Page 108 of The Silversmith

My attacker’s neck at my eye level was all I saw before I turned into a knife hidden beneath his cloak and screamed. The sudden and acute twist of hot metal in my side became an excruciating catalyst.

I had to choose. My life or his.

Fueled by rage and pain and desperation, I screamed and plunged my own knife into my attacker’s throat. Blood gushed over my hand, down my wrist, hot and wet. The scent of copper filled my nostrils.

Only then, after piercing his flesh, did I have a chance to see what he looked like. The Insidion, simply a man in his final moments, looked down at me, pleading. His dark, forest-green eyes were what I would remember in my nightmares. Not the skull tattoos covering his face or the gruesome scar across his mouth. But his eyes. The fear in them. And how, as he took his final breath, that fear—along with all joy or hate or peace or laughter he’d ever felt—disappeared.

The man fell to the ground.

He was dead.

A tattered wail left my throat, and I stumbled backwards. The knife in my hand… my hand, covered in his blood. I’d watched life leave those green eyes.

“Ella.” Gavin caught me from behind, one arm across my chest.

I stared in horror at my crimson-stained hands. So strange that such small, familiar hands with violently trembling fingers could be the source of death.

“It’s alright. You’re alright.” His fingers inched toward the handle of my blade. “Give me the knife, sweetheart.”

I obeyed, weeping through the sharp, burning pain in my side. When he’d taken the dagger, I dropped my hand to the wet, sticky spot of fabric covering the searing pain at my waist.

My muscles screamed with each shift of my body like a hot poker twisting inside me. I lifted my hands before my eyes. My breathing labored when I realized I couldn’t tell the blood of the man I killed from my own.

Gavin circled to my front and followed my bloody hands to the stab wound low in my abdomen. Within seconds, his usually tan skin bleached white. “No,” he croaked. Hands that had been steady while slaughtering over a dozen men now shook as he reached for the hem of my sweater. All of him in a panic. “No, no, no, no—”

“Gavin—”

“No!” he bellowed, lowering me to the ground, crumbling to his knees along with me. He yanked away the black fabric, his breathing distraught and uncontrolled. Every trace of that savage warrior I knew was gone. “Please, no, no, no—”

“Gavin, breathe!” I insisted, my voice stronger this time. The wound burned, but I pushed through the pain, caring little about it when he was struggling to merely breathe. When I could see something inside him had just snapped. I had never imagined he was capable of feeling such debilitating shock.

The cutting pressure was awful to bear, but I was only a little woozy. I felt the blood seeping rather than gushing. The blade hadn’t gone that deep. Tears blurred my vision, but I knew—

“I’m okay.” I lifted my quaking hands to his face and forced him to meet my gaze. “I’m okay.”

His wide, wild eyes studied the wound as he touched the skin around the puncture. As if he were trying to hold me together. Fix me. I had done the same when I accidentally stabbed him. When I thought he might die, I knew I never wanted to feel that fear again.

And now I saw that same terror mirrored back at me, magnified a hundred-fold.

“I’m okay,” I whispered again, even as I cringed at the pain.

He huffed out a relieved breath, assessing the wound with clearer eyes. It would need to be treated fairly quickly to avoid infection, but it was low, above my hip, where there were no vital organs or arteries. It hurt like hell, but it wouldn’t kill me.

“Ella,” he breathed.

“Yes.”

“You’re okay.”

“Yes.”

He gripped my face with his hands and pressed a kiss to my forehead. Neither of us cared that he was covered in blood.

“You’re okay,” he reminded me again, or himself, or both of us. One more stolen kiss to my forehead. He carefully laid me down and removed his jacket. He folded it so the clean interior faced out and tucked it beneath my head. “Don’t you move.”

I obeyed, staring up at the gray sky of fading dusk, focusing only on my breathing. When he returned moments later, he knelt beside me with a roll of cloth bandages and his canteen. He gave me his hand to squeeze as the biting-cold water cleansed the wound. I clenched my teeth but hardly made a sound. He stuck his hand beneath me to help arch it so he could wrap the bandage around my torso.

I tried to lift a hand to his wounded bicep. “What about your arm?”