Page 70 of Feralheart

The blonde woman’s eyes went wide with dismay. “We’ll attend a ball? At the fortress?”

A ball. While Tolross lay at home, listening for footsteps that wouldn’t come. While Father stood at a window I’d never see from here, willing me to walk through a door I couldn’t reach.

The elite got a ball. My family got more worry.

“Just stay out of the way and don’t draw attention.” The handler’s mouth tightened. “You’re riding in the race, which makes you relevant for now.”

A second handler gestured from the arena’s edge.

I made my shaking legs take me forward. Sand clung to my hands and knees, but that was the least of it. My left boot sole had melted, making each step uneven and torturous. The burn on my thigh where the scale had seared throbbed with each heartbeat. My palms looked like someone had drawn on them with red ink, the lines glowing even now.

“What about our dragons?” I looked back at Lykor, still collapsed in the sand, his sides billowing with each breath.

“They’ll be collected and stabled until the race.” The handler’s tone suggested this was obvious.

I walked back and crouched beside Lykor’s head. His gaze tracked me, exhausted but aware.

“Two days,” I whispered, placing my palms on his jaw. Heat stirred in my hands, but I had nothing left to give. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

His breath came out in a long exhale that smelled of smoke-sweet-ash and old pain.

I didn’t know if he understood. I didn’t know if it mattered.

I stood and forced myself to walk away. Leaving him felt like abandoning my mother, choosing survival over staying with someone who’d given everything for me.

I didn’t look up at the crowd. Didn’t check if the prince might still be watching from a new location. The weight of his gray-eyed gaze didn’t matter. Not even if I could still feel it on my spine.

I had to get through a ball. Had to figure out how to win a race I had no business entering. And I had to somehow reach Selira before the bond that shouldn’t exist dragged me off a cliff.

I fell into step with the other survivors.

Mine, Selira had said.

But as I limped after the handler, one thought kept circling.

Selira was wild.

Untamed.

And in two days, I’d have to ride Lykor in a race designed to kill me.

The bond wouldn’t matter if I died before I could reach her.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

ERADIN

My boot peeled away from my foot in strips, taking chunks of skin along with it.

My vision went white at the edges, and I breathed through my teeth until the room stopped tilting. The rest of the boot slipped from my grip and hit the stone floor with a sound like a slab of meat hitting a block.

That’s what I was now. Meat that had survived when it shouldn’t have.

I sat on a bench in a bedroom they’d assigned me and the blonde woman, my hands braced on my thighs because if I looked at my foot again I’d see stars and hear the wet sound the wiry man had made when stone punched through his chest.

I looked at my foot instead. It throbbed. My mother had taught me healing, but I had no ointment or bandages. The best I could do was keep it clean and cushion it in my boot—or what was left of my boot. My lack of footwear was an even greater problem than the burn. How could I compete barefoot?

The trial mark on my hand had stopped screaming, but it still radiated heat. Black and raised, it was just another thing branded into my meat.