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His chin brushed along the side of my head as he nodded, first stubbles catching on my strands. “He kept her from me, sending her across the land with Commander Mertok, trying to force my hand by keeping her out of my reach. When he refused to come to his senses, I marched thousands of corpses to his hold. He offered a parley then, stating a misunderstanding, saying that he himself had fallen victim to a betrayal. He lured me into a frozen valley.”
“And trapped you.”
“Ah, my little one, a moment of utter folly on my part, but gods are not free of failure, and I was desperate. Eventually, I freed myself and leveled his kingdom to the ground. I chased across the lands beyond the Soltren Gate in search of my companion. But by the time I reached Njala, months later, Commander Mertok slit her throat as… as an act of revenge.”
My ears pricked at the hesitation. “You didn’t chain her soul?”
“It departed quicker than I could act.”
Quicker than he could act.
An unexpected hollowness formed in my core. When I turned to look at him, I shuddered beneath his unguarded stare and how those hairline cracks in his icy mask opened into gaping craters. Shadows played around his face in the setting darkness, as though wanting to hide what I discovered behind the fractured facade of the cruel god.
For the first time since Enosh had taken me captive, I saw the man beneath the immortal, heartbroken and vulnerable, the reasons for his undying rage clearer the more he shared with me. For us mortals, grief ended with death, but his lasted for an eternity, spent as what had to be a lonely existence.
I straightened and looked forward once more, not liking how all this softened me toward him. “If you killed those responsible for your loss, then why condemn the rest of us?”
“Because the depravity at the mortals’ core is to blame for all this, their never-ending hunger for power, which is not for them to have.”
“If we’re all so bad at the core, then why keep me? I’m one of them.”
“Mmm, yet you carry the least of it, a precious particularity about you I failed to recognize when you first came to me.”
There was that word again.
Precious.
My core expanded at the sheer sound of it, my ears utterly unaccustomed to the word. How twisted my life had become, where I tried to escape the man who refused to let me go, only to get back to the man who’d once wanted rid of me.
I rubbed at my itchy eyes. “One step out of your court and you could’ve cut one of those virgins down some idiots had sacrificed off a trunk two hundred years ago.”
“Lift your chin. Higher!” His fingers wrapped around my throat, tilting my head back until he had access to kiss along the side of my neck where he whispered, “For as much as I torment you with need, you do the same to me, mortal, or I would have tossed you outside to let you die among the corpses. Servant, plaything, treasure… above all, you aremywoman.”
I shuddered.
Not an unwoman.
Not a woman.
Hiswoman.
He held no power over my body out here, but his words infiltrated me just the same, sending gooseflesh across my skin. The ardor in his tone even over a word such asplaything, the possessiveness of his grip where another had once threatened to discard me… The urgency with which he wanted me roused a faithless flutter in my belly.
I ignored it. “Maybe—”
“There he is!”
My gaze swung around.
My fingers numbed.
A handful of villagers hesitantly approached from a dark orchard, carrying limp corpses or wheeling them on handcarts, the moonlight breaking against the blades strapped to the three men among them.
Enosh hissed at the sight of the torches they carried, the horse dancing underneath us as if it sensed its master’s fear.
Hefearedfire.
Why else would the feathers grow damp against my skin where he dug his fingers into my belly, pulling me against him as he shouted, “Return to your hearths!”
