Page 31 of Fragile Oath

“Yes, My Lord?” I asked.

“I asked if you were ready to eat.”

His eyes were already narrowed in ire, and I didn’t have the right answer. Was he hungry? Had he asked the first time to be solicitous, or in a pointed manner? I tried to think back, but I had missed his words entirely.

When I took too long to answer, he reached for my wrist. I braced myself for the warning squeeze, but Davin was suddenly there, putting far more of his body between us than was necessary to knock on the panel behind us.

“Apologies,” he said, not bothering to strive for sincerity. “I need to speak with Ewan.”

If I were being charitable, I would allow that he had a pressing need to know when the next stop was, but somehow I doubted it.

“I, for one, am famished,” Gallagher said as soon as Davin returned to his seat.

He pulled out a satchel with breakfast from the inn and all but shoved the contents in Alexei’s lap. Alexei glowered, and I placed a hand on his arm. My permanent position for this ride, it would seem.

“I could eat,” I said softly.

He grunted agreement, handing me my portion of the food, my punishment forgotten. For now.

The day went on in that fashion. The next time Alexei shifted near me, Gallagher had an immediate need to stop the carriage.

“Too much coffee, I’m afraid,” he said, his tone only marginally more convincing than Davin’s had been.

And so went a series of stops and interruptions that made increasingly little sense. By the time we stopped at the inn for the night, Alexei was livid, and my stomach was churning with an altogether different sort of dread than I had grown accustomed to at Alexei’s hands.

Growing up, my mother had taught me how to knit, as all proper Socairan ladies could do. I hated the signs of my errors so much that I was given to unraveling the entire thing at the first missed loop.

That’s what I felt like now, like I was one of those scarves, coming apart entirely as the result of a single mistake.

So when my door swung open on silent hinges that night, I wasn’t half as surprised as I should have been. Still I froze, unwilling to turn around and face whoever had come into my room. Whether it was Davin’s frigid ire or Alexei’s blind rage or Gallagher’s quiet disappointment, I wanted no part of what came next.

The door clicked shut, and I squeezed my eyes shut in a long, fortifying blink.

“What is he holding over you?” Of course, it was Davin. Had I ever really doubted it would be?

Each of his words fell like the first flakes of snow in a blizzard, heavy and portentous.

“What’s who holding over me?” I shot back, forcing my features into an icy neutrality before I turned to face him.

As lies went, it wasn’t my best work, but I hadn’t expected him to hit the ground running that way.

He ran a hand through his hair, causing a single strand to tumble onto his brow. Then he let out a frustrated huff of air. “Aren’t you tired of playing games, Galina?”

“This is not a game to me,” I bit out.

Far from it.

Davin’s expression hardened, his chest rising and falling too quickly. He crossed the room in three long strides, and my heartbeat picked up in my chest. This was nothing at all like the fear that overtook me when Alexei was close. Davin’s nearness was dangerous in its own way, sending every one of my nerves on alert.

Perhaps that’s why I was too distracted to notice when his hand stretched out to mine. I wanted to pull away, should have pulled away, but I was rendered immobile by the intensity of his gaze as it bored into mine.

Slowly, and so, so gently, he peeled back the sleeve to my nightgown, revealing the charm bracelet I never took off. And the purpling bruise underneath it.

So many things crossed his features, I could hardly read them all. Anguish and fury and resignation. His hand moved from my sleeve down to the mark, barely trailing over the discolored skin like he could heal it just with his touch.

“So you’re just going back with him by choice, then?” he growled, his voice a sharp contrast to the gentle fingers still tracing the marks that Alexei had left.

I tugged my hand back to my side, and he released it without protest.

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