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Jesse strode away, kicking through the stream, head down, and his hands pulling at his hair. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
I lowered the bow, my spine straightening. “Excuse me?”
He spun back, his eyes flashing, vicious and angry. “You can’t even hit a target at ten yards. An unmoving target. You’re a goddamned waste of time.”
My breath caught. He didn’t say this was a waste of time. He said me. I was a waste of time.
Shea hugged her bow to her chest and stepped upstream, her expression pale with shock.
I felt something a whole lot more venomous than shock. I plowed forward, my heart punching against my ribs, the heat in my cheeks rising to an inferno.
“Fuck you and your arrogant fucking face.” I held the bow out to him. When he refused to take it, I slapped his chest with it. “Maybe the weapon is out of alignment. Did you think of that? Or maybe it’s fucking cursed.”
I regretted that as soon as I said it. The bows he’d given Shea and me had belonged to the Lakota, the ash wood softly worn by their gentle hands, the arrows crafted with skill and love.
The same bows we’d pulled from their dead fingers. The same arrows that hadn’t saved their lives.
Jesse yanked it from my hand and strapped it on his back. “No such thing as an inaccurate bow. The person is inaccurate.” His tone scathed with rage. “You are inaccurate.”
Splashing sounded Roark’s approach and in the next breath, he sidled in front of me, his hand tightly gripped on Jesse’s shoulder. A warning grip.
“Well done.” Two words Roark said when he didn’t mean it. His fingers squeezed, shoving Jesse backward. “If ye talk to her like that again, I’ll break your face and send ye off seeing triple with your sphincter leaking ass juice. Feel me?”
Jesse jerked out of Roark’s grip, his glare stark red and aimed at me.
This had nothing to do with my archery skills and everything to do with the deaths of our friends. Jesse hadn’t verbally blamed me, but I could see the censure that put shadows in his eyes and grooved angry lines across his face.
But I’d rather him blame me than Michio. If Michio had led the Drone to the Lakota camp…
I shut the door on that thought. We couldn’t determine the timing of the Lakota’s deaths given the mummified state of their bodies, but if Darwin had left the mountains because of the Drone, his travel time to the animal reserve didn’t add up to the timing of Michio’s departure.
Jesse was smart enough to work that out, which made my telepathic link to the Drone the most obvious point of blame.
As Jesse trampled downstream, all I could do was stare after him, my pulse pounding in my throat. How would we move on from this? What could I do or say to return to the way things were between us?
Walking away wasn’t the answer. I released a blade from my forearm sheath, aimed it at the tree branch he was about to duck beneath, and flung it with the same numbness I’d hidden behind for two long weeks.
It landed with a thunk, inches above his head.
He stopped, glanced up at the buried blade, and turned his neck. His glare found me, tunneled into my chest, and bit a chunk out of my heart.
I swallowed the unbearable hurt and raised my chin. “How’s that for inaccurate? Maybe I should’ve aimed a few inches lower?”
His brows dipped over red-rimmed eyes. Then he turned away and continued downstream.
“Bastard.” I hated watching his retreating form. Hated it.
“Evie.” Roark sighed, turning to face me. “He’s—”
“Grieving? Well, so am I.” I just chose not to take it out on other people.
“Give him time, love.”
I’d given him two weeks, and the coldness was shattering me from the inside out.
I pushed past Roark, gave Shea a strained smile, and waded after Jesse. As I trudged beneath the overhanging branch, I collected my knife and returned it to the arm sheath, my attention on the muscled form of stubbornness incarnate. “Stop walking away from me, Jesse Beckett!”
He continued his slogging pace, not even acknowledging me with one of his condemning glares.
I charged down the middle of the stream, fuming and clumsy, lifting my heavy boots out of the water to gain speed. No more running away. The bastard was going down.
A few splashing stomps later, I spun around him, grabbed his wrist, and pulled it across the front of my body. As intended, the momentum fucked with his balance and forced him to take a step.
Surprise rounded his eyes as I ducked down and gripped the back of his denim-clad thighs, hooking in and dropping to my knees. The rocky bottom jarred pain through my knee caps as I locked a leg around his forward-stepping ankle.
