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“An impressive one, I’m sure.”
He snorts. “I was more impressed by the heap of bones below your cliff.”
My muscles tense. “They all tried to kill me. They all deserved to die.”
“I’m sure they did,” he says with a straight face.
“But enough about those failed dragonslayers. I’m talking about this fucking lock.” My voice rasps with intensity. “You could have paid me instead of attacking me, chaining me, and dragging me from my home.”
His eyebrows angle in a frown, but he stares into the distance. His silence infuriates me more.
“You get paid for killing monsters, don’t you? Why don’t I deserve the coin? You think a dragon wouldn’t appreciate gold?” I curl my lip, my words dripping with disdain. “You sound like a shit monster hunter.”
Still, he says nothing.
“You can’t have dragonfire without a dragon. What was your brilliant plan? Take off the aellurium collar and pray?”
“Not exactly.”
“Free me.”
“Pyrah.” Rook fixes me with his smoldering eyes. “I don’t trust you.”
My throat tightens until it’s painful to speak. “Neither would I.”
He turns away from me and starts walking again, the reins to his mare in his fist. Bolt follows him without complaint, but I still want to scream at him to listen to me. Anger burns in my blood.
He thinks he’s already won. He thinks I’m defeated.
He’s dead wrong.
* * *
We travel through the nightfall.A damp chill clings to the trees and makes me shiver. I would have felt grateful when Rook finally stops, if I weren’t still fantasizing about destroying him. We’re in a meadow of grasses and flowers, near the shore of the lake. It smells marshy here: green, wet, and earthy.
“We can camp here,” he says.
I slide off Bolt, my legs shaky, and pat the mare’s neck. She’s a good girl, despite her demonic rider.
My stomach growls. “I’m hungry.”
“Touch Bolt and you won’t live to see the dawn.”
I scoff. “Don’t you need me alive?”
“I’ll make an exception.”
“I’m not eating the horse.” I pace around the meadow to stretch my legs. “I’m waiting for you to cook dinner.”
He looks sideways at me. “We need wood for the fire.”
“Or you could free me, and we would have a fire that much quicker.”
“Good idea,” he says sarcastically.
Willows grow in a thicket between the meadow and the lake. I crunch through the grasses, wondering how far he will let me go. The willow branches bend when I tug on them, still green and whippy, no good for kindling. Instead, I hunt for dry twigs and driftwood on the sandy beach.
When I steal a glance back, Rook is nowhere to be seen.
