he had made her feel things for him, stupid and ridiculous things, only to cast her away and tell her she was worthless. That she meant nothing to him.

For one minute, one beautiful minute, she had thought maybe she wouldn’t be alone for the rest of her life. That maybe the cards had something else in store for her, something better than what she’d always known.

That she might be more than what she had always been. Something better.

And yet here she was, in worse shape than she had ever been. It would have been better if she’d never met him, because hope was too painful, too unkind, too unfair.

And she hated him for that. For making her feel more worthless than she had felt before. He was the one making things worse, not her. Him and his flame-eaten dragon…

And she was not referring to the one sleeping peacefully in the camp, recovering from her injuries earned on the field of battle.

She threw her head back, hot words flying to her tongue, but only one slipped out. “No.”

Jerrid arched an eyebrow.

“I’m not leaving. I don’t care if I do get myself killed. At least I will have died trying to do something good, something that will have mattered, even if it only matters to the girls living in this camp⁠—”

“You’re a fool.”

His words hit like a slap across the face, and it made her want to physically slap him in return.

“At least I’ll be a fool fighting for someone besides himself.”

His eyes narrowed as he pushed himself slowly up on one elbow to get a better look at her. “What do you mean by that?”

Brynja rose and shuffled backward, as if to say she wanted no part of this argument, this fight, this…whatever it was.

“I mean exactly what I said,” Ava fired back, her fingers clenched tightly against her thighs. “That you’re the one being selfish and only thinking of himself. You and Dragon.”

His nostrils flared, a light sparking in his eyes.