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“Dawn,” I said hollowly, beginning to back away. “Promise me.”
He gave me a sad smile. “If I can, I’ll be there. If I’m not, get His Highness to Stavroyarsk. You promiseme,my prince.”
I choked up at the address, unable to speak.
And then Jiron was gone, disappearing into the darkness between one tree and the next, and with a prescience that had nothing to do with my Sight, I somehow justknewwe wouldn’t be seeing him at dawn.
*
Chapter Twelve
“Ren,” Mat said gently, shaking my shoulder. I lifted my head and blinked at him with bleary eyes sore from crying and lack of sleep.
“Did you…say something?”
“We’re almost at the Martinezes’ estate.”
“Right,” I said dully, not caring one way or another. My head drooped again, and I stared unseeingly at my boots as memories of the past few hours continued to flash on repeat through my head, haunting and mocking me.
The last time I’d seen Jiron as he left the hut with Mathias, not bothering to even say goodbye to him with the assumption they’d be back within the hour.
The door crashing open on its hinges sooner than expected, only it was a stranger who stood on its threshold, bearing a cruel smile and a wicked-looking blade.
The man closing in on me where I lay on the bed, muttering dark threats against my family that sounded like promises, as I desperately tried to scramble away from his reaching fingers.
Get the fuck away from my man!Mathias appearing in the doorway, hissing out angry, possessive words and foolhardily launching himself at my attacker without a weapon or any sense whatsoever.
My fingers closing around the knife Mat had knocked to the floor earlier, reaching up to plunge it through the stranger’s throat as he grappled with my lover.
Mathias dragging me from the hut and sequestering us in a thicket a couple of miles away, frantically whispering what had happened in incomplete sentences and choked horror.
Sunbeams drenching the desolate hut hours later, the dead rebel’s blood having long dried on the floorboards. Just me and Mat waiting in vain as the sun reached and passed its zenith, the echoing silence of the space meant to be filled by Jiron devastatingly loud.
And the flies buzzing around the corpses in the forest, busy laying their eggs in the mouths and chest cavities of the scattered dead men.
“None of them were Jiron,” Mathias murmured to me now, his thoughts evidently sinking into the same place as mine. “We checked all of the bodies twice, darling.”
“He would have been there,” I argued, following the pattern this conversation had taken each of the dozen times we’d had it. “He would have been at the hut when he said, and hewasn’t.”A dark thought struck me, and I strayed off script for the first time in hours. “Maybe the surviving rebels took his body with them?”
“Why would they do that?” Mat said gently, with more patience than I probably deserved. “They didn’t bother to bury or take their own with them. They wouldn’t do it for an enemy.” He clasped my hand tighter. “Jironsurvived, Ren.”
I knew that. Rationally,I knew that. But the fear of his death was overwhelming everything else, as was the knowledge that if he lived and yet hadn’t made it back to us, it could only mean one thing.
The fuckers had him.
Dios only knew what they were doing to him right fucking now, and...
“We have to find him.”
“We don’t know where to look,” Mathias reminded me.
That was utterly logical and intolerably frustrating.
“I have to do something!”
We’d remained at the site of the massacre – for that was what it was, a dozen bodies beginning to fester in the heat after being cut down by Jiron’s sword – for longer than was safe, hunting for any clue of what might have happened to him. For that many to be dead and the guard still missing…by the Blessed Five, how many men had there been? Why did he have to be so brave and fuckinghonourableall the time to have still tried to take them on,alone?
Yes, I’d heard everything Mat had said to me about the rebels seemingly not giving a shit about keeping me alive for the bounty. About how they’d do terrible, indescribable things to me if I was caught. About how, without Jiron taking out their tracker, that would have been my inevitable end.
