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My heart gave an excited, relieved flutter.
“And to bereally sure,” my lover continued, “you’re saying you wouldn’t hesitate to hurt the man at my side? This one, Renato Aratorre, the true king of Quareh?” He gestured at me with his free hand, as if they might have gotten confused with theotherperson standing with him on the edge of a Dios-damned cliff.
Filiberto gave him a filthy look. “Make me repeat it one more time,bárbaro, and you’llwishit’s only a beating you’re in for.”
I shrugged. “We’re just checking.”
“For your sake,” Mathias added. “We’d hate for you to be killed unfairly.”
“I wouldn’thateit,” I countered, watching the figure in the trees silently close in on the men at the back of the group. “It would probably be quite a pleasant way to end this shitshow of a day.”
Mathias reached a hand up to my face and turned it towards his. “I can think of a better way,” he murmured, and when he pressed his mouth to mine, Iwas in vigorous agreement with him for once. Fingers brushed skin, tongues grazed teeth, and I watched his delicate lashes flutter shut before closing my eyes in turn and fully surrendering to the kiss.
I heard a scream, one of those panicked, pained shrieks which are only cut off so abruptly for one reason. There was barking. Swearing. Metal on metal. Noises that meant nothing, close but ever so distant, because all that mattered was the man in my arms who fitted against me so perfectly I knew he’d been made for me. Or I for him.
It felt like I was falling from a great height; dizzy and wild and lost, and with my heart in my mouth as I tumbled towards the exciting and terrifying unknown. I cracked an eye, fearing I’d perhaps accidentally pitched us over the cliff edge such that I’d have a hell of a lot of apologies to make in the seconds before we splattered over the rocks below, only to find us both still standing on solid ground, plastered together so thoroughly we might have been one entity.
It had been one of those metaphorical falls, then, one which felt realer than the sting of my shackled wrist or the ache in my shoulder or the wind in my hair. A realness I only experienced withhim,the man who set my nerves alight and my senses dancing. Who made me want to laugh and scream and run and fly all at once, although I settled for playfully biting at his bottom lip as we drew apart, just so I could watch his own eyes spark with lust. Or annoyance. Something that was clearly synonymous with him being in unstoppable, incurable love with me.
I reluctantly dragged my gaze from Mat’s, landing it on the mercenaries instead. Or what had been mercenaries: they were now nothing more than immobile, bloodied corpses lying face down in the dirt. All except Filiberto, but only because he was on his back, staring unseeingly into the cloudless sky as he suffered the indignity of having his killer use his cloak to wipe his own blood from the sword that had slayed him.
I mean, I assumed that was what had happened. With how distracted I’d been by Mathias and his eager, surprisingly deft tongue, for all I knew the mercenaries had all spontaneously keeled over and died untouched.
Yet that would make the giant crouched beside Filiberto a figment of my imagination, and I was too delighted to see him to entertain that as a possibility.
“I’ve rather missed you stabbing people for me,” I said fondly, and Jiron’s lips curled into a soft smile as he raised his head to look our way. “Mathias prefers togetstabbed for me, which is substantially more…let’s be nice and call it discommodious.”
I cocked my head, considering. “Although he did almost have his throat slit last night, so maybe I should give him credit for spicing it up.”
“Jiron!” Mat exclaimed excitedly, and the guard cracked a second smile in his direction before fixing me with a look. It said‘you’re Blessed lucky I arrived in time to rescue you’, which clearly meant he’d forgotten how to communicate in our non-verbal language in the two weeks we’d been apart, because he’d mistranslated‘I’m Blessed lucky to have the privilege of rescuing you’and also left out‘sorry I left it so fucking late’.
“My prince,” he murmured, plucking something from Filiberto’s pocket before rising to his full height. Whenever I’d been away from Jiron for a while – which was extremely rarely – I was always struck afresh by his size. Larger than me and only a little smaller than a mountain, my oldest friend exuded a comforting, stabilising presence that others had variously described as ‘terrifying’ and ‘intimidating’ and ‘argh, please don’t-’, usually right before their hearts coincidentally gave out.
“Are the others…”
“Luis and El are fine,” he assured me, and the emotions I felt at hearing that on top of seeing him alive andhere, made my knees weak. Mat immediately steadied me with an arm around my waist, wisely moving us away from the edge of the cliff.
“Don’t you stop me from swooning in his presence,” I objected in a futile attempt to pretend I wasn’t dizzy with relief. “Jiron is looking so scrumptiously edible drenched in sweat and the blood of our enemies.”
“How did you find us?” Mat asked. I was curious enough myself that I didn’t chide him for the boring change of subject, although it was a close thing.
“I’ve been on your heels for the last couple of days, tracing rumours from village to village before I came across the accident on the road. A pair of princes traipsing through a forest is not exactly a subtle trail to follow.” My guard hesitated for the briefest of moments and then smoothly added, “but not nearly as conspicuous as your pursuers, of course. I surely wouldn’t have found you without them.”
“Hmm,” I said. Mathias snorted at my sceptical expression.
And then we were all moving closer to each other in wordless urgency, and I found myself pressed between Jiron’s solid chest and Mat’s slimmer frame as the guard drew us both into a tight embrace.
“Ren.” Jiron murmured my name into my hair with a sob, his huge hands gripping me in a way which was almost painful. I expected my own fingers were digging into his flesh just as deeply. “I was so worried. Being apart from you was…”
“I know.”
I did. I’d felt it too; an emptiness that had gnawed at me no matter how hurt or terrified or exhausted I’d been. Jiron had been at my side for over thirteen years, and I had very few memories of my life before him.
“And you, little one,” said my guard, and as I drew back I saw him gently squeezing my lover’s shoulder. “I feared for you both.”
“You know Mat’s too stubborn to die. It’s why I decided the safest place for me was permanently attached to him,” I drawled, gesturing at the chain between us. “I offered to be attached inotherplaces too, but he was his usual disagreeable self and made me sleep on a pile of rocks for even offering.”
The northerner grimaced. “Now imaginethat,” he said to Jiron with a finger rudely jabbed in my direction, “but all day for the past...a thousand years, it must have been.” He lifted his shackled wrist with a weary expression. “And unable to escape.”
