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In solidarity, I braced next to her. “Neither will I.”
Shiraz scrubbed a hand up his face. Continued it all the way over his head. Like that prevented more water and mud from streaming back down. “I have not even started with you yet.” As he glared at me—through me—a sole refrain beat through my system as an appropriate riposte.
Oh, please start with me. Then on me. Then inside me.
Instead I managed, “Nice to see you too.”
“Nice is not a term you want to bring up with me right now, Miss Fava.”
And just like that, the darker glare. The prowling, possessive, addiction-worthy energy—just like the shit he’d pulled last night before jumping on me, only amplified by one hell of an insane situation.
Sheeez-usss.
Between the adrenaline from the storm and the adrenaline from him, it was a miracle I didn’t suffer a coronary there in the mud.
No time for coronaries now. First—and much more important—things first.
“Have you eaten at all?” I demanded him. “Or even rested?” A lot of hours had passed since he’d taken Crista and me to the shelter. Dawn had to be near, though I highly doubted the sky would look much different than now.
“Questions are not your privilege right now either, Lucina.”
“How convenient for you,” Jayd sneered. “Just as it shall be so convenient when you drop over from exhaustion.”
His jaw steeled. I hoped to hell Jayd didn’t notice how my breath snagged. Couldn’t be helped. His ticked-off look was seriously one of his sexiest. “We have had just a few items on the task list tonight.”
His dry irony didn’t go unnoticed, and I would’ve shown a little more appreciation, except that some subjects needed to be front burner right now. “Like finding a pair of runaway twins?”
His brows crashed down. “Not yet.” He snapped his gaze to where Crista and Shai still grappled. “We are doing everything we can.”
Again, he latched a breath right out of my throat—as he melted my heart a little more. He cared about those kids—because he cared deeply for the woman who worked for him. But there was more. He was a prince deeply connected to his country, beyond just the required royal patriotism.
“Crista thought the twins would have come here,” Jayd stated.
Shiraz nodded. “Logical.” His comment sealed another speculation as fact. Parryss Landing was to the Sancti kids what Santa Monica had been to my friends and me. Water, sun, and adventure, though on a smaller and safer scale. Just not today. Just not now.
Definitely not in the next moment, exploding with Crista’s hysterical scream. Then her fight against Shai’s grip, resembling a panicked cat clawing its captor. Once I tracked the line of her attention, out into then across the water, I deciphered her insta-tigress mode.
Weirdly—miraculously—one buoy in the river hadn’t been torn off its moorings. It bobbed wildly on the waves, clinging to position despite the force of the wind and the beating of the water—
And the two figures huddled together atop its base.
A small boy and a small girl.
“Forryst!” Crista shrieked. “Fawna! Hang on! Hang on!”
“Holy hell,” I rasped. Next to me, Shiraz voiced the same thought in a guttural Arcadian oath.
“Crista!” he bellowed. “You are ordered to stand down. Stay. There.” He bounded toward her and Shai, each step sending up a powerful splash. “Captain Storm,”—I assumed that was really Shai’s last name, but more irony, anyone?—“keep her secured!”
“Trying!” Shai gritted—only to join his filthy Arcadian to Shiraz’s, grabbing at the eye Crista had nearly scratched out, and the balls to which she’d landed a solid knee. With a loud moan, the soldier sank to his knees—
As Crista tore free, and ran like a madwoman into the river.
A madwoman with a damn death wish.
