The emotion that welled up in me was despair. Because I could never have him as my own. When I’d left the Dead Mountain, I had never expected to meet a male like…him. I had never expected for these feelings he stoked to come roaring to life like a fire, licking at me, consuming me, burning me up.
I felt rage all my own for him. For what he’d experienced when he was at his most vulnerable. I shook with it. I hated the female that had taken advantage of him, that had used him.
“I cannot promise you that I will be right with you. Not always, leikavi,” he murmured. “But I will always try to be. Though I will understand if you do not want this. If you do not want me anymore because—”
Leaning up, I kissed him to cut off his words, feeling my eyes prick with tears. How could he even think something like that?
Davik hesitated for only a moment and then his mouth was moving against mine, tugging me more firmly against him.
Against his lips, I murmured, “Rest assured that I will always want you, Davik.”
Those red eyes burned into me when I pulled back to look at him. His hand dove into my hair, gathering it into his palm, tugging on it gently until my neck was exposed to him.
My lips parted when his teeth bit at the column of my throat. I looked up at the night sky as he marked me—as if he needed to after what had just transpired between us—inhaling his warm scent that made my head spin.
Behind a dark mass of clouds, the moon peeked through, full and bright, and my lips thinned. Every night, more and more of it would disappear, melting into a single silver sliver. Then the black moon would blanket Dakkar. A black moon would blanket the Dead Mountain.
I wondered if I even had the amount of time allotted to me. I wondered if the poison would’ve already claimed me by then.
Even though he made me feel safe, Davik wouldn’t be able to protect me from the poison slowing the blood in my veins, thickening it to stone. Only another dose of it would save me, the dose I took every two weeks under the Dead Mountain. The dose all the Ghertun slaves took so we weren’t tempted to escape. Escape would’ve been easy. There were many paths, unguarded paths, that led away from the Dead Mountain.
But the Ghertun knew that they could control us with the threat of death. The poison was extracted from a plant that only grew in the dark, acidic soil, deep in the mountain. And the death was agonizing. Slow and agonizing. I’d come close to it once, after all.
Davik stiffened, his arm tightening around me so much that it almost stole the breath from my lungs.
For a moment, I feared I’d said something out loud, something I didn’t want him to hear.
When I glanced at him, his head had raised from my neck, his attention was forward, peering into the darkness, towards a grouping of rocky pillars, pillars that jutted high all over the eastlands. Worry flowed through me—thinking he was seeing another shadowed spirit, his twin perhaps—but when I looked in that direction, I froze too.
“No,” I breathed.
Something reflected in the moonlight. Eerie, watchful black eyes met our gazes, unflinching. Five pairs of eyes total, eyes that were nothing more than vertical slits. Their teeth were razor-sharp, like blades, and yellow, stained from the roots they so enjoyed gorging themselves on. Their legs, bent heavily at the knee joint, just like a pyroki’s, shifted as they tracked us and I swore I could hear their bones creaking in the quiet.
A pack of Ghertun were watching us from within the shadowed darkness.
Bile rose in my throat, that familiar, bitter fear returning to me in a rush, as if it had never left.
Chapter Thirty-Five
“Let me speak to them,” Vienne said, her voice soft and shaking. “Please!”
We had just made it back to the encampment. As we did, I bellowed a war cry to my darukkars, loud and echoing, and in an instant, they were racing from their volikis, dozens and dozens in a rush.
“Nik,” I snarled down at her. If she hadn’t been with me, I would’ve gone after the Ghertun right when I’d spotted them spying in the darkness. How long had they been watching us? Watching her? “Never.”
“Davik, you don’t understand,” she said. “Please! I need to—”