Page 3 of Stealing the Troll’s Heart

Then she says something I can’t distinguish, and releases some of the tension between the dagger and my flesh.

“I think she’s going to back off,” I say to Blizzek. “Make it seem like you’re going to put your gun down.”

He frowns at me. “What? No way.”

“If you don’t, one of us is going to die, and I will haunt you for the rest of your life if I’m the one who goes down.”

Suddenly the human shouts something at me. She doesn’t like us talking past her. She gestures with the dagger, and I swallow hard, hoping she doesn’t make a mistake that close to my jugular.

Blizzek gives me one last withering look before he starts to remove the horn of his gun from the girl’s head.

She’s quicker than lightning. The moment the gun isn’t on top of her, she’s already moving, and she kicks Blizzek square in the balls. He shouts and drops his gun, like a giant idiot.

I reach out and grab whatever I can—and my hand wraps around her tiny arm. The girl looks up at me, green eyes wild, and snarls something in her language. I reach for the axe over my back. Her time on this plane is over. That’s when she grabs one of my tusks in her other hand and yanks my head towards hers.

For a split second, I’m looking deep into her green eyes, right before she presses her lips to mine. They’re pliable and small, and I find my hand freezing on the handle of my axe.

In that one lost second, she pulls away from me, her skinny wrist slipping out of my hand. And then she’s running. Before either of us can recover, she dives into the woods at twice the speed we could chase her and vanishes like a shadow.

“Raz’jin!” Blizzek waves his arms at me. Then he clutches his crotch in agony. “What the hell?”

“I don’t know. Ask her!” I’m enraged. Right in front of Blizzek, a human womankissed me? And then she used my surprise to escape.

“You let her get away.” He scowls deeply. “She pulled a stupid, easy trick and you let her get away with it.”

“I’m sorry that I didn’t expectthat.”

Blizzek rolls his eyes, and whenhe’s finally recovered, we keep on in the direction of our gold. He kicks a rock. “Would have made a nice trophy,” he says.

But I’m rattled. She was so soft, but so warm, too. I found that more than anything, I wanted to bury my hands in her, and smash her body against mine.

What a dirty, nasty trick from a dirty, nasty creature.

Chapter 2

Telise

Hours later, I’m still not sure why I did it.

I keep telling myself that it worked. I got away, right? I’d done something unexpected, and it took the troll by surprise enough that I was able to make my escape. Otherwise, he would have cut me in half with that axe.

But the more I try to rationalize it away, the more that I’m thinking about what his mouth felt like. It was only a split second, but I found something in that second that I didn’t expect to find.

Well, maybe I should have expected it. Deleran has always called me “odd”. He’s my only real friend, but he’s back in the king’s city of Culberra doing only gods know what. Probably drinking himself under a table, with women crawling all over him, each wanting a taste of him.

“You’ve never made a move on me in all the years that I’veknown you,” he said once. We met as kids back in our hometown of Great Oak but left together to do something a little bigger. “Why not?”

“Not interested,” I’d said.

“Like, in men, or in me specifically?”

“I’m just not into it.” I had shrugged at the time. “Gender irrelevant.”

“Who is your type, then?” Deleran asked then, but I had no answer. I felt like I’d know it when I saw it. “You’re going to be a virgin forever, Telise.”

But it’s not that I don’t have a sex drive. Oh, I do, and it’s loud and angry. It’s just that nothing that should turn me on ever has. No, I’ve been wanting something my whole life, and I just don’t know what it is yet.

At least I managed to get away from the situation with the two trollkin, hide intact. Maybe it wasn’t a win, but it was a tie.

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