Page 67 of Where Broken Wings Fly

It wasn’t fair that I wasn’t able to speak, that I wasn’t able to defend myself or shoot his own anger back at him. All I could do was stare and try my best to speak through my eyes, which felt like they had been rubbed down with sandpaper. I also could not smell anything.

He finally stopped wearing a deep path into the floor beneath him and glared at me. “You disobeyed a direct order from me.”

My eyes said: I don’t care about your orders.

He scoffed, spinning on his heel to begin another burning of his soles against the dirt. “I’m furious with you.”

Trying to speak, all I managed was a strangled croak that made me instantly taste blood.

“Stop trying to talk,” he snarled, refusing to look at me. “Gods, Olivia. You fool.”

The angrier he got, the funnier it became. Which was terrible, because the first attempt at laughter nearly shattered my ribs.

“Killian is beside himself. He was just as ignorant as you when he dove in after you.”

My heart tightened at that. It was no longer funny.

Opening my mouth and forcing the words out, my voice was not my own. My voice was not a voice at all, but a tearing of letters put together and mashed into a sentence. “Is he okay?”

“He’s fine.” Raegan continued to seethe. “I almost lost you both. Fools, absolute fools.”

He had said fool so many times I was struggling to believe it was even a part of the dictionary.

His face twisted into something not quite Raegan. “Killian has been many things, but never a fool. He cares about you.”

I stared at Raegan, wondering how his statement appeared so much like a question.

“You… You care about him too, I imagine.”

I knew where Raegan was going with this. What he was trying to ask, no matter how indirectly. What I wanted to say, what I would likely never bring myself to be able to admit, was something as simple as this: Killian made life exciting, Raegan made life real.

Yet all I did was change the direction of the conversation.

“The meeting?” It wasn’t even a sentence worth saying, for how much it flayed the inner flesh of my mouth, but I just had to know.

“Postponed. And I told you to stop trying to talk. Do you ever listen?”

Raegan was only getting angrier, the darkness returning to his hair beneath the tall canopies of Choilltean and painting him far more brutish than he was.

“The Queen was distraught, her people were distraught. We moved it ahead by a week.”

A week.

I’d only have two left after that. If I survived this injured state, that is.

“She’s furious. Absolutely livid. And craving war, from the sounds of it. I’m not sure what will become of tomorrow. Almost every kingdom has been hit now, I think they will come to some sort of agreement. I hope.”

Raegan was rambling, but I was happy to let him because second-by-second the wrath was steaming off of him.

Until I replayed his words in my head.

“Tomorrow?”

“Olivia! I will gag you if I must,” he hissed as he finally stopped pacing once more and turned to me. “Yes, tomorrow.”

“How long have I–”

His glare promised death if I didn’t stop talking, so I made a point of shutting my mouth.