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If he did…
Well, then I wasn’t so sure we would have a future after all.
There was a long, long pause.
The other women were still going through the motions, but I waited silently, hoping the man holding my hand would come to the same conclusion I had.
Finally, he loosened his grip on my fingers, and then released me altogether.
“We’ll discuss it more later,” he told me in a low voice, though the end of the remark sounded a bit like a question.
“We will,” I agreed.
He lifted my fingers to his lips and brushed them over my knuckles. “Be careful, Mariah.”
“I will.” I stepped up closer to him, pressing a soft kiss to his lips to show him that I appreciated him fighting his instincts on this. “You can come give me tips, like the other men are doing.”
He was trying—and that mattered a hell of a lot more to me than I could say.
He tugged my crossbody bag over my shoulder and set it on his own as I stepped back, turning toward the group. When I joined the group, stepping into place a few feet from Ana at the back of the line, she flashed me a grin.
As I returned the expression, I felt more than saw Ervo position himself just a few feet from me.
He was taking me up on my offer.
“This is one of the warm-ups,” Ana explained quietly, as I tried to mirror her movements. “It’s more about stretching and making your body move in new ways. We’ll pair up soon for hand-to-hand combat. The men aren’t allowed to fight us yet.”
“Who decided that?” I wondered.
“North and January. The rest of us agreed.”
Huh.
“Where’s Naomi?” I asked. “And Sunny and Dots?”
“Dots walked away the minute this started. Sunny said she wasn’t interested either, and followed. Naomi’s decided that she’s done with Aev, and is staying with the fae women right now. He’s kind of losing his mind about it, so things are tense with the unseelie.”
Hmm.
I was surprised that Sunny hadn’t been interested. It seemed like the kind of thing she’d jump at the chance to do. But I could ask her about it later; the unseelie having issues was a bigger deal.
“Tense how?”
“Right foot back further,” Ervo told me in a low voice. “Both of you.”
We both scooted our right feet back further, in the strange lunge we were pulling off. Ana definitely moved through it easier than I did, but I chalked that up to her having experience already.
“Some of them have started breaking away, joining the seelie. They saw the connection between your happy little couples and want what they have,” she explained.
Ah.
“The council is fighting,” the girl in front of us, Blue, added. When she looked at us over her shoulder, I flashed her a small smile. She had light skin and bright blue hair (hence the nickname), changed from blonde by Vevol’s magic shortly after she was brought there. We hadn’t been close during the one year we’d been at the Stronghold together, not the way I was close with Sunny and Dots, but we’d still spent an assload of time together.
“About the people leaving?” I checked.
“About everything,” she explained. “Iyvan tells me things, in exchange for cake. He’s a shitty cook, and the dragon on the council.”
My eyebrows shot upward. “I thought you guys considered the men the enemies.”
