Page 31 of Stealing the Troll’s Heart

“Your camp is that way. I hid you.” She doesn’t sound fluent, but she’s able to get the message across. I taught her well. “Don’t move your leg. It’s hurt.”

When I’m finally able to open my eyes again, I glance down at my calf, where there’s a heap of bloody bandages wrapped around my wound. When I look up at her again, I know that Telise is the one who did this. She’s the one who saved my life.

She should have just left me.

I glare at her. “Why are you here?”

Telise recoils a little, and her eyes are surprised. What did she expect? Some sort of happy reunion?

“War,” is all she says. “Same as you.”

Oh. So she got dragged into this mess, too. What’s the chance that we would end up on the same front, fightingin the same battle?

I wish fate would stop fucking with me this way.

“Raz’jin?” She reaches up to touch the side of my face, but I grab her wrist in my hand and hold it at a distance. It seems to finally settle in her expression that this is not what she’d hoped it would be. But she doesn’t know how long I’ve spent wading through the misery she caused me, the distances I’ve traveled trying to forget about her.

Her hand drops back to her side. Her tears haven’t stopped, but they’ve gone from the happy kind to the sad. Telise wraps her arms around herself.

“I’m sorry,” she says again, but no amount of apologies will make a difference to me. I’ve erected a tall, impenetrable wall around myself. Then she reaches into her pocket for something, and I wonder if she’s going to whistle my position to her friends.

Instead, she pulls out a huge, green jewel. My emerald.

She holds it out to me, keeping her eyes on the forest floor. “Take it,” she says. “It’s yours.” This time she doesn’t try to apologize, as if she knows there’s no apology in the world that can fix this. She just keeps her hand extended, the glimmering emerald sitting in the middle of her tiny palm. I reach out and take it, and the brief sensation of my fingers against her skin sends a spark up my arm. I know that skin so well, and what every last inch of it feels like. Now she’s muddy and dirty and scratched up, but I can still make out the little freckles that cover her from head to toe.

I slide the emerald into my pocket and grunt as my leg moves. I’m not going to thank her for returning something she should never have taken in the first place.

But she didn’t sell it. No, she held onto it for what, a year? More? It came into war with her, when she could have turned it into enough gold to sit pretty for some time. She could have bought her way out of conscription with this.

Telise kneels down in front of me, very near but not quite touching me. Seeing her up this close it’s hard not to reach out and grab her, pull her in tight, and claim every part of her.Mine. That voice inside me won’t stop repeating it.

“Raz’jin,” she says, squeezing one hand tight inside the other, “I did not understand.”

“Didn’t understand what?” I ask, irritation in my voice. I can still remember the sharp ache in my chest when she insisted that there wasn’t anything between us, the bite it took out of my soul when the ship pulled away from Eyra Cove that day and I discovered what she’d done.

“Mate,” she says. “I didn’t understand what you meant.”

I thought I had made it pretty obvious.

“We don’t have this,” she says, gesturing to herself. “Humans. We don’t mate. Not like you.”

How barbaric. And yet they reproduce? And build cities?

“Foolish,” I say. But maybe they aren’t so foolish to not develop a bond like that, one that can’t be broken. It could save so much pain.

“But you.” She reaches out one hand so tentatively that I don’t react. Her fingers land on my tusk, and I remember the way she thanked me the night that I freed her in the orc village. “You, Raz’jin... you are my mate.”

Chapter 15

Telise

He’s not happy to see me, I can tell that much. I might have saved his life, but to Raz’jin that’s no exchange for what I did to him.

Of course, I didn’t understand the link between us back then. He had known something truer and deeper existed there when I didn’t. But even if I had fully grasped the implication of what he was saying, I wouldn’t have been willing to admit the truth to myself anyway—that I couldn’t live without him.

And, to be fair, he went about it all wrong.

But seeing him here and alive, no less, I finally get what that book about trollkin was trying to tell me.

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