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I pull my arms over my chest on instinct. Did I just flash her? I glance down at my chest. This nightgown isn’t exactly full coverage, but frankly, it’s less revealing than her tight clothes.
“You bound her!” She screeches like nails on a chalkboard, and I can’t help but wince. “You bound a human?” She blinks at him before her lips thin into a hard line. “First, you pretty much start a war. Then you disappear. Now I find out you’ve been binding a human with that wretched spell. How did you even learn it? It’s so… so…” She shivers. “I know you’re your father’s son, but I never believed—”
Sigurd snarls.
I gasp as a sharp gust of wind comes from nowhere and knocks her to the ground.
Holy crap on a cracker. I sway on my feet. He made that, from nowhere.
Moria twists before she’s even finished her slide across the floor and leaps to her feet. Claws—yep, those are definitely claws—curl toward her palms before she swipes her arm back in our direction with a cry of her own.
Faster than I can blink, Sigurd leaps in front of me. Arms wrap around my back as he pulls me into his rock-hard chest. Everything is warm pine for the briefest second. I don’t have time to move before the wind tears at me, trying to rip me apart like that horrible night my life changed. I scream, my nails digging into the fabric of his shirt as I hold on for dear life, memories slicing me up more than whatever she did ever could.
“Stop!” Sigurd’s command carries through the room with volume and resonance far too loud for the man it came from. The wind dies in an instant, but I’m still shaking, the memory of the tornado pulling apart our house and my life with it, as fresh as the night it happened. He releases me to whirl on his cousin. “You dare…”
My legs wobble, and I lean against Sigurd’s back out of desperation.
Silence hangs so heavy between them that I ache to break it, anything to knock me out of my grief.
“She doesn’t even know she’s gifted,” Moria says. “Does she?”
Talking about me like I’m not even here. The nerve. It bugs me enough to find my balance and glance around Sigurd to see Moria standing with her arms crossed and a hard look on her face.
“No,” he replies. “She knows nothing.”
Douchebag. I cut a sideways glance his way. A hot douchebag, but still. At the moment, he’s just as arrogant and aloof as the king he says he is.
Sigurd stares across the room—a large, open sitting room with ridiculously fancy furniture and far too few walls. We might as well be floating in some spaceship because all I see beyond the open wall across from us is sky.
“What were you thinking?” Moria flings her crossed arms out with a huff. Her hands fist and un-fist, those pointed claws extending and retracting.
“I wasn’t.” He rakes a hand through his hair. It sticks up, wild as the look in his eyes before it falls back into place. He sucks in a breath, and the look is gone. “I felt a human come through a door, shifted there, and when I saw her on the ground, I…”
He turns to stare at me, the silence so heavy all I can do is stare right back.
A human. Right, because they’re not. Just peachy. Words I don’t understand hang in the bubble of quiet.
“She said she was being chased,” he continues, looking back to his cousin. “I didn’t think. I just bound her so no one could take her away.”
A thick lump forms in my throat so that I can barely swallow.
Moria whistles. “Not like you to lose your calm.”
“No. It isn’t.” The emotion of moments ago vanishes in what can only be his typical veil of seriousness.
“Well.” She looks between us. “You can tell me more later, but now, we need to discuss yourincidentwith the Court of the Forest.” Her fingers—definitely no claws now—drum on her hip.
Their shared fury has vanished as quickly as it came, almost like they fight like that all the time. Maybe they do. I shudder.
Sigurd gives me a once-over with cold, clinical detachment so unlike his attentions from minutes ago. “Don’t try to leave. For your own good.”
Both of them turn on their heel and head toward a set of large double doors at the far end of the room.
Oh no. Like heck if I’m going to be stuck in this strange place. “You can’t just leave me here!”
Moria stops and turns. Sigurd keeps walking as if I never spoke. My nails dig into my palms.
“You have to take me home,” I say. “Please! My grandmother is old, ill. I care for her. She needs me.”
