Page 117 of Forged Bonds

“I’ll pay you a couple gold for some time with her,” he grunted.

I brought my hand to my wand beneath the cloak, though I knew it was the last option. If anyone knew I was a witch, we wouldn’t only be facing off against this man with ogre blood. We’d be fending off the whole block.

“Not for sale,” Emmett said.

All my men held back their growls, but I felt their fuming beneath the surface.

The giant stared at us. His eyes were brown but had a film of white over them, like his eyesight wasn’t good. Was that going to work in our favour in this situation? I glanced around and noticed a crowd forming outside the brothel and the tavern across the street.

Not fucking good. We need to get out of here.

I spotted the change in this man’s eyes before he made a move, knowing from experience when someone had decided not to take ‘no’ for an answer. Dancing back on light feet, I moved behind Emmett. No one else had approached yet, but they would when they realized this was a devolving situation. I switched my grip from my wand to my dagger, not drawing it yet.

He’d reached for me the second I moved, loosing a snarl when he wasn’t able to grab me. Forming his hand into a fist, he drew it back to throw a punch. Oswald jumped back and the abnormally large fist was heading right for Emmett, who threw up his arms to deflect the hit.

It didn’t land quite as we’d all expected it to.

The fist hit Emmett’s barrier, but there wasn’t much force to the punch.

Mainly because the hand was no longer attached to an arm.

Blood spurted on my mate as the fist hit him, the attacker pulling back what remained of his arm with a scream. I stared blankly at the boney stub of a wrist where his hand had been. Then, blinking, I took my attention off the injury to figure out what the fuck had just happened.

It didn’t take long to figure out.

Altair stood smirking beside the man, wiping his sword off with the sleeve of his tattered shirt. Black wings extended from his back, the span as wide as Shan’s and just as immaculately groomed. He was dirtier than I’d last seen him, but didn’t seem worse for wear physically. “Would anyone else like to fuck with us?” he called out, staring challengingly at the crowd gathered outside the tavern and brothel. “Or would you like to keep your hands?”

The man who’d attacked us was much less threatening now with his hand detached on the ground and tears streaming down his cheeks. Whatever supernatural he was in addition to being part ogre, it wasn’t one of the fast-healing ones. If it was, he could theoretically pick his hand up and reattach it.

No one moved an inch except the brothel girls, who continued serving drinks and rubbing against men. They saw shit like this every day, I imagined. I’d learned it was better to ignore things that didn’t concern me, and they had to as well.

“Come on,” Altair said, quieter. “If we hang around, someone will get brave.”

He pulled in his wings and we walked away, making sure not to hurry. Running from a potential fight was a sign of weakness we couldn’t afford to show. Altair led us a few blocks, then turned into a building. We walked silently through a bakery smelling of fresh bread, up a set of stairs, and down a hallway to a closed door. There was a tingle of magic in the air. The room was warded.

Altair swung open the door without incident, stepping inside. “We have guests,” he declared.

Sky was unsurprised, already drawing on the floor with chalk. The wards dropped for a second and we filed into the room.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Nolan demanded the second Sky erased his markings, warding us all into the room. “We thought you were dead or captured.”

“Don’t be too furious at me,” Altair said, raising his hands in the air. “We were almost dead. I promise. Sky got us the fuck out of there and we had to hop a carriage immediately so they didn’t follow us. We got to Eimburn last night and were finally going to be able to risk a portal back to Earth, but you beat us. What the fuck happened out there? They had way more men than we expected.”

“They did,” I said.

I moved away from my men and settled on the thin bed. This room was small, only big enough for a queen-sized medieval-style mattress on the floor and a small table with a chair against the wall beside the door. A single window had moonlight shining through it, but it was barely big enough to fit my body through.

“What went wrong in the calculations, then?” Altair asked.

“We thought they didn’t know we were coming? We thought we were stronger than we actually were? I don’t fucking know. Something. I’m glad you two are alive, though, because we’ll need you for our next attempt,” I said.

Altair was already shaking his head. “Absolutely the fuck not. Nolan, I’d never tell anyone your plans, but if you’re going to attempt another suicide mission to kill your cousin, we’re out. I like my life. Very fond of it, actually, and it’s my last one. Either your plan is fucking perfect and you get a lot more men, or you’re on your own.”

His concerns were valid, but I still bit my tongue against a sarcastic retort. It wasn’t his fault Shan and Caspian were taken. They’d had to run for the same reason we had: because they’d been completely overwhelmed.

“Our plan is perfect and we will have more men,” I said, answering before Nolan could.

He was deferring to me in this situation, anyway. My mate knew I hated to be spoken over, or spoken for.

---