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“What else do I need to know to protect you, my love?”
She made a pained face. “It’ll probably be better for you if you don’t watch TV or go online or read any papers for the next several weeks.”
“Why?”
“Because this will be all over the news. And people will be nice about things for about twenty-four hours, but thenafter that they’ll say I’m crazy and my kidnapping was made up and all sorts of other cruel shit, especially if my dad’s already been lying about it. The truth won’t matter. It never does.”
“That is fine, my love. You will be with me. And I don’t need any of those things. I just need you.” She sounded so despondent. I desperately tried to think of things that might cheer her, and I leaned forward to clip her free from her chair and picked her back up to carry. “Would you like a new last name?”
Sloane blinked a few times, refocusing on me at last. “Are you for real?”
“It is a human custom, is it not?” I explained. “I do not have a last name. Perhaps we could pick one out together.”
“I—wait—are you asking me to marry you?”
“No. You are already my mate. It is not the same thing, but it is better.”
Her eyes squinted, and she seemed to regain some of her former spark. “Did you ever ask me if I wanted to be your mate?”
“Not in so many words, no.” But I’d endeavored to show her in every interaction I’d ever had with her—that I could be the one she could trust, that she should build her life with.
“Would you have asked if I wanted to be your mate?” she went on, teasing.
I decided it was safe to tease back. “Only if I were certain you’d say yes.”
“And if I didn’t?” she said, while grinning.
“I have tasted you, Sloane Marlow. You taste like home.” I adjusted myself so that I could lean back some and she might be more comfortable. “And no matter what comes next, we will always have each other.”
I felt her relax against me, and she made the circle motion with her hands. “We’ll keep each other in one piece,” she said, and I decided not to correct her as to the gesture’s meaning just yet.
“Always.”
Forty-Two
SLOANE
“All right,you two lovebirds, brace yourselves,” Ellum said, as he began our final descent. We’d apparently refueled during a midflight nap I’d been taking—after being in the caves so long, my sleep schedule was all kinds of fucked—and we’d been flying over civilization for the past few hours, racing the setting sun, with a sense of dread growing in my stomach that whole time.
The helicopter hovered, flew sideways, then set down, and Ellum took his headphones off which meant that it was time for me to do the same.
“I love you,” Nia’n’an told me, the second his headphones were off. He’d picked me up again, to carry me outside.
“I know,” I said, setting my hand against his jaw. “And that’s the only thing that makes any of this okay.”
Ellum ran around and opened up the sliding door to thecargo bay, so that we could emerge—and there was a contingent of three orcs there.
“We’re here for your debriefing,” the first one of them announced—before spotting me. “Sloane?”
“Hey, Shiranak,” I said, waving from the safety of my arms.
“You’re . . . alive?”
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
“You know him?” Nia’n’an asked me.
“Of course. He runs my father’s security.”
