Page 131 of Steel Heart Iron Claws

Hundreds of bats shoot out like arrows, flapping their wings in my face as their hard little bodies slam against me, knocking me around like a straw dummy before dispersing up into the smokey trees.

Fuck!

My pulse scrambles to regain its rhythm as I hunch over, raking my fingers through my hair in case any of the little devils got tangled in it.

As my breath heaves, I toss my head up?—

To see a monster crashing toward me.

I have a split second to process a thirty-point buck thundering out of the cave with his massive antlers lowered at my torso. Sabine rides on his back like a goddess straight out of a legend, gripping the base of his antlers, her hairwhipping behind her as her eyes fix on me like dagger points.

Fuck me.

So, she’snotready to surrender, I take it.

I stand my ground, quickly calculating my chances. The buck is forty feet away—it’ll be on me in three seconds. My hand instinctively grabs for my bow. I can have an arrow in the animal’s heart in two.

I nock the arrow and pull back the string, closing one eye for aim.

But as my vision hones in, I can’t seem to fire. Beneath the reek of smoke, the air still smells faintly of Sabine’s tears. Her grief over the deer herd is real.

“Just do it,” I growl to myself.

I steady my aim again, though my fingers shake.Dammit. I’m a huntsman. I’ve killed hundreds of deer and never thought twice. But there’s something different now that I’ve found Sabine. It doesn’t matter if I’ve forgotten our past. Somehow, her pain is my pain. What she cares about, I care about. I never would guess in a million years that Wolf Bowborn would hesitate to take an animal’s life, but this is what she’s done to me.

She’s given me a fucking heart.

“Dammit!” I hurl my bow to the ground as the buck closes the distance between us. One second left. A half a second.

I throw myself to the side as its antlers barrel forward. One point catches me in the right side, and pain explodes across my ribs. I grit my teeth as I come up from the roll, tossing the sweaty hair out of my eyes.

Think fast, Basten.

I don’t want to kill the buck, but I can’t let Sabineescape. Right now, they’re retreating fast. The smoke will hide them completely in another second.

Adrenaline sets my muscles on edge as I scan the immediate forest, calculating where I laid my traps. I pick up a rock and pitch it to the right of the fleeing buck.

The animal spooks to the left—right into the tripwire I secured before between two birches.

There’s a crash as the buck slams to the ground with Sabine still on his back. A cloud of dust kicks up as Sabine falls off sideways, tumbling into a pile of leaves. I hear the air shoot out of her lungs.

She groans, temporarily stunned.

The buck scrambles to his feet, stumbling only briefly before regaining his footing, and then bounds off into the encroaching smoke.

I race to Sabine’s side and drop to my knees. “Little violet!”

I roll her onto her back as she coughs, her eyes unfocused, blinking hard at the sunlight through the clouds of smoke. A cut on her temple oozes blood. I quickly feel along her limbs for any broken bones, relieved that she’s only twisted an ankle.

I cup the back of her head to gently lift her up. “Easy. Don’t move too fast.”

She coughs again as her eyes begin to focus.

Glancing at the spreading wildfire—one hundred feet off—I brush the wet hair off her forehead as I murmur, “It’s almost over. Soon, you won’t have to fight anymore. We’re together now. All we have to do is keep moving until sunset. I left Artain incapacitated, but that bastard will figure a way out to free himself sooner or later.”

She latches onto my forearm, where the scars that formher name peek out from my torn sleeve. “Basten. The buck?—”

“I didn’t shoot him.”

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