Bonded to the Rakian Berserker (Rakian Warrior Mates #3) - Elin Wyn Page 0,35
in the morning. I don’t know what would be worse. To believe that was something that had already happened to me that I don’t remember, or to think that’s the future that waits for me someday.”
Never once did Gavin loosen his hold on her, stop the soothing strokes down her unbound hair.
“Can you tell me what it was, what you saw? Tell me now, and I’ll remember it for you.”
Bit by bit the fragments came out, the cell, the girls. The man, the pain.
“Oh!” Esme pushed away from Gavin as revelation hit.
“The brand on the man’s arm! That’s what I was doing when those assholes found me,” she explained. “Brylnee’s daughter said she’d seen a mark on the wrist of the man who talked to her, and I wanted to see if the men who attacked Hendrick’s clan’s children had anything like that.”
Gavin’s face shuttered, expression gone cold.
“That’s why you stayed with the bodies, rather than going back to the camp with the others?”
“Yes, but that’s not the important part,” Esme hurried on. “The man I checked, he did have a brand.”
“We could have checked that in the morning. You could have asked me to look.” His voice was curiously flat.
“But don’t you see? It was the same symbol in my dream. It’s all connected!”
“I see perfectly well,” Gavin said, then stood, started pacing the room. “Which is why I’m calling Nic and Adena to get down here. They’re taking you back to Ship.”
17
Even as the words left his mouth, Gavin knew he was in for a fight.
Esme’s nostrils flared as her eyes narrowed. “What did you just say?” she snarled.
Maybe he didn’t phrase it in the best way.
Words had never been his strong point.
But he was right. He’d never backed down from a fight before, and he’d be damned if he was going to start now.
“Don’t you see?” he said, grabbing her upper arms. “The men that attacked the caravan today, they’re tied to something in your past or something in your future. There’s a good possibility you’ve escaped them once.”
“We don’t know if that’s true,” she said angrily, brushing his hands off her “And even if it is, all the more reason I need to help. I need to make sure that whatever happened to me, doesn’t happen to them.”
“And how are you going to do that?” Gavin pressed on. “You yourself said you can’t remember what happened when you were a child. How do you think that’s going to help them?”
Her face paled, but Gavin refused to let up. There was too much at stake here.
“For all we know you’re just going to be another target. If you escaped, they may want you back even more. You could put the rest of them in even more danger.”
“You don’t know that’s true,” she argued, turning away from him to light the small oil lamp on the table across from the bed, turn the wick down so only a faint glow lit her features, casting the rest of the room into a heavier shadow.
“You don’t know it’s not true.”
“Why are you being like this?” she demanded. “Nothing has changed, not really. My dreams could just be a dream. Dreams are weird. Maybe my mind just threw it in because I saw the brand on that man.”
Gavin felt himself spiraling, but not into the fire, not the rage.
This was something worse.
“And that’s another thing,” he said. “You put yourself in danger tonight.”
“I know that, and I apologized. I won’t do it again.”
“What if I hadn’t come back in time?” Gavin reached to cup her cheek and let his hand fall without touching her skin. “Esme, what if they’d taken you, the guys with the brands on their arms, the men of that stupid gang, someone we don’t even know is the enemy yet?”
“But they didn’t!” she insisted. “And why is this about me? You’re the one throwing yourself into danger, you’re the one risking himself every time. You don’t wait for backup, you just charge in, and, what am I going to do if something happens to you?”
He rocked back on his heels, stricken.
She was worried about him?
“Oh,” she threw her arms in the air. “This is ridiculous.”
Esme stepped forward, wrapping her arms around his neck as she stretched up on tiptoe. “I can’t argue with myself and with you at the same time,” she murmured.
This made no sense.
And then her lips burned as they pressed into his, and he no longer cared what made sense and what didn’t.