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Khijhana keeps pace with us easily, never tiring, always moving forward. She is as eager to get to her master as I am, but for very different reasons.
My fury grows with each mile we cross, as does my impatience.
If the rose is damaged, if my people are entirely without hope...
I will make it my mission in life to hunt down the woman responsible and make her pay.If I can find her.She no doubt has an escape plan, the way she strategizes even at chess. The image floods my mind unbidden.
“Betting on your own face?” she challenged as I chose a side of the coin to determine how we would begin to play our game.
“It’s the only one I can trust,” I replied darkly, thinking of how Odger was so quick to try to move in on someone who should have belonged to me. Again.
The smallest hint of satisfaction shows in the quirk of her eyebrow, so slight and so quick it would’ve been easy to miss.
“And here I was about to say the opposite,” she counters. “I’ll take the wolf.”
A game within a game. That’s how it always is with her. She is desperate to outwit any who dare cross her path.
Even if they don’t realize she’s doing it.
“Am I to understand you meant to imply you would trust a wild animal over your king?”
“Am I to understand you would blame me for such a notion?” she fired back.
Then her icy exterior melted away to pure, molten anger.
“Tell me, my king, how much trust you might have for someone who fills the space in their marriage bed with secrets and false niceties?”
The hypocrisy of that statement would almost be laughable now, if I thought I would ever be able to smile again. I grip the reins tighter and spur Zola to go faster, my anger burning against the frigid air around us.
Zaina had known where to hurt me, and she had used her words like a blade to pierce wherever she could.
“Everyone has secrets,” I had added after a moment.
And how true that had been for both of us.
We trudge further up the incline of the mountain, close to the very spot I nearly lost her. How can you lose someone who was nothing more than smoke and mirrors? How can you lose someone who never belonged to you in the first place?
Better she had died that day.
Chapter Nine
Einar
Eventually, we get to a cliff where Gideon’s tracks double back, but two sets of footprints lead down the mountainside.
Two. Two sets.
She isn’t alone.
Helga bends down to examine them, placing her own foot next to the larger one.
“A man and a woman,” she voices what I have already surmised.
One set unmistakably belongs to Zaina. The other, to a man with an obvious death wish.
Why it makes me even angrier that she’s with someone else, I cannot say, but I can hardly see through the furious wall of crimson in my vision as we follow the tracks to the base of the caves. Caves I brought her to only a few days ago.
Even through my ire, a few things stand out to me.
