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I blinked, unable to even process what was happening as the grip on me suddenly disappeared, replaced by night air that suddenly felt much colder. Fiona and Nasrin clutched at me, dragging me backwards so quickly I almost stumbled and fell. Tilly caught me about the waist before I did, steadying me.
A ring of warriors encircled the four of us, hissing and drawing their weapons. Before they closed in too tightly and blocked my view, I glimpsed Gahn Errok thrashing, snarling viciously, as Gahn Buroudei and Gahn Fallo locked their bulging arms around him.
“Well, that was quite the greeting. I guess that settles that, then,” Fiona whispered beside me, still holding my arm. “He came foryou.”
“Are you OK?” Nasrin murmured. Her green gaze was narrowed as she tried to see past the warriors who had created a wall of muscle in front of us.
“Yeah. I think so. It was just a hug,” I said, fighting to keep my voice even. I was shaken, but not badly so. I wasn’t hurt. Just... Surprised.
“He isnothappy,” Tilly said.
Since I couldn’t see what was happening anymore, I steadied my breathing and focused on trying to listen to what was going on.
“I have enough arrows to kill all five of you putrid Gahns!” Gahn Errok hissed. His words had a different cadence than I was used to. A different accent, lilting from his mountains.
“They are no use to you without your arms,” Gahn Buroudei grunted in return.
“Yes,” seethed someone else – sounded like Fallo. “Maybe we should just rip them off. Let us see how you fire your little spears then.”
“You have no right to keep a man, a Gahn,from his mate,” Gahn Errok snapped.
God, that word.Mate. Said with such force, such possessive rage, I felt it like a fist in my chest.
“She has not accepted you,” Buroudei said, his voice thick with exertion at trying to keep Gahn Errok under control. “You cannot behave this way – grabbing her without so much as a word!”
“I did say one word!” Gahn Errok retorted.
“Did he?” asked Nasrin, turning to me.
I nodded. “He said, ‘Finally.’”
“Bit rich of Buroudei to be saying shit like that,” Fiona noted, her grip finally easing on my arm. “The way Cece tells the story, he licked the blood off of her fucking neck the second he had her alone. And they couldn’t even speak the same language back then!”
“But that was before,” Tilly replied. “Before they knew we didn’t feel the mate bond.”
“Does... Do you think he knows that? Gahn Errok?” I asked.
Oh my God. What if no one had told him? What if he’d come all this way, expecting me to be as obsessively in love with him as he was...
With me.
He loved me. This strange, snarling, vicious man loved me.
He doesn’t even know me.
My friends didn’t answer me.
But they didn’t need to.
The answer became clear just a moment later. Fallo’s deep voice cut through the scrabbling and noise.
“There is no automatic mate bond for the new women. She feels nothing for you.”
All the commotion beyond the warriors in front of us ceased.
The silence pulsed around us before it was cut with a vicious statement.
“I do not believe you.”
