Page 97 of The King has Fallen
“What the hell game are you playing?”
“I’m trying to help you. We both know sometimes it takes an objective eye, looking in from the outside, to see the true picture—”
“Objective? Yilan, you name yourself my enemy. You speak treason on my King!”
“I’m trying tohelp you—”
“Why?”he rasped, then came at me, stalking across the tent like a predator ready to pounce. “I didn’t ask for your help. Why should I believe that’s what you’re doing?”
I shrugged, trying to disguise the squirm because I knew what he was really asking and I wasn’t going there.
“If you Nephilim defeat our neighbors for us, we will only have one battle to fight to win the entire continent,” I said casually, though my Kingdom had no intention of going to war, except in defense of our own borders. “You kill all the others, we have only one enemy left. You.”
“The strongest one,” he pointed out.
“Perhaps.”
He reached the cage and put a hand to the top of it, leaning in as he huffed. “We have routed most of the continent, and in these battles our biggest obstacle is the landscape, not its people. Soon we will take them as well. What possible evidence could you account to suggest otherwise?”
I didn’t answer him, because he was right. But it aggravated him.
His jaw went tight and he leaned in, muttering at me through the bars. “I am not stupid, Yilan,” he said quietly.
“Debatable,” I said lightly, teasing.
But he bristled. “I know you let me see you that first day. Now you’re helping without being asked. You kissed me in the lake—”
I leaped to my feet. “Youkissedmeat the lake!”
“And you kissed back!”
I folded my arms. “Still—”
“Look, that isn’t the point,” he growled sternly. “The point is, if you don’t want me and won’t have me, why help me? Why give yourself up, only to help? Isallof this a… a manipulation, Yilan?Do you plant thoughts in my head and feelings in my body? Are you deceiving me even beyond the things I know?” He was growing more and more agitated, gesticulating as he snarled. “Why did you cage yourself again? What game are you playing?”
“This is no game,” I said seriously.
“No, game, yet you’re playing with fire.”
I raised my chin. “God is in the fire with me.”
His eyes narrowed. “What were the words you used? Oh, right…What a fucking cop-out.”
I tensed, but at that moment a messenger called from outside the tent flap, asking Melek if he could enter.
Melek stared me down a second before answering, then bid the man to enter.
It was the young, lanky messenger again, looking a little intimidated. His eyes widened when he found Melek glaring at me through the bars and obviously already upset.
He swallowed hard as he saluted his General. “Sir. The King has heard of the… the battle plan and requests that you bring the Fetch to him.”
Melek went very, very still at that, his eyes still fixed on me in a blazing scowl. But I knew… I knew how the nerves hit him in that moment. Because they hit me too.
Adrenaline in a sharp, electric jolt. And not the good kind.
What did the King want withme?
And why now?
