Page 96 of Cursed Shadows 4

“What took you so long?” I choke through my sobs, the very sobs that rattle me and shudder my breaths as though grated.

His arms come around me.

He holds me to him.

His voice is soft, a murmur, “You made good work of masking your scent. I might admit that I’m a little impressed at just how evasive you are, heartbreaker.”

A wretched, watery smile warps my face. It’s buried in his chest. My hold doesn’t loosen.

Neither does his.

If Dare isn’t much of a hugger, he dismisses the urge to peel away from me. He allows me this moment of relief, of comfort. A flicker of what I now realise is friendship.

Maybe pity, too.

“I landed at the summit,” he murmurs into my caked hair, thick and cracked with dirt and blood alike. “To say it’s been a battle down this far is something of an understatement. Though, it is me we are talking about,” he adds, and I can just picture his lopsided grin forming, “so I cut through those litalves like they were nothing more than butter, and I looked great doing it.”

That watery smile lingers on my face.

A thick swallow bobs my throat before I slip my hands away from him.

He mirrors me, releases me, but slowly, and his hands linger on my shoulders as he takes a step back.

Golden eyes rinse over me.

He considers me, searching for injury, I think, but it’s the grim, bloody smear of my face he finally settles on. “I told you I would find you.”

My answer is wrought with sniffles, “But you are late. And if I hadn’t had luck on my side, Boil could have killed me.”

Dare’s smile is small. “He was never going to kill you. I wouldn’t have let him. I had the perfect striking spot.” He gestures over his shoulder, to the tree whose bough he took a perch on. “I only waited to see what you would do.”

I blink, once, twice, and tears fall from my lashes. “You—you sat up there and watched?” I pull out of his hold. “I was in danger!”

“Actually, I think he was the one in danger. I was prepared to strike him,” he adds with a gentle sigh, and his fingers dance fleetingly over the collection of throwing stars strapped to hisvest. “But then you seemed to have crafted a trap for him—and I wanted to see where you were going with it.”

My breath hitches, that awful shuddering tail-end of a sobbing fit still lingering.

“It was a beautiful thing.” He grins; a gesture to match the glittering gold of his eyes—to match the hungry excitement stirring deep within him. “The blood of your enemies suits you well, Nari.”

“We have different ideas of beauty,” I mutter as Dare snakes my arm into his gentle hold.

I watch, mute, as he fastens a rag around the gash along my forearm.

His voice is as soft as his hold, “But the same ideas of truth.”

I flinch.

The flutter of my lashes is quick to pass.

Dare releases my arm.

He acknowledges my ability to lie. Something he hadn’t known about me. Something that, now, the whole of fucking Comlar knows.

Father…

My eyes shut on the thought before it can blossom.

Swallowing thickly, I turn my back on Dare and scoop up my belt, weapons and all. It clatters and clangs as I re-fasten it to my waist.

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