time to spare. The tower guards were dead, but there were more just like them throughout this prison. In seconds, reinforcements would rush into the prison proper.
His gaze swept the yard again, searching out the dangers, pinpointing where he would need to be to get his woman to safety. His knife wound was deep and painful, but nothing he hadn’t experienced before in centuries of battle. He hadn’t the time to spend healing himself. He would need all of his powers focused on the escape.
He flashed to Shea’s side and she threw herself at him. Instantly, the world righted itself again. She was alive and in his arms, and the rest he would deal with.
“Torin!”
She held on tightly to him, her face buried in the curve of his neck. As if she knew she belonged there, accepted what they were and always had been to each other. This, he thought, would make the coming days easier. To have her acceptance, her cooperation in the task ahead would make all the difference.
But cooperation or not, he wouldn’t be letting her out of his sight again.
With her body pressed to his, he felt the chill of the white gold chain around her neck seep into him, sending ice racing after the fire in his veins. She was stronger than she thought, he told himself. Even with the drain of the white gold at her slender throat, he felt her magic bubbling with her.
Despite the chill of the dampening element against him, his body responded immediately to her presence. Heedless of the danger, he was hard as iron and aching to begin the ritual. But his mind overruled his dick. This time.
“We have to go,” he said, glancing over as Rune flashed in to stand beside him. The Eternal’s gaze swept the crowded yard—the screaming women, the wounded prisoners stretched out across dirty asphalt, the remaining guards who were running for cover to wait until their cavalry arrived.
“I know,” Shea said. “I’m ready.” She released him, took a step back, then reached out and grabbed the hand of the blond woman standing beside her. “I mean, we’re ready.”
Of course this wouldn’t go smoothly, Torin told himself with an inward groan of frustration. Never once in centuries had Shea stopped surprising him.
“Damn it!” Rune’s curse was deep and vicious.
Shea shot him a dark look. “I wasn’t talking to you.” Then she shifted her gaze to Torin’s and he felt the strength of that stare hit him hard. “This is my student’s mother. She’s not a witch. And if she doesn’t get out of here, they’ll kill her. They’ll torture her for information she doesn’t have.”
“We don’t have time for this,” Rune told Torin.
“We don’t have time to argue about it, either,” he shot back, before turning his gaze back to his witch. “You insist on this?”
She met his gaze squarely. “I do.”
Nodding, Torin looked at the other woman, who watched him through stunned yet resolute blue eyes. He took her measure and noted that she hadn’t shrunk back from him, though a man appearing from a tower of flames had to have shocked her. “Your name.”
“Terri. Terri Hall,” she said, words tumbling from her mouth as she reacted to the dangerous situation. “And I do need to get out of here. I have to get to my daughter.”
“Torin,” Rune interrupted, “there’s no time to save another. We had a mission and we’ve been here too long already. More guards will be coming.”
But Torin was looking not at Rune but at Shea. Her green eyes were locked with his and she was measuring him, seeing who and what he was. He sensed that her memories of their shared past hadn’t cleared yet. And so the choice he made now would decide much for her. He knew this moment would brand him in her eyes for all time. Could she trust him and learn from him? Or would he be as uncaring as those who would see her dead?
The choice was a simple one.
“Take the woman,” Torin told Rune flatly.
Shea smiled and Terri blew out a relieved breath. From somewhere in the distance more shouts lifted into the air. He didn’t like leaving these other women to the less than tender mercies of the guards, but there was nothing he could do to help them. Not yet, anyway.
“You have to get her to safety,” Shea insisted, spearing Rune with a commanding stare. “You can’t just get her out of here and then dump her somewhere. She