Page 138 of Lifebound

Rune was lying on the rooftop of the carriage on his back, his head turned to me.

Surreal.

“What…what the hell are you doing up here, Rune?!” I breathed as the wind blew against my face.

Raja was in the front with the reins of her black horses in her hands, guiding them down a very narrow pathway between dark trees. The lake was still there in the distance, glistening under the sunlight that only grazed a little bit of the sky over it. Mountains on the left and trees everywhere around us, and the wind blew my hair in my face, but I didn’t dare let go of the window frame to push it away.

“I’m trying to apologize,” said Rune, and he reached out his hand to move my hair behind my ear slowly, like he was giving me time to move away from his touch.

Just like that, everything just…changed.

Yes, I was still pissed, but suddenly nothing was as gloomy as it had been a second ago. I had no idea what the hell kind of magic this guy did to me, but he was talking, and he was apologizing, and I just didn’t care.

I wasthatscrewed.

My eyes closed and I breathed in deeply, told myself that if Rune was lying up here, it meant it was safe. The rooftop of the carriage was made out of thick dark wood and there was this metal extension all around the edges like a railing where Rune was holding on. He wasn’t going to fall, and the carriage wasn’t going all that fast. It was safe.

And we were here now, weren’t we?

“For being a dick?” I said and regretted it the next second.

I didn’t want to do this. God, I didn’t want to do this at all.

Rune smiled a little. “Pretty much, yes. You didn’t deserve that. I’m sorry.”

There were a lot of things I could think to say right now, but I shook my head because his words were like fresh water for my burning soul.

“I don’t want to fight, Rune.” I didn’t want to even argue about anything. Not now.

He leaned a little closer, touched my cheek again, pushed more of my hair away. “Me, neither.” His finger traced my jawline, my lips. “But I meant what I said earlier. This journey is as good as over.”

Stabs at my heart. “Exactly. I want to be close to you while it lasts. I don’t want to fight.”

Rune leaned over all the way until I could see the blue of his eyes from the light of the bird over our heads. “You’re too good for me, you know that? For this entire place.”

Impossible not to smile. “Help me up?”

He did. He sat up on the carriage, and he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me like I weighed nothing. I screamed a little from surprise and even Raja heard me. She turned her head to look at us, but I was on top of a moving carriage, and Rune was gently laying me down next to him, so I didn’t much care about how pissed off she seemed. I cared about breathing in deeply as I looked up at the sky and the stars, held onto one of the railings on my left, and tried to convince my heart to slow down its beating.

Meanwhile, Rune turned on his side and put an arm around my waist, hiding his face in my hair, as comfortable as if we were lying on a bed.

My eyes closed. I focused on the heat of him. Rune was here. Even if I was going to fall off, he’d never let me. He’d catch me. He always did.

For a while, we just lay there near each other, touching and breathing and feeling one another’s bodies. Incredible how fast my mind had shifted from that chaotic mess it had been in the carriage. Now it was as calm as the lake in the distance.

“I was six when I got banished,” Rune eventually whispered in my ear. “My powers were sealed, and they took me to where they take all those who suffer the same fate—to die in a part of the Neutral Lands where anything goes. It’s a piece of land that has no name, and it belongs to no one because it was cursed centuries ago. Nothing grows on it, and no magic works properly, and everybody does pretty much whatever they want there. They eat whoever they want. Nobody lasts long in that place.”

My heart fell on her face. What in the actual fuck? “They put you there when you weresix?!”

“Yes,” Rune said. “I stayed there until I was eight.”

“My God, Rune.” I dug my fingers into his forearm becausefuck!

“It was okay. I knew how to survive. I was fine,” he said, but that was bullshit. He had beensixyears old!

“But you were just a kid. Who could possibly be so cruel as to takea kidto a cursed land where he could beeaten?!” That was far more cruel than anything I’d ever heard before.

“The Midnight King,” Rune simply said. “He banished me. And when I was eight, The Seelie Queen brought Lyall to see the no man’s land, to know it, to understand what it was and what it meant. She took educating him very seriously. Wanted him to see everything that existed in Verenthia since he was a child, too.”

---