Page 275 of The Wild Prince's Favorite
Kassein found the body she was staring at just as he stepped inside.
A man was lying in a pool of blood, his throat ripped wide open. He immediately knew a blade hadn’t caused the wound; it was too large, like it had been ripped open, not sliced.
“Looks like a baby dragon’s work,” Kiera commented.
“Niiru,” Kassein muttered.
It was the only dragon they knew who would have been the right size for this injury and had all the reasons to be there. Kassein swallowed and moved deeper into the cave, his heart anxiously thumping faster and faster as they found one body after another.
While a young dragon’s sharp fangs had obviously ripped apart the first one, this one had been violently stabbed by a proper blade.
“Alezya,” he muttered.
After the second body, Kassein’s eyes stopped on what, at first, looked like just a lump of bloodied fur. He almost threw himself on his knees, his hands frantically grabbing the ripped coat while his heart pounded in his chest. He’d put that very coat on Alezya just hours ago.
Now, it was ripped in multiple places, and worse, it was stained with blood. A lot of blood. Kassein’s mouth was horribly dry.
“Looks like our girl fought and took this off,” Kiera noted.
His sister’s voice barely reached him. He scrambled to his feet and continued down the tunnel, finding two more dead men, but no Alezya.
He reached the end of the tunnel, and that was it.
Four dead men, a ripped coat, signs that she and Niiru had been there, but Alezya was nowhere to be found.
“She had to have come out either way–”
He didn’t listen to the end of his sister’s sentence; Kassein ran back to the cliff, and looked down at the impossible height. Kiera let out a faint, ragged breath behind him.
“Kassein, if she fell–”
“Don’t say it,” he cut her off angrily.
Kein growled in the distance too. He was staring down from that height, and there was nothing his sister could say that he didn’t already know. Kassein forced himself to breathe; even his throat was impossibly tight and painful. He had to find her.
He took out his blade, ignoring the protests of his sore, aching muscles as he began to climb down. Maybe she’d managed to fall on a cliff somewhere below. Maybe she’d landed in a shallow crevice, and the snow had stopped her fall. Maybe she was just stuck somewhere. Maybe she just couldn’t hear him calling her name. Maybe she couldn’t hear all his men calling her name.
Kassein climbed down, and his sister flew on Kiki, making another loop around the mountain, looking for an impossible scenario, something they might have missed. It was about a fifty-foot drop from the cliff to where Dajan and his men were searching the hill of snow and rocks.
The rain had stopped, and it was night now, dark, infinite, and cold. The temperatures were dropping scarily low, the ice-cold air biting. Kein growled in the distance, his dragon touring the entire rift as if Alezya could appear anywhere.
Kassein climbed down, looking for any crevice, any small hill, anything he could have missed between the cliff and the ground. The minutes stretched into hours. He was vaguely aware that the gorge had emptied, the men had been taken to the infirmary, and his generals and Tievin were leading the other rescues and assessing the aftermath.
Kassein couldn’t have cared less. All he cared about was this small area and finding Alezya, wherever she was.
“Commander!”
He heard Dajan’s voice and jumped down as fast as he could, not caring how painfully he landed. The Captain’s voice made it seem like they had found something, and Kassein couldn’t tell if his tone had sounded good, bad, or just shocked. He ran to them, and his heart sank as they were slowly extracting a body. They had gotten rid of most of the snow, but it took Kassein seconds to focus, and recognize that the broken mound of blood-covered limbs wasn’t Alezya. It was an older man, whose body had visibly been broken in several places in the fall; he had probably died on impact, given the state of his skull.
“Darak,” one of the nearby tribesmen gasped.
Kassein’s eyes whipped to them. That man was the Deklaan Tribe leader? The man who had spoken paled under his stare, but pointed a shivering finger.
“Tyo Darak!” he exclaimed. “Te Deklaan Kulani bastarko!”
And then, the man spat at Darak’s body.
Many other tribesmen reacted angrily too, sending obscene gestures at the dead man’s body, some of them glancing up at the mountain before they got even angrier for some reason.
