AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Ren’s lip curled, and then he began to walk away, his boots scuffing up powdered snow with every enraged stomp.
“It worked out, didn’t it?”
He abruptly rounded on me, jabbing a finger against my chest. “You couldn’t possibly have known that, Nathanael!”
“I…”
“Don’t you fucking lie to me, not now,” he snapped, spreading his fingers and shoving at me with both hands. Caught by surprise, I staggered backwards. “Don’t you daretell me you Saw how we’d be fine.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Well that’s something.”
“What is this about?” I demanded. “That I took a risk? We’re on the fucking run, Ren, do you think any of this issafe?”
The prince let out a hollow, unamused laugh. “A risk. That’s what he calls it.”
I folded my arms. “And what would you call it?”
“How about a Dios-damned suicide attempt?”
I stared at him. “I don’t…what?”
“Mat,” Ren said, his voice softening. “Those two could have easily killed us. Left us stranded. Screwed us over a hundred different ways, and your self-destructive ass didn’t care!”
“I care,” I said. “Of course I care.”
He huffed out a long breath. “Really? Because it didn’t look like it. It didn’tfeellike it. And that…”
He crumpled, his head dropping and his shoulders slumping, and I had him wrapped in my arms before I could even blink, holding him tightly. He clutched back at me, fingers kneading into my back and arms through my furs.
“You’d tell me, right?” he whispered, pressing his cold face into my neck and breathing me in. “If you were thinking about hurting yourself?”
Fucking hell.That’swhat he thought?
My first impulse was to laugh it off. And then I imagined how it would feel if I feared what Ren might do to himself, and quickly sobered. “Sí,” I assured him, squeezing him tighter until he exhaled against my throat. “I swear to you,moy dorogoi.I haven’t. I’mnot.”
I felt the tension drain from his body, pressed together as we were. Ren had frequently expressed how little stock he put in the promises of others, knowing words were sometimes just words: easily spoken and easily ignored, but that he trusted me when I made them? My heart beat a little fonder, something I would have thought impossible with how full of love it already was for this man.
“You’re right,” I said. “It was reckless, and I’m…I’m sorry.”
Fuck. It had felt reasonable at the time, but now I thought back on it, it had indeed been stupid to put our lives in the smugglers’ hands. I’d just been so intent on reaching Mazekhstam, worried about the delay, filled with a certainty that it was the best thing to do…was that what Ren felt when he called on Dios, or Astrid when she prayed to her own god? A faith that defied logic, was blind to common sense, and made people do stupid shit?
But it hadn’t been a deity I’d trusted to see us safe. Just me and him, together.
I pressed a kiss to the side of Ren’s head. After a moment he rubbed at his face and straightened out of our embrace, but I didn’t let him go far, keeping my arm wrapped around his waist so I could rest my hand on his hip as we walked. His mouth curved into a small, satisfied smile and he did the same to me. It made our steps awkward, and my wrist still ached from the burnt handprint that had begun to blister, but neither of us would let go.
“At the far end of the lake,” I told him, steering us towards it, “is the Grachyovs’ hunting lodge. It’s several miles from the main house. We can rest up there.”
“How do you know it isn’t occupied?”
“It doesn’t have any beds,” I said, expecting him to make a joke about that. He didn’t. “It’s not used for overnight stays, just to take shelter in during the day. I went there once with the real Mathias and-”
And Kolya.
“And uh, Astrid.”
Ren seemed to know exactly what I hadn’t said.
