Page 88 of Feralheart

Tomorrow we’d be flying through trials designed to kill us, and she was sleeping like a child without nightmares. Or like someone who’d learned to steal rest whenever they could, the way I had when Mother was dying and every moment mattered. The way anyone did when they’d survived something that should’ve killed them.

After coating my burn with salve and wrapping it in a scrap of clean fabric, I lay down on my bed, the talon-blade still strapped to my hip.

I closed my eyes.

Bodies filled my vision. The first man’s throat opening. The second turning to ash. The wet sounds. The smell of charred flesh.

I pressed the scale against my leg until heat burned sharp enough to drag me back.

Gray eyes. The line of Fenian’s throat when he’d swallowed, standing over a body he’d killed for me.

He’d moved before I’d finished understanding I needed his help.

My chest ached with something I didn’t have a name for. Gratitude felt too small. Debt felt too transactional.

He was elite. The crown prince. I was commons, a problem he kept solving when he should just let me die.

The gap between us was too wide. It always would be.

But in the garden, when he’d stepped between me and the killers, the gap had felt like something I could’ve reached across if I’d been brave enough to try.

I shoved the thought down and focused on the scale’s heat.

Finally, I sat up, moving slowly so the bed wouldn’t creak. Lyndie’s breathing stayed even.

Since the window was too high to reach, I grabbed the chair from beside the washbasin and positioned it as quietly as I could.

The chair legs scraped stone.

I froze.

Lyndie stirred but didn’t wake.

I climbed up and pushed the window open. Cold air rushed in, tasting of stone and distance and something wilder underneath.

The scale burned hot enough I gasped.

The pull yanked hard, and I was suddenly somewhere else.

Stone surrounding me. A cavern, ancient and huge. Water rushing nearby, echoing off surfaces I couldn’t see. Cold spray hit my face. Deep. Hidden. Safe.

Mine.

The word carved itself into my bones.

Soon.

Then the vision snapped shut, and I was back in the room, gripping the window frame hard enough the wood bit into my palms.

I knew where she was now. East of here. Deep enough the sun couldn’t reach. Where water carved through stone and made places the elite didn’t know existed.

She was waiting.

I climbed down and dragged the chair back to its place. My hands shook, but I wasn’t afraid. No, I felt something very close to hope.

I lay back down on the bed again.

A wild dragon had chosen me.