“They can’t find me,” I breathed.
He glanced at me. “They won’t.”
Maybe I was a naive girl, but I felt impeccable trust at that moment. Maybe it was that no one had ever really wronged me until this trip. Or maybe it was that my thoughts were foggy, and my emotions were begging me to latch onto something so I wouldn’t float away in the maelstrom and drown in its depths. Whatever it was, had me lying down on my pallet.
My limbs were trembling as I looked up at the stars. My pants were torn, but I had no energy to change them. My mind involuntarily pushed rewind and took me through what happened in the city.
If I had magic, where was it? I would’ve been raped and probably murdered if not for Weston, and shouldn’t some magic have been kicked into gear to save me? Wasn’t that what happened when someone had magic but didn’t know how to use it?
Maybe everyone was wrong, and they were all after the wrong girl. I was weak and couldn’t even protect myself, let alone Alyria. I couldn’t be what everyone assumed I was.
I was only a girl in a man’s world.
My bottom lip stung when I licked it, and I remembered the man smacking my face, like a vision in front of me, as though it happened again.
A gruff voice interrupted it. “Leave like that again and I won’t be there to save you next time.”
That had been the fourth time he saved me. Why? I knew he was cold, so why save me? Shudders of something ran down my spine, but my body and mind were too exhausted to try to find out what it was. I gazed at the stars for a while, watching for a flash of gold, something to show me there was some good in Alyria.
There was a question consuming me until I couldn’t help but ask it. “Have you walked through the flames before?”
“No.” His voice was deep, and it had this natural way of slithering down my spine as if it were a physical presence.
“How did you know you could?” I asked to the night sky.
Silence met my ears, and when I looked over at him, his gaze was on me. His face was a perfectly constructed mask, but his eyes . . . they told me everything. And I didn’t know what to do with the information I took from them.
A cold sweat covered my skin as I met his heavy stare. I didn’t know him as he’d told me I wouldn’t.
When I realized that he hadn’t known he could walk through those flames, I knew he hadn’t done it to save me. He wouldn’t have done it to save a farm girl from Alger.
So why did he save me?
I knew the answer, but I wasn’t ready to admit it to myself.
I didn’t think I’d ever be ready.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
TRAPPED
Metal. The smell hit my nose and roused me from a deep sleep. Every muscle in my body ached as I sat up and opened my eyes to the rising sun.
I’m dead. I had to be.
I looked down at my blood splattered arms and imagined I was a ghost, only coming back so I could say goodbye to my grandmother.
A man’s glassy brown eyes looked me straight in the face. Later on, that image would haunt me with the words I caused this.
I’d never seen a battlefield, but I imagined this was how it would look.
I was lying in the middle of many bodies. A man lay too close for comfort, his eyes open and his throat cut. There was another lying close by with his neck at an awkward angle. Nausea washed over me as my eyes took in the rest of the gruesome scene.
If I wasn’t dead, then how had I slept through this? Two more men were steps away from the camp, with knives in their backs as if they had been trying to run away. Two more, too bloody to notice where the wound was, were next to the fire.
When my eyes landed on Weston, and slowly traveled up his bloody hands to his smoldering eyes, a shudder of fear went through me. The reason he didn’t drag the bodies away and why he made me wake up to this hit me like a ton of bricks. His face was hard and unreadable, but his eyes didn’t lie.
He wanted me to see this. Sympathy or guilt held no place inside him; the only glint in his eyes I saw came from pleasure. He wanted me to know what he was capable of.