Page 90 of Iridian

Just hold on a minute!

The words remained inside me, though. I’d always known we were living on borrowed time when we came here. The fact that we were surrounded by the IDD, and that every day soldiers had to go down there to get them to back off was proof enough.

And even though I knew what was happening out there in the world, and I knew what Taland and I decided to do when we spoke in private earlier, it still came as a surprise to me. As a shock to have to leave.Now.Just like that.

But we did.

Taland put his arms around my shoulders, and I put mine around his waist. We took a moment just to breathe in, to prepare mentally, and the others waited outside to give us a little space.

We didn’t really take much with—we didn’t have a lot of things that belonged to us here. Not even the clothes we wore were really ours.

Fifteen minutes later, we walked out of the house together and we didn’t look back.

Chapter 22

Rosabel La Rouge

Soldiers ahead, at our sides, at our back.

“So, they justknoweverything?” Aurelia asked as we went down the mountain, far away from the wide pathway at the front of the house, in a much denser part of the forest that covered this mountain like a green blanket.

“If any of us has seen it, they know it,” Taland said. “The soldier who found you and brought you to us saw. The rest know where you came from.”

“That is…” Aurelia shook her head, but she couldn’t find the word she was looking for, so she never finished her sentence.

Apparently, we weren’t going to walk away from this mountain through the main pathway because it was chockfull of IDD soldiers and wards. We were going to walk away through an uncharted pathway, where there were no soldiers and no weapons and no wards to slow us down.

“Insaneis what it is,” Seth said after a moment.

“It’s okay, brother. Who knows—we might convince Tal to abandon those ridiculous ideas when this is over. I have faith,”said Radock who was walking in front of us with Zach and Amelia, and he turned and looked at Taland in such a way that I wanted to tell him to keep his eyes in front of him.

My body must have gone rigid and Taland must have noticed because his arm was still around my shoulders. He pulled me closer and kissed my temple and said, “We’re going to be just fine, sweetness. Nobody will see us.”

“You can’t be sure of that,” I muttered, even though we both knew it wasn’t the IDD who made me want to start running in the other direction right now.

“I can. Zach and Amelia created this ward themselves. They know what they’re doing,” Taland said. “Nobody’s down there. I canseeit.”

He couldseeit—meaning one of the soldiers was already at the edge of the mountain, and Taland could literally see through his eyes.

Goddess, it was like I was only now realizing what that meant. How…incrediblethat really was.

“It’s not that,” I said with a sigh.

“And my brothers can think whatever they like.” He kissed my hair. “That’s not going to change a single thing.”

I wanted to believe him, but…

“Me, too,” Zachary continued, throwing us another look with a sneaky little grin. “It would be a shame to let all of this power go. This is next level stuff, Tal. It really is.”

“Think it through is all we’re saying,” Aurelia said. “You could be invincible.” She thought about it for a second. “Youareinvincible.”

“Which makes me wonder, why in the fuck would you want to give that up?!” This from Kaid.

“Because he’s not well in the head,” said Seth. “This is sad, really. Fuckingsad.”

“Can’t you just give it to us or something? If you don’t want ‘em, give ‘em up. We’ll adopt them,” said Kaid again, and every inch of my skin rose in goose bumps.

The thought of those soldiers the way I knew them, with all the stories Taland shared,belongingto someone else to do with them as they pleased made me sick to my stomach.

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