Page 23 of The Last War We Ever Fought

“In where?”

“In there.”

Elijah’s eyes widened just a fraction with incredulity. “Why?”

“Because they will see us.”

“Why wouldn’t I want them to see us?”

“We can’t be here,” she hissed, looking back at the entrance where Henry and Adam had stopped to chastise the soldier for leaving his post.

“You can’t be here.”

She groaned, pulling the cupboard doors open and shoving him inside the tiny space before squeezing in herself, too. Rowan thanked every god there was that the cupboard was empty and big enough for the elephant of a man War was.

The space around them fell into total darkness when she pulled the doors shut, closing them in. The only small flash of light came through the tiny crack between the doors where Rowan could see the two generals usher in a few others.

His and her breaths were so in sync that Rowan had not noticed yet how close they were to one another. When she did, she held in her breath just to feel his.

“Breathe, Rowan,” he murmured in her ear.

And so she did, her chest rising until it felt like it could burst.

Elijah chuckled, and she shifted to spin round and put a hand over his mouth. “Shut up.”

His brows hiked up and she felt him smile against her palm.

“East,” Rowan heard Adam’s faint voice say. “We enter east first; their villages have had the least damage from this war and they’ve had plenty of crops so their kind will be the healthiest and probably the least diseased.”

“Rowan would know an entire battalion has disappeared from camps, she counts almost every single soldier every morning and evening,” Daniel chimed in, and she could tell from the way his sentence faded that the two other generals had given her captain a silencing look.

Henry sighed. “Rowan will not be part of this.”

“Because she’d be against it,” Daniel continued, and that somehow made Rowan let herself proudly smile just the slightest. “We were ordered to not harm civilians and that our march over Gobresh would be solely to claim lands.”

“It was an order!” Adam said, banging his fist on the table.

Rowan flinched and both of Elijah’s arms went around her, engulfing her in an embrace and holding her shaking body in his. Some small part of hers wanted to lean into him, to hide in his hold, to smother herself against his scent of sandalwood.

Ignoring the conversation outside, she looked back up at him. Realisation struck her a little too sharply and she pulled back the best she could inside the small space, his embrace coming loose, too. “Don’t touch me.”

“There is nowhere for me to go, little thief.”

She shot him a cold look that did none of what it was supposed to do.

War hummed. “Strange.”

“What is?”

“Your perfume,” he murmured. “You smell delicious.”

Rowan swallowed. “It’s just rosemary. I was always told it keeps the flies away.” She looked up at him. “But apparently it doesn’t work for all kinds of flies.”

Dropping his head back, he bit his lip and chuckled softly, his shoulders shaking. “Hard to breathe again, Rowan?”

It was. Everything was too warm under her thin clothing that was accordingly appropriate to the temperature. Rowan always made sure to feel the least uncomfortable she could. Sweat and frost made her thinking slow, sluggish, sometimes it made it unbearable for her to be inside her own head, her own skin. But despite all the effort she’d spent in buying the freshest linen fabric to make heat less bothersome, it wasn’t working. She felt terribly warm.

She turned around, closing her eyes and hoping he wouldn’t hear her quiet plea, “Please stop.”