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Demand their apology.
Demand their repentance.
And now, dressed in a ridiculous dress Taj put on me while I was lost in thought, I’m preparing to get on a horse, another activity I’m starting to remember from my childhood. I’d been trained to ride horses, as it turns out. And to write letters, though those still elude me.
I had friends.
And my cousins were mostly good to me.
What about my parents, though? A black hole in my memories. A missing page. How the fuck can I not remember them?
The most jagged piece of them all.
And damn, I hate this dress. How do girls move in these things? I stride toward the stables across the paved yard and the corset—that’s what Ariadne called it, a corset—is digging in many unfortunate parts of me, while the wide skirt feels like I’m wearing a cloud, or a tree’s foliage, my legs strangely bare. If I wasn’t wearing my underpants underneath, which I did by threatening to bust Taj’s balls if he as much as said another word on the matter, my dick would be swinging free.
Which is something I’m used to, after all this time.
But I’ve never spent my days and nights constantly fucking hard over a girl—and men—so that changes a lot of things.
Taj is talking with Ariadne, following behind me, their voices soothing, a melody like that of the rustling of leaves and the soughing of wind around my cave. My cave which I have left behind with everything I owned over the past twelve years, everything I found and fashioned and broke and mended, my entire life with the jaguars roaring outside and the hawks and vultures flying in circles overhead, the steep hills around me and the mountains in the distance, capped with snow.
I have made up my mind.
And the cave was just a cave, a place where I almost died of fucking loneliness and these people… my mates… they are where I belong.
I feel it in my gut, the way I feel danger when an animal is lurking in wait, the way I feel the rain coming down from the mountains.
This is my place. These are my people. This affection they show me is reflected in me. This desire they have for me is met in me.
“Repeat the passage, Kiaran,” a voice from my past says, a cane tapping on marble floors. “What did philosopher Adrie say?”
‘What I give is reflected in others and returns to me.’
‘What others do to me is reflected in my heart and returned to them.’
“What…?” I’m barely aware I’ve stopped and grabbed my head. A painful throb goes through my skull, and another. “What the hell…?”
“Kiaran?” Ariadne’s voice is distant, much more distant than the voices in my head. “What’s wrong?”
I shake my head—which proves a mistake, as the pain grows worse—and then something whizzes past, leaving a burning line on my shoulder.
A knife thuds into the wooden door of the stables.
Fuck.
“Kiaran!” Taj roars, again making me think of jaguars, and I turn, grabbing Ariadne and pushing her behind me.
Where is the knife thrower? Judging from where the knife ended… I locate him behind a tree.
“Taj! Get him!” I point at the man and Taj is already moving, pulling out his knives and throwing them. He runs after them, right at the man, grabbing him and pulling him out of his hiding place.
A servant of the house that we missed in our search earlier.
“Trying to kill my mates, are you?” Taj snarls at the man and it takes me a long fucking moment to remember he’s talking about us, that I’m one of those mates he’s so fiercely protective of. “Thought you’d get a fat reward? That you’d get gratefulness? Are you that stupid?”
“Taj!” Ariadne is trying to step around me but I stop her. “We should get going, and Taj has gone…”
“… berserk?” I ask with a smirk.
