Page 38 of Broken Fate
“Huh?” I stared stupidly. Good? How could he think my sprawled form was in any way praiseworthy? I couldn’t even sit up straight!
“You kept up longer than I thought,” he explained. “I expected you to fall behind a long time ago.”
“Are you that arrogant?” I asked, managing to get it all out in one rushed gasp of breath.
Kiel’s head fell back, and he chuckled, a rich, throaty thing that burned free some of my exhaustion. I could feel my wolf perk up slightly, too, as he bathed us in sound.
“No,” he said, the humor fading as quickly as it had come. “Not arrogant. Just aware. Maybe one day you’ll understand.”
Now, why did he sound so wistful when he said that? Why wouldn’t I understand? Did he know something about my future that I was unaware of?
“What happens now?” I half-whispered, abruptly concerned I might never leave the riverbank.
“Now?” Kiel reached up and started undoing the simple braid that kept his long hair behind his back. Then he shook his mane, letting it flow freely. “Now, we regroup.”
“Regroup?” I questioned. “But Andracis and his men, they just destroyed your base.”
Kiel shook his head. “That was a temporary stop. Truthfully, we’d probably used it for too long. That’s why they were able to find us so quickly.”
“You mean because I led them there,” I corrected. He was trying to absolve me of blame by stating that it was his and his people’s fault, but that wasn’t true at all. “I’m the one at fault. If I hadn’t raced off for my parents, dragging everyone back to Arcadia, who knows what would have happened? Everyone would be okay. Nobody else would have died bec—”
“Enough.”
Despite my fatigue, I still managed to recoil at the snarled command.
“You have to stop blaming yourself, Jada.” Kiel shook his head. “When you do, you assume everyone else around you is incapable of making any decisions or choices for themselves. Do you really believe that you control everyone? That youforcedthem to do as they did?”
“No,” I said in a voice that absolutely was not a whimper. Not at all …
“Good. Now, start acting like it. The people around you are all thinking, intelligent people. They can make their own choices. They can make their own way. Wechoseto come after you. Wechoseto break you out of jail. So, this complex you’ve got about being the focal point of all the bad needs to go. You need tolet it go. Whatever it stems from.”
I clenched my jaw, looking away. How could he understand? How couldanyonewho hadn’t been what I had understand? Watching your sister go beneath the ice. Knowing there wasn’t a thing you could do about it and, worst of all, holding on to the knowledge thatyouput her there because of your selfish actions? That was a guilt that never went away. Never diminished.
But maybe … maybe I could try to absolve myself of a bit of the responsibility for Andracis’ attack.
“He was hunting us long before you came around,” Kiel said as if reading my mind. “This isn’t the first outrider base we’ve lost. It won’t be the last. It happens. That’s the risk we run. It’s annoying howfastthey were able to find us, and once we regroup, I’ll be analyzing just how they got inside so fast without an alarm going up. But this was going to happen one way or another. With or without you. So you don’t get to be the bad guy here. Not this time. Understood?”
I nodded shakily.
“Good,” he said, standing up. “I’m going to get cleaned up.”
Silently, I watched him walk into the river until it wrapped him to his waist. Then he bent his legs and dropped below the surface. The idea of getting clean sounded appealing. Especially since I’d been lying in the mud on the river’s banks ever since shifting back.
I got to my feet, surprised my legs could still hold me, and started walking to the river—I could have just crawled to it, but my dignity wouldn’t let me.
The cool, slow-moving current had barely hit my knees when Kiel finally resurfaced. He broke the tension of the water in a burst, standing up straight and flicking his hair back as water streamed from his body. At the same moment, the sun burst over the treetops, bathing us both in its warm rays. The light glittered across his skin, reflected by the raindrops.
As the water cleared from his eyes, he started to rub his body, cleaning off the dried blood and dirt that had accumulated during the fight and subsequent run. He twisted and turned, muscles contracting and flexing, all while the water dipped dangerously low on his waist, hinting at what lay beneath but never quite revealing anything.
What caught my attention most, however, were the scars that covered him. I’d somehow missed them before, but the water highlighted them. They crisscrossed his body in all directions, a veritable maze of them.
Just what have you been through, Kiel, to gather such a collection of pain?
Without thinking about it, I slid deeper into the cold water. Moving closer to him, I approached from behind as he bathed. I saw the moment he noticed my approach. His spine stiffened, and he slowly turned toward me, his skin drawing taut over his thick, powerful pecs and defined abs.
The water shifted slightly around his waist as I drew near, my own nude body fully on display for him. We didn’t speak, but his cock swelled under the surface. A sure sign that he could sense the magnetism behind us. The force that drew me to him all of a sudden.
“No,” he said, lifting a hand to stop me.
