Page 83 of Her Cruel Redemption

He shook out his hand. ‘I don’t think you needed to bite me.’

I just stood there trying to overcome my shock at seeing him. Here. In the dark near a camp of soldiers who wanted him dead. Putting his hands onme, who wanted him dead more than all the rest of them combined. I wanted to strike him with lightning, one good volt to end him once and for all, butI couldn’t grasp the threads of the static, couldn’t release it with the alcohol making me fuzzy and stupid. Sparks crackled uselessly between my fingers, but they wouldn’t gather, wouldn’t bend. I stumbled another step back. My head swooped. His gaze followed the sparks, and a savage smile pulled at his mouth.

‘Ohandyou’ve been drinking. No magic for you, then. I suppose no one told you that, either. Unless you’re walking around with a death wish these days.’ Too fast, he crossed the space between us. I stumbled backwards until my back hit a tree and I was caught with nowhere else to go. ‘Or were you hoping to be captured?’

‘Is that why you’ve come?’ I spat, trying to appear unphased by his proximity. ‘To take me prisoner?’

‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you? I’ll admit the idea is tempting.’ That vicious smile widened, darkening his eyes as he traced a finger lightly along my jaw, the contact so sudden and intimate that it caught me completely off guard and all I could manage was a sharp inhale. ‘To have you tied up and completely at my mercy. The things I woulddoto you.’ He slipped his hand down my neck, caressing my throat, letting that dark, decadent threat hang between us for a moment. And I just stood there, pulse racing, immobilised by the contact, by the shock, by the maddening sense of disappointment that followed when he drew his hand away. ‘But I’m not interested in giving you anymore excuses to deny responsibility or in feeding your delusion of me as your villain. If you were toaskme to tie you up and take you back to my bed, though, that would be another story.’

‘Then why are you here?’ I garbled the question in my speed to get it out of my mouth, to take us from the subject of being tied to beds while I scrambled to try and erect my shaky mental shields, envisioning walls and steel and fire and ice and anything to keep him from being able to fan the flames of the heat he’d wakened with his touch. I wished I hadn’t had so much to drink. It was making me blunt where I needed to be sharp. He’d risked coming to find me for a reason, and if that reason wasn’t to capture me, then what? ‘If you’re caught, I doubt they’d even wait to try you. The soldiers would string you up before anyone could stop them.’

He took a lock of my hair, wound it through his fingers. ‘So, all you’d have to do is scream and you could finish me. What are you waiting for?’

‘I want to know what you want first.’

He laughed. ‘I’m glad I still have your curiosity at least.’ He seemed to sober, releasing my hair, that wicked gleam leaving his eyes. ‘I’ve come to warn you.’

In a flash, I’d drawn the throwing knife I’d been subtly trying to loosen. Managed to brandish it before me. ‘You aren’t in the position to be making threats.’

‘I said warn, not threaten,’ he continued, as though the knife wasn’t even there. ‘You’re treading dangerous ground. You’re using magic without any concern for what it’s doing to you.’

‘You’re just getting scared because my power means we’re going to win,’ I snarled, the effect ruined slightly by the slur in the words.

‘You didn’t win today.’

‘That’s because you played dirty.’

‘Because lightning is straight-up honourable.’ A flash of anger glinted in his eyes. ‘And how are you feeling after your little stint playing with magic? Well enough to drink the better part of a brewery, I suppose. What a good idea, to treat yourself to another kind of poison right on the back of a brush with death.’

I just stared at him blankly for a few moments, before I huffed a laugh of disbelief. ‘What is this? You’ve come to scold me for not taking better care of myself? Are you fucking joking?’ I leaned closer, baring my teeth at him. ‘Have you forgotten why I’m here in the first place?’

He regarded me more soberly now, gaze tracking across my face in that way that wassofamiliar it made me want to scream. I could feel the aching pressure of it building in my chest, looking up at him, feeling that clamouring desire to hurt him again.

BecauseIwas hurting, and I wanted him to hurt with me.

‘Don’t you remember what it did to me when I pushed myself too far?’ His voice was quieter now. The memory of that tense night after Dovegni had attacked us materialized around me in an instant: mopping at his brow as he shuddered his way through a fever dream, wrapped in terror at the thought he might die. ‘That was just the baseline,’ he continued as I tried to push the memory and the feelings attached to it away. ‘The magic will get into your head if you’re not careful. Without training in mastering it, you’ll be drawn into using more than you can take. It took me a long time to find that line between wielding magic and being wielded by it, and I had help from Baba Yaga, who knew the limits better than anyone. If you push yourself again like you did today, it’ll become even more difficult to control. It’ll kill you.’

‘I don’t need or want your advice,’ I said, though some of the venom had leaked out of my tone. ‘I still hate you for all you’ve done to me. And if wielding magic is how I make you pay for it, then that’s what I’m going to do.’

He let the words hang between us just long enough for them to begin to disintegrate, to grow tattered and fragile. Because it washard,to hold these two sides of him in my head at once. The side that was here, risking himself trying to warn me. The side that couldn’t be trusted, that could turn my own emotions against me, that had tried to kill Gwinellyn, that had torn a country apart. That had promised he wouldn’t let anyone hurt me.

‘So you take revenge on me, I suffer, you get some kind of gratification out of it. But how does this end for you?’ he said. ‘A victory for them won’t be a victory for you. They fear you, my dear. You’ll never be anything other than a weapon to them, and they’ll have no use for a weapon in times of peace. As soon as they’re done using you, they’ll be working to end you.Youwill be their new villain.’

I hated how he always seemed to be able to speak the truths I was too afraid to acknowledge. Hated that he’d come here to lay such ideas at my feet. Perhaps that was his game, though. Perhaps he was here to try and turn me against my allies and what I needed to do was get away from him before he could cloud my head. I still held my throwing knife limply in my hand, all but forgotten. I’d stabbed him once before. I could do it again.

Instead, I spoke. ‘I could say the same of you. All those allies of yours. Surely they don’t all support your methods. You can’t tell me the Yoxvese with you have completely abandoned all their beliefs about violence and the sanctity of life.’

‘They don’t complain when I get results.’

‘And when they no longer need the sort of results you can get them?’

He smiled coldly. ‘Well, then I suppose we’ll see who strikes fastest.’

‘Good luck with that.’ Finally, I forced myself to move. To slip out from between Draven and the tree at my back. To where it was colder and clearer and I could think a little straighter and could stop fixating on this magnetic tension between us that seemed to keep me perpetually locked in his orbit. I should have already walked away, should have raised the alarm.

His arm shot out with the speed of an arrow, snatching at my hand. Inhaling sharply, I paused, and we stared at each other, the weight of the night pressing down on us, the contact between our hands somehow more intimate and vulnerable than when he’d had me by the throat only moments ago.

‘I didn’t expect to see you out there today,’ he said. His voice was rough. Almost a growl. ‘I never thought they’d let you fight. Not in the middle of it all.’

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