Page 135 of Feralheart

Lyndie sat and pulled her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. “They’re not going to make it easier. They want us dead.”

“Even the high lords and ladies,” Reece said. “Who’d have thought?”

Grief made Selira’s breathing jagged. She’d curled up where she’d landed. Rising, I walked over and lay down beside her. Her wing flopped over me, her body forming a wall between me and the rest of the camp.

Protecting. Mine.

Her grief pressed into my chest until I couldn’t tell where hers ended and mine began.

How many of us would die tomorrow?

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

FEN

The bond felt like a door I’d kicked open without checking to see what might be on the other side first. It was dark there, and a cliff waited. If I wasn’t careful, I’d fall.

I stood beside Aristus on the black sand shore, my fingers finding the ridge above his eye where the harness’s noseband had sat for most of his life. The scales there were smoother than the rest, worn down by leather and metal and my refusal to see what I was doing.

Twenty-three years of pressure. The proof had been carved into his body.

Since removing the harness, the connection between us had changed.

Before, it had been like speaking through water, muffled, delayed, and filtered through runes that transformed every communication into something controllable. Now it still felt distant, but also raw. Emotions bled through in a way they never had before.

My hands ached with the need to do something about it.

His breathing came easier without the harness’s throat latch restricting it. But his responses felt confused, cycling through relief and anger and hope so fast I couldn’t keep track.

I pressed my fingers against his neck, feeling for the pressure points where the leather had dug deepest. He didn’t pull away, but he didn’t lean into my touch either. Just tolerated it, the way he’d tolerated everything I’d done to him.

I did this to you. The thought arrived completely formed in my mind.

Tension locked into my shoulders, the same rigid stance I’d used during council meetings when my mother was watching. Except no amount of perfect posture would fix what I’d done.

Through the bond, Aristus tested our new connection, and I found confusion, mainly. He’d spent most of his life with me telling him what to feel, what to do, and how to exist. He didn’t know how to just be.

Neither did I.

He reached for me. This wasn’t the commanded response I’d trained into him, but a tentative nudge. Testing to see if I’d flinch or force an answer.

I didn’t know how to receive it. My instinct was to redirect it, make it something I could control.

I held still and let his unease wash through me until I couldn’t tell which of us felt more lost.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

The words felt inadequate. Worse than inadequate. Obscene.

I dragged air into my lungs, breathing in and out the way I’d been taught to manage panic. Except this was grief, and I’d never been trained to handle that.

Aristus’s head turned, his eyes finding mine. Intelligence looked back at me, and something else underneath. Not forgiveness. Maybe the possibility of it, if I proved myself worth the effort.

That hurt worse than anger ever could.

The tremor in my hands had worked its way up to my elbows. I couldn’t make it stop, couldn’t lock it down the way I’d been trained. The control I’d spent my life perfecting had cracked, and I didn’t know how to seal the fissure.

“Your Highness.”