Page 63 of Shadow Warrior
His words were like a slap, and then rage burned away the stab of pain. “Trust me, Master Hyde, I won’t be making that mistake again, but Brady understands me. He accepts the fact that I might love more than one man.”
Hyde’s mouth parted, and the harsh lines, the mean lines, softened. “Love?” He took another step toward me.
Oh, shit. His proximity was like a drug affecting my pulse and pushing it higher. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Don’t want you?” He edged closer, and I took a step back. “Don’t dream about you wrapped around my cock?”
“Hyde.”
“Archer. Say it.”
My tongue ached to wrap around the syllables of his name. “No. We can’t do this.”
His jaw ticked, and the heat in his eyes smoothed to steel. “I know.” His throat bobbed. “One last time. Say it.”
Fuck, he was so close, his citrus aroma messing with my head and my heart. I closed my eyes and tucked in my chin and allowed his name to roll off my lips. “Archer.”
He drew a sharp breath. “Look at me. Look at me and say it.”
This was some fucked-up foreplay that had the pulse at the base of my throat jumping and my heart crushing in a vise because it could never be. We could never go anywhere. We both knew it, but like idiots, we stood, mere inches apart, our hearts in our eyes as we locked gazes.
“Archer.”
He broke with a ragged sound, bracketed my face with his hands, and rolled his forehead against mine. “Fuck this, Justice. Fuck it.”
He released me abruptly and was gone, leaving me shaking with an overload of emotions and a sense of deep loss that only a shit load of time would heal.
“Justice?” Lloyd appeared in the main doorway to the barracks. “Suit up. You’re on patrol with me, and then we have team training at the fortress.”
The fortress where the wanker Henrich was. The Shadow Master who’d given me news of my friend’s death so callously.
Harmon …
Fuck, he should be here with me now. He shouldn’t be gone.
“You okay?” Lloyd asked.
“Henrich isn’t going to make an announcement about Harmon, is he?”
Lloyd’s mouth thinned. “I doubt it. If he did that, then he’d have to explain what happened and why. He would have to tell the knights the fomorians infected a knight and then dumped him back in the mist for us to find.”
“Yeah, which will lead to speculation about the fomorian motives, but that’s as it should be. The knights need to be aware of what’s going on. We need to be preparing for a possible attack, not focusing on a bloody trial.”
“Oh, they’ll have the trial set up in a day,” Lloyd said. “One of the newer knights told me what to expect.”
Okay, I was all ears.
“They dump us into sector three, and they release a pulse, a frequency that brings out everything that sector three has to offer. Our task is to survive and to do it as a team while making our way to the checkpoint in less than three hours. Ten points per team member. Six members to each team and we need forty-five points to win. Lose a team member and we lose ten points, five points lost for every fifteen minutes we go over the three-hour mark.”
“So, they don’t actually have to prepare anything?”
“Aside from planting the emitters that will blast the frequency to kick-start shit, no. They’re busy right now getting ready for a party. They call it a welcoming party for the new knights, but it kicks off the night before we head into the trials.” Lloyd pushed the door behind him open. “Look, there’s nothing we can do right now. Maybe once the trials are over, we can speak to Henrich about issuing an alert.”
“Venrick is still out there, and no one’s doing shit about that.” I shook my head as I strode through the door. “It’s like Henrich wants us to forget what happened. Like he wants us to pretend that the fucking fomorians didn’t waltz into our territory and take our men.”
Lloyd didn’t argue with me, and it was obvious from the set of his jaw that he agreed with me.
Only a week left till the final trials. Just as well because I was done with cadet status.
