Page 114 of Until the Stars Fall

His eyes narrowed but then softened slightly. “Did it occur to you that I might have been about to? Before you hit me?”

Shit. Stars-damned impatience.

“You still could have, instead of yanking me off my horse and growling at me,” I said, noting how the guards and Matthias were inching their horses away from us.

Connor leaned back and turned his face toward the early evening sky as he shook his head. Slowly he brought his attention back to me. “I don’t know if you know this, Sapphire, but bad tempers run in my family.”

I pressed a hand to my chest and pulled back in feigned shock. “You? Temper? No. I don’t believe it.”

This earned me a soft laugh that ended too quickly.

“Forgive me?” Connor asked.

I bowed my head and asked him for the same in return. In response, he took my hand and gave my fingers a squeeze before waving Matthias back over to us. Then he looked to me expectantly. It took a quick toss of his head in Matthias’s direction for me to realize what he meant for me to do.

“I would like to avoid the scene if possible. Is there a way around it?” I asked, and Matthias nodded.

“There’s an old hunting trail about fifty meters back. It meets up with the road between Engle and home,” he explained, pointing behind us.

I glanced at Connor and asked, “Would it be a problem to backtrack to Engle?”

Rubbing his hand over his chin and along his scruffy jaw, he shared a look with Matthias before finally answering me. “We won’t be going to Engle.” My brows shot up, but I held my tongue, giving him the opportunity to explain. “With the rebels active in this area, and with the drastic escalation in their cruelty, we need to return home.”

“So we just give up?”

Before I’d even finished asking my question, he was shaking his head. “Of course not. We just delay the rest of our visits for a while. We need to learn what we can from the scene and then regroup before we decide how to proceed.”

“But how do we learn from it if we’re bypassing it?”

Connor looked around at the guards who stood watch around us. Meeting my eyes once more, he explained, “You and I are going to take the hunting trail.”

“Alone?” I asked with unintentional nervousness.

He laughed quietly. I waited for some inappropriate comment, but instead he said, “No, we’ll be taking Evan and Willem with us. Matthias will take the others to investigate and report back to the palace once they’ve laid the fallen to rest.”

Matthias tossed his head to command the other four guards to continue down the road, but he didn’t turn to follow them right away. Guiding his horse close to Connor’s, he clapped a hand on his back and whispered something to him before riding away.

CHAPTER 55

Connor

Surprisingly, Lieke never asked what Matthias had said to me before we parted ways. A few times on our ride, she gave me a sideways glance, but I pretended not to notice, focusing on searching the trees on either side of the old trail we now traveled along.

Even if she had asked, I would have lied.

“I told you she was good for you, Connor,”Matthias had said. It had been nearly impossible to keep myself from scoffing at him, but doing that would have surely piqued Lieke’s curiosity to an uncontrollable level.

We proceeded in relative silence. To my knowledge, this path hadn’t been used since before the War of Hearts. It had since become overgrown, but the trees had been cut back so severely they’d never fully recovered, affording us just enough room to ride beside each other. On a map, this would appear to be a shortcut back to the palace, but its twisting and winding route through the trees would, in fact, force us to travel slowly.

As we rode deeper into the forest, my earlier annoyance with Matthias shifted into a prickly unease. The air—darkened prematurely by the thick forest canopy—chilled me, yet somehow it remained stifling. The trees, which bowed their branches over the path, seemed to close in on us. Soon it seemed as if the forest might swallow us up, and we were eventually forced to ride single file.

I motioned for Lieke to go in front of me so I could more easily watch for any danger. Her heartbeat sped up. Not much sunlight was visible overhead, but I estimated we had another few hours, at least, before darkness fell. We wouldn’t make it back to the palace before then and would be forced to make camp.

Lieke turned her head over her shoulder, whispering, “What if the rebels didn’t leave? Will Matthias be okay?”

I stifled a laugh. “Should I be jealous that my fiancée is worried about my second and not me?”

But she didn’t seem amused as she faced forward again, saying, “Last I checked, he doesn’t shift into a hound with fangs and claws.”

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