The stubborn Kyanite woman inside me wants to deny him. The woman who knows she cannot, stands, and moves to the others side of the pit. He watches me, his thoughts veiled behind shadows.
He pats the space next to him. I sit and curve my legs to the side, trying hard to keep my thighs tucked close. Those silver-blue eyes flicker over me, trailing my body as if I’m goods in a shop he’s considering buying. I swallow but don’t shy from his stare.
“Do you like what you see?” I ask when I can no longer bear the silence.
Father hates my bold tongue. I find it serves my purpose. I’d rather be bold than shy.
“You will do,” Gabriel says, his voice flat.
“I will do?” I roll my eyes upward.
I may be too skinny, and my eyes are brown instead of blue, but it doesn’t make me any less desirable.
Or maybe it does.
His stare lingers a moment longer, then shifts away. I swallow through the sourness in my throat and try to think of something to say.
“Thank you for…” The words stick in my throat, like everything else in this lodge.
The image of that night overcomes me, blinding me with its memories. The man with the bone necklace entering my tent. The darkness stirring behind his eyes. The way he picked me up as if I were simply air. I weighed nothing to him.
Another memory inks its way through. Esmund poisoned me. It made me sluggish and sleepy.
Why did he go through such efforts to overcome me?
Maybe he feared my magical abilities. He wasted his time. Even if I did have Kyanite magic, it’s incapable of being evil.
It’s light and goodness.
My stomach twists as I remember how helpless I had been. As a child, I was taught to defend myself. Everyone had to with how often our villages were attacked. Then, I trained with a mercenary army. I shouldn’t have been so easy to overpower.
“You do not need to thank me. I was simply guarding a prisoner,” Gabriel says.
I jerk my gaze away and study the steam rising from the rocks. “You could have harmed me too.” In truth, Gabriel could have done many things to me that night, but he didn’t. Instead, he rescued me, aided me, and he stayed on the other side of the tent.
“Oh,” he says in a sarcastic tone, “because I am a monster?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. It’s written in your eyes. You think I am beneath you. That I’m a savage.” Gabriel’s words come out in a stream of unveiled bitterness.
“You’re not a savage.” I run my fingers against the stitches. “A savage wouldn’t have tended to my wounds as you did.”
The muscles in his shoulders flex as he folds his arms. “Perhaps not, but I am still Bloodstone.”
Still Bloodstone.
Those words ring in my ears as I try not to think, to not remember what the Bloodstone did to Mother.
A half smile touches his mouth. “I see my words hold truth. You cannot stand the idea of being wed to a man like me.”
“I am processing.” I jab my thumb into my palm. “As you are doing, I’m sure. Two days ago, neither one of us thought of marriage.”
His gaze lowers to my hands as I jerk them apart and settle them against my thighs. “Do you do that to cause yourself pain?”
“It is nothing,” I say.
He reaches out, snags my left hand in his and flips it over. The indentation in my palm stands out like a red flag.
