Page 7 of Tamhas

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Tamhas

I’m starting to worry about you. I hope everything is all right.

I have to ask: did I say the wrong thing? Piss you off? If so, I wish you’d just tell me.

I was hoping I would’ve heard something from you by now. I still don’t know whether to chalk you up as a ghoster (is that what it’s called when somebody ghosts on you?) or to worry that something happened to you. I do hope you’re all right.

I read message after message from her, each of them driving another knife into my conscience.

It wasn’t my fault that I’d disappeared. But there was no way to explain that. She couldn’t know that we’d been kidnapped. Those that weren’t killed.

Confessing to the kidnapping would’ve meant confessing how I lived. Confessing why I would’ve been kidnapped at all and what happened to me while I was there. Confessing who I was.

I’d already taken far too many chances by maintaining a friendship with her at all.

Owen would be back shortly to relieve me. I typed out a quick reply to Keira’s last email, dated nearly a week earlier. I’m sorry to have disappeared on you—it wasn’t by choice. All is well now. Thank you for caring, and I hope you haven’t written me off.

Once I received confirmation that it was sent, I logged out and wiped the browser history. Not that Owen didn’t have the skill to look into my records if he wanted to, but there was little reason for it. We trusted each other.

Which was a problem, since I had been anything but trustworthy.

I hadn’t sent the email a moment too soon, since Owen entered the control center before I hardly had the chance to breathe. “How does everything seem to be working?” he asked, settling down in his customary seat.

I took pains to sound as carefree as possible. The way an honest, trustworthy man would. “Fine. Fast, secure.”

“Good.” He looked and sounded exhausted, and the stress lines which had etched themselves into his forehead during the process of doubling down on our security were still present. “Let’s hope this round of upgrades leaves us safer than before.”

“We still don’t know how they found us,” I reminded him, for what seemed like the hundredth time. No matter how many times he’d agreed with me, allowed that there could’ve been any number of opportunities to suss out our location, he managed to find a way to blame himself.

He let out a growl of impatience. “Aye, I know it, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a strong possibility they traced us electronically. They knew just where we were—they landed helicopters here, for Christ’s sake.”

“I remember,” I muttered. He hardly needed to remind me of that terrible day. Like something out of the worst nightmare I’d ever had over the course of a thousand years. “Even so, there’s no need to punish yourself for what happened. It’s a waste of time, a waste of energy.”

“What would you suggest I spend my energy on, then?”

I tapped the table with my forefinger. “This. Now. Keeping us secure and undetected in the present. I’ll do everything I can to help you with it. You know this.”

“Aye,” he grinned. “And it would be helpful to me right now if you’d get out of here, so I can work in peace. You know I hate feeling as though I’m being watched.”

“All right. I’ll leave you to your logs or whatever it is you pore over.” I knew very well what he did in there all day: records of incoming activity. If anyone attempted to find us, to hack our servers in order to assess our location, he’d be the first to know.

Would that it had helped before.

We’d already spent hours talking about it after our return, while Klaus and I had assisted him in setting up a more secure system for both physical and cybersecurity. It seemed as though he needed to get it off his chest, like he wanted someone to understand how difficult Gavin had made it for him to properly secure the clan’s location.

“He didn’t believe we were under any threat from the outside because of the enchantment placed upon the woods,” Owen had explained one day while we worked. “I told him time and again that I wanted to upgrade our systems, but he was so certain that we couldn’t be reached even if someone were to discern our location.”

I could almost hear Gavin saying those very words. A good man, a fierce dragon, someone who had led our clan through centuries of peace. But stubborn, too. Obstinate. Never one to take the advice of others easily. Perhaps he might have, one day, had his life not been ended by one of the very people he’d been so certain would never find us.

Alan was not going to be accused of making the same mistakes as his predecessor.

Rather than going to my room or spending time with the clan in the common room—I heard a movie playing in there, a musical by the sounds of it, and nothing could repel me easier than that—I turned left and walked down the tunnel toward the cave entrance.

I needed to fly. I needed the chance to get my thoughts together in peace.

Or the chance to stop thinking altogether and indulge the less rational, more instinctual side of my being. I’d long since grown tired of thinking.

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