Page 80 of A Warrior's Fate

So instead, Isla focused on what the rest of her wanted, what it felt. The slightest bit of relief to have one of her secrets out in the open, but also fear, anger, guilt, and defiance. Maybe too much to handle after the emotional drainage she’d already gone through.

“So, what if he is?” she said softly, stepping away, only to gasp as Sebastian roughly manhandled her collar—as only a brother would—and pulled it back to check her neck.

“Did he mark you?” His voice was a mix of overprotectiveness, surprise, and maybe…excitement as he inspected the skin.

“Get away.” Isla swatted at him, adjusting her clothes. “He didn’t.”

Sebastian moved back, a breath of disbelief from his mouth. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because…” Isla trailed off, directing her eyes anywhere but at them. Just the rocks, the granules of dirt, the cool water flowing down the ravine. Even with the sense of inevitability that had hung above the truth being revealed at some point, she hadn’t prepared what to say. “Because it doesn’t matter,” she eventually settled for. “We aren’t doing anything. We aren’t accepting the bond.”

“You rejected him?” Sebastian again, spoken quick as a whip.

“No.” Isla wrapped her arms around herself, feeling the stickiness of the sweat percolating on her skin. “And he didn’t reject me. We’re just forgetting we ever met and moving on.”

Simply saying it all out loud made her feel just as crazy as the night they’d started their grand scheme in the garden.

“Does it work that way?”

Sebastian again, and Isla found herself toeing at a rock protruding from the russet-tinted earth. “It has to.” And at his follow-up question of why, she met his eyes. “Because it’s what we want.”

The “we” felt different off her tongue this time.

We.

They were a “we”, an “our”. Their bond—a little universe drawn between their souls—vast and endless and mystical and wondrous and theirs. Only theirs. No council or otherworldly force would decide for them what they did with it. If they wanted to live their lives separately, they would. And if they’d decided they had wanted to tread through existence and eternity together—

“Why keep the dagger?”

Now Adrien spoke up after spending some time in observational silence.

Isla turned to look at the Heir, his eyes more golden than green in the early forays of dusk, and still barely readable. But his words—not at all about Kai or her forsaken bond—clued her in enough on where his head was. What he had in mind was either not worth saying in his eyes, or so bad he didn’t want her to hear it.

She sighed, perfectly fine with his disposition for now, but knew something was coming, if not for the slightest flare of his nostrils, but because she knew he couldn’t be silent. Not about something like this. She fought away the nagging feeling of guilt and focused.

Now how much should she share? The bond was out there, but how much further down the rabbit hole would she bring them? Where would she even start?

“Lukas knew who I was when I went to see him,” she began, moving closer to her bag, debating internally on whether she wanted to brandish the marker and explain—eventually. “I don’t know if he remembered me, or if someone told him who I was, but they gave him that dagger to get himself free. And then gave him these ultimatums regarding whether he killed me or took me ‘somewhere’. I want to make sure there’s nothing I can figure out from it before I let it get buried with everything else.”

The boys had gone entirely still as she spoke, barely catching on her latter dig. And even without ties or tethers or connections, she could sense the rage simmering beneath the surface. Worse than it had been in the infirmary when they thought she’d just been attacked.

“Where?” Adrien asked, eyes narrow and voice rasped.

“We didn’t get that far,” Isla said, curling her fists—though not out of anger. She felt the phantom warmth of Lukas’s blood on her hands again, the feeling, the memory making her shudder. He’s alive.

“Who would bring that to him? Who got it in? We canvased. He was guarded non-stop.” Something that struck as shame lingered in Sebastian’s tone like he couldn’t believe that they’d allowed her to get in that position, that they’d let that happen to her. “Who would want you dead?”

The big question.

“He mentioned a nurse who’d come in to see him.” Isla felt the weight lift from her shoulders bit by bit with every word she spilled. But there were limits. There had to be limits. “A second one we hadn’t accounted for and the infirmary probably didn’t know about either. He never said if it was a man or woman, but he mentioned a ‘he’ when he had the dagger on me.”

As she’d spoken, her eyes had flitted back and forth between them but remained mostly on Sebastian, hesitant to look Adrien in the eye. But when she did dare pass her gaze over the Heir, she had to double back. There was a gnawing in her gut, a little voice in her head that clued her in on what the shifty look on his face meant, and as if the words had been whispered in her ear by that tiny thing for her to relay, she asked carefully, “Where is he now?”

“Heading to Valkeric.”

There was no remorse in her friend’s voice. It was mostly flat. Could’ve been considered indifferent if it weren’t for the aggravation that still lingered. Isla wished she knew exactly what was bothering him most. What she’d said about Lukas or—

Focus.

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