Page 71 of Lifebound

“I don’t need to.”

“Do fae not eat often?”

“We can eat as much as we like. But we don’t need to more than once a day, maybe once in two days. Food it not our primary source of energy. Magic is.”

I nodded, as if that made perfect sense.

“Your hair is wet,” I noted.

“I bathed when you were asleep. It was safe.” He said it like he wasjustifyingthe fact that he’d left me alone to go clean himself up.

It made me feel…strange.

But more than that—the image of Rune in that rusty tub full of steaming water, stark naked and washing himself slowly…fuck.

I swallowed the last of the food hard. This was getting out of hand fast.

I needed to get ahold of myself faster.

“Why are you flustered?”

My eyes met Rune’s and now he was smiling, and my heart forgot how to beat.

Lie, Nilah, lie!

“I, um…the food. I don’t know but it hit my stomach like rocks.” There, that was a lie.

“The food smelled perfectly fine.” He raised a brow, looked at my empty plate.

“Maybe my stomach was sensitive then,” I countered, and it didn’t much matter if he believed me or not, just that he stopped talking about how hot my cheeks felt. Jesus Christ, I was going to make a fool out of myself before the day was over.

“You’ll be all right,” Rune said and stood up. “Time to go.”

I held back a sigh of relief and stood up, too. With the scarf pulled over half my face, I kept my eyes on his feet and followed him outside.

The day seemed to be a bit colder, which suited me perfectly. My muscles were sore, just like I knew they would be, but after a few feet they heated up and the pain gradually faded away. I’d be able to walk—and thank God I’d chosen to wear the most comfortable sneakers I owned. They’d be ruined by the time I made it back home, but it would be totally worth it.

I had no idea in which part of the Neutral Lands we were, but the people here were all the same, especially now that it was morning, and everyone was out and about their business. Rune walked ahead and I followed, sneaking looks at the creatures here and there as I went. Impossible to help it, and it was the perfect distraction to these thoughts in my head that wouldn’t stop coming.

Was I ovulating? Because it felt like it, but I didn’t have my phone with me to check my app, and I never bothered to memorize dates—who did? I must have been, though, because Rune leaned back to grab my hand when a larger group of people turned the corner of a two-story building and came onto the main street, and my insides clenched and my pussy was on fire.

Definitely ovulating.

Or maybe I just needed to touch myself and get this over with quickly, get it all out of my system—exceptwhencould I possibly do that?

Eventually, though, the walking and the people and thoughts of his shadow magic got the best of me, and I was no longer so caught up on how my hand felt in his. I asked him questions about this or that creature, and apparently the namefomorianreferred to anything at all that wasn’t a species on its own but was a product of magic gone wrong or an offspring of two different species that had had no business creating an offspring in the first place—like the Twinborn.

“They’re one of the oldest fomorians. They say they have giant blood in them,” Rune explained, and in my mind, all I could see was Tuck and Tucker bickering and slamming their heads onto one another.

“Oh, God, Rune. Doesn’t that mean giants have two heads?”

“Most have three according to the stories,” he said, and my stomach turned. “But nobody has actually seen a giant in centuries, so we don’t know for sure.”

I looked up at the sky and tried to imagine a foot as big as a mountain falling over us.

“Hey, you don’t need to be afraid.” Rune was looking down at me, the corners of his lips curled up.

“We’re talking about three-headed giants here.” Of course, I was going to be afraid.

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