Page 140 of Lifebound

“I don’t know—let’s see. Does it bother me that you killed some men who were planning to rape me? No, it doesn’t, if I’m being honest. Does it bother me that you killed people who…wanted to kill you first? Is that right?”

“Yes. All of them tried,” he said, and he didn’t look happy about it.

I wasn’t either, but… “Then,no,Mr. Moody. It doesn’t bother me a bit.” That was the whole truth, no matter what that made me. “You know what I want to know, though?”

“What’s that?”

“Everything.”

His lips stretched into a smile that made it impossible not to give him yet another kiss. Too perfect. Too kissable.

“Justeverything?” he teased.

“Yes. I want to know about all the creatures of Verenthia and what they can do, so that I don’t end up throwing us in a different place by accident.”

“Maybe you should,” Rune whispered, and my heart squeezed. “But you’re right.”

He let go of the railing and wrapped one arm around me so that my head lay on his shoulder, and his other arm was secured around my waist.

“Are you comfortable?”

“Yes,” I said. “This might be the most comfortable place in all the worlds.”

“The rooftop of a moving carriage?” he teased again, and fuck, I loved this mood on him.

I smiled and bit the side of his neck, which then made him growl. “Just your arms.”

He nudged my head up with his chin until his lips met mine. “And you’re the purest, most beautiful thing they’ve ever held.”

My toes curled and I leaned into the kiss, tasted his tongue on mine, and let him bite my lips as long as he liked. He was magic, this man. He really waseverything.

“Go ahead, start talking,” I whispered when he stopped kissing me for a moment. I’d have loved nothing more than to keep going until the end of forever, but I really needed to know more about this place, and we needed to be aware of our surroundings while lying on the rooftop of a carriage. The rest would come a little later.

thirty-seven

The entranceof the tunnel was underneath a tree that looked like it could come alive any second and smite you with tentacle-like branches. It must have been some sort of a willow tree on steroids, with deep green leaves and roots as thick as my thighs.

We had to leave the carriage behind because you could only get to it by walking. The trees around it were too dense, like someone had planted them on purpose to protect this old giant.

Raja walked ahead.

Rune had my hand in his, and in the other was a leather bag full of food and water he’d gotten for the road. My mind was buzzing with the stories he’d told me of how the creatures here behaved and what magic they possessed and which meant which. The sky was completely dark and from here we couldn’t see the part of Verenthia that the sunlight hit nor the lake. All we saw were trees.

Raja knew exactly where she was going. Once she pushed aside the large long branches of the tree, she let us through first, and it felt like we wereinsideto be under that tree. The distant sound of birds and leaves moving with the soft wind was cut off completely.

She said nothing as she took us to the other side of the giant trunk. It was five times the width of my shoulders, if not more, and it had the strangest bark I’d ever seen, like it was made out of roots all the way up to the branches, and they slithered all around it like snakes. I’d have hesitated to go near it if Rune hadn’t been holding my hand.

When she found the spot she was looking for, Raja kneeled down and touched the thick roots that indeed looked like tentacles as they went in and out of the ground. Rune raised his other hand and let out light, three circles as big as my fist that slowly transformed into birds identical to the one he always made for me. And the birds went closer to Raja because she apparently needed to see what she was doing, find what she was looking for, which was, unsurprisingly, a root. A specific root, I figured, and when she did find it and pulled it up, it didn’t look any different than the others at its sides.

But the ground groaned and shook anyway.

Rune and I stepped back when she rose to her feet again, and I watched in awe as the roots that wrapped around the trunk moved, slithered away like living things for real, to make way for a hole in the bottom half of the tree, as well as the ground near it.

I held onto Rune’s hand with both of mine as my heart hammered, afraid and excited at the same time. The whole thing didn’t last longer than a minute, but I saw it happening with my own eyes. I saw that tree change shape and open up like it had a mouth of its own.

Fucking hell, how many more strange, terrifying, amazing things was I going to witness in this place before I left?

Raja stepped aside, then looked up at the three birds flying over us. “An unnecessary waste of energy, Rune.”

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