Page 31 of Shadows of Stardust

But there’s nowhere to run, nowhere I can go, no chance he wouldn’t catch me in just a couple of seconds like he’s promised.

So I’ll have to look for another opening. I’m shit at hand-to-hand combat, but the first opening, I’ll take it.

“What are you doing here?” I ask, voice rasping out hoarse from all the screaming I did behind the muzzle of his hand. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

It’s a stupid thing to say, but my mind’s not organized enough right now to be pithy, and Zandrel just gives me a long, patronizing look before he answers.

“The date ended early. Apparently the Aventri has also been carrying on with a Jurvian, which Ansalla didn’t appreciate in the slightest.”

Casual, he sounds so fucking casual right now.

My world is crumbling around me, Savvie slipping further and further away, and he’s still acting like all of this is a joke.

And to him, it probably is.

Wherever he came from, whatever kind of training he has, it probably puts this little security gig far enough beneath him to be laughable. Handling one relatively powerless human bound and determined to break out of a reality vidcomm production show probably does seem like a joke to him.

Mortifyingly,unforgivably, tears sting at the backs of my eyes. I blink them rapidly away. My half-formed plan to incapacitate him seems more and more futile with each passing moment as I take him in, study him, from his absurd height and bulk to the protective plated ridges covering his arms to the muscles beneath those plates.

Invulnerable. He’s completely, utterly invulnerable. My limited knowledge of physical combat notwithstanding, I can’t find a single place on him that looks weaker than the rest. Nowhere I could strike to give myself half a chance of escape.

I swear I can almost hear my last bit of fragile hope shatter, littering the jungle floor in a million irreparable pieces.

“Where did you think you were going?” Zandrel asks.

Instead of barbed and condescending, the question sounds almost curious. He tilts his head to one side and looks fromme, to the fence, and back again, trying to piece together what exactly is happening here.

“Nowhere that concerns you.” The words come out clipped through my teeth, barely patched together around the lump that’s lodged itself in the back of my throat.

God, I’ll never forgive myself for this.

Not just for failing to get out of here and find Savvie, but for being so damn weak, for showing that weakness to the male in front of me.

“You can tell me.”

I can’t help it, I laugh. Short and bitter, I shake my head in disgust.

“Why the fuck would I do that?”

His brow creases, and he’s just opened his mouth to say something else when a new sound pierces the night.

“Who’s out there?”

The call of a deep, masculine voice echoes through the jungle. Zandrel and I both fall silent, and the voice is echoed by the stomping of heavy, booted footsteps.

More than one set of footsteps.

This is it.

This is the part where Zandrel tells the approaching crew exactly what he saw, exactly what I was doing. This is where I get carted off the show at best, or at worst, have to face some sort of charges for trying to trespass into the Eritin wilderness.

Wildly, I look back to the fence and the eight or nine feet between me and my one best chance.

I wouldn’t make it three steps before Zandrel caught me again, so for the sake of my pride, I don’t even try. All I do is look and look and feel my heart shatter in my chest, feel my sister slipping away, for good this time. There’s not going to be another chance, there’s nothing. Nothing I can do, no way I can—

“Kiss me.”

I whirl back around to face Zandrel, and he’s closer than he was even a few seconds ago. Towering over me in the darkness, with the light from the pool casting all the hard angles of his face in an eerie aquamarine glow, he stares down at me intently, like what he just said wasn’t certifiably batshit.

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