Page 51 of Lifebound

And he slipped around the corner of the building in one fluid movement, like he didn’t own a damn bone in his body.

Wait! Come back!

The words got stuck in my throat. I squeezed my eyes shut and breathed in deeply, tried to calm my nerves. There was nobody here—nobody—and if there were, they wouldn’t be monkey monsters coming to devour me—they would be people.Please let there only be people…

But my panic, thankfully, was very short-lived because Rune came back possibly less than two minutes later. I had just gotten my breathing under control again when he simply materialized from around the corner and stopped in front of me, looking down at me like he was still making up his mind whether to kill me and pretend he never saw me in the woods, blame it on the fucking monster monkeys.

Now that I thought about it, it would have actually been easy.

“Where w—” I stopped talking when he raised his hands and showed me what was in them—a piece of fabric.

A red scarf with thin golden threads here and there that you could only see from close up. And he put it right over my head.

“What the hell?!”

I tried to get away, step aside. He put his leg between mine and pinned me in place.

“It’s clean. And you need to wear this at all times. Cover your face as much as you can.”

I looked up at him, dumbfounded, as he tied the scarf underneath my chin, and then tucked my hair in—withoutmy permission, I might add.

“Do I need to remind you thatnobody here saw me or knows who I am!” I hissed, and I had the good sense to put my hands on his chest—how in the fuck is he so strong?!Seriously, his muscles were like steel—and push him back until I had some space to breathe.

His proximity wasnotgood for my health. Or self-respect.

“True,” he said, and now he was slightly smiling, not disgusted in the least as he took me in.

“I don’t need a stupid sc—” I made to grab that thing and take it off, but his hand closed around my wrist and stopped me.

He towered over me once more and whispered, “There are a lot of creatures here who prey on beauty. We don’t want to call attention to ourselves, remember?”

“Well, I—wait, what?” Did he sayprey on beauty?

“The less people see of you, the better,” he continued and let go of my wrist.

I was grinning now. “Oh—so you think I’mbeautiful?”

It was meant as teasing. Rune seemed to bring that side out in me—I wanted to tease him as relentlessly as I did Betty, but with him I was pretty sure it was a side effect of the nervousness he made me feel because of this physical attraction I seemed to have to him.

Either way, I meant it as a joke.

Rune didn’t even smile, the asshole, simply said, “You are.”

Just like that, he took all the fun right out of it. Made it…unimportant.

“A lot of creatures here will go to great lengths to own a face like yours even if they don’t know who or what you are.”

Ugh.Own a face? Was he serious?

I waved him off. “Whatever. Let’s just find somewhere to eat.” I pulled the scarf lower until it fell to the middle of my forehead. “This good enough?”

Again, he analyzed me with that same focus, then leaned in and pulled the knot he’d tied over my chin so it covered my bottom lip completely. “This is.”

I rolled my eyes. “You still think I’m beautiful.” Again, this was meant to tease him, but this guy, for all his changing moods, seemed to have no sense of humor in his veins.

“Mermaids are beautiful, too. They are still mermaids.”

“I beg your pardon—did you saymermaids?” And in my mind, the image of Ariel with the long red hair and the green tail and the purple shells for a bra, came alive.

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