Page 80 of A Promise of Peridot
He stood and carried me all the way back to our camp, the insistent rain an urging at our backs.
24
arwen
With incredible care, Kane laid me on my tent’s pallet, draped in the fox fur cloak he had given me so many nights ago in the Shadowhold dungeon. The single hearth in the small space was barely flickering, casting a steadfast low glow along the gray canvas. The pitter-patter of rain that had drifted in and out as Kane carried me back was now a full-blown storm, angry droplets and a screeching wind assaulting the canvas above. It was the coolest night I’d had in the jungle thus far, and I sat up, wrapping myself more tightly in the fur before I winced.
The pinching, burning pain where Halden had branded me stung, but the shame was almost as potent. Shame that he’d laid a hand on me, and even more so that, after everything, it still felt like a betrayal.
I grazed my own stomach. Barely any lighte bloomed at my fingertips. Maybe I had used too much power escaping Reaper’s Cave and blasting whatever that was at Halden. I healed what Icould—spare drops of lighte calming blistered skin—and tried to make peace with the discomfort.
A small inkling of pride shone inside me.
I had summoned my lighte, and not just to heal. I had used it to protect myself.
Kane was facing the tent entrance. The rain continued to batter the canvas.
“Did you find Mari? Did everyone make it out?” My voice sounded like an instrument missing strings.
Kane turned to face me, still drenched, still rippling with that unwavering fury that I didn’t fully understand. “They’re all fine. I told them you needed sleep.”
His words soothed me. “Did she take the ledger with her?” I asked through my fingers, massaging my temples and brow. What a Stones-forsaken day it had been. And no blade to show for it.
“I didn’t ask,” Kane forced out.
“What is wrong with you?” His anger was makingmeangry. I was the one who’d been seared like a cut of meat. I shuddered at the memory, and Kane’s eyes grew more lethal.
I couldn’t hold that gaze a minute longer. Dirt and splinters had lodged underneath my fingernails, and I began to pry them out one by one.
Kane released a slow breath before sitting on the pallet beside me. His damp shirt brushed my shoulder as he wrapped one large, warm hand around my own and pulled it into his lap. Cautiously, like I was a mouse in a trap, he plucked the hair-thin slivers of wood from my bloodied nails.
My frustration melted like snowflakes on warm skin.
His voice was still low, but softer as he said, “How are you feeling?”
“I’ve felt better.”
“I thought I had lost you. Thinking you had been... It was... unendurable.”
“I’m sorry.”
He lifted his eyes from my fingers. “Don’t be sorry. Not for anything.”
“But you didn’t lose me. I’m right here, and still—you’re so angry.” If he knew somehow who took me... Maybe he thought I had admitted that we didn’t have the blade.
He drew a hand down his face in frustration, the other still clasped around my own. I tried to shift, to face him better, but the sharp pain in my stomach and chest was like being stabbed, and I grimaced.
“Don’t move,” he murmured, releasing my hand and helping me sit back. But every time something touched my burns, they stung. I repositioned myself again.
We both looked down at my blouse, soaked in rain and blood. Studs’s blood.
“Off. I need it off,” I blurted. “It’s sticking to the burns.”
Slowly Kane slipped his hands under the fabric, his calloused knuckles sliding along my sides and sending a very different kind of shiver up my spine.
“All the way off?” His voice was strained.
I hummed my agreement, and in one swift movement, the blouse flew over my head and landed in the corner of my tent in a heap.
