Page 80 of The Jasad Crown

Two things happened at once. The blanket, which slipped when I tried to catch the sword’s hilt, was caught in a gloved fist. Before I could careen to the ground, Arin’s other arm went around my waist, hauling me into his chest.

Pressed together from shoulder to knee, I counted the rise and fall of his chest as though it were my own breath traveling through him. Eventually, I tipped my chin back, meeting the patient gaze above me.

“There you are.” His chuckle brushed my forehead, sending heatracing over my skin. “You want my suggestions on how you should amuse yourself?”

I gripped his lapels, viscerally aware of the brush of leather at my collarbone where he held my blanket aloft.

“I have some thoughts on the matter.” The silky pitch wrung a shiver out of me.

I shouldn’t have offered this new angle to our game, not when I was just as likely to lose. Just from standing pressed against Arin, my heart had apparently decided the inside of my chest was no longer its preferred residence and was attempting to pound its escape through my ribs.

As though he could read every thought warring in my head, a slow smile curved over Arin’s lips. I could feel every single strap of his vest against my chest. I had a notion that if I dropped the blanket, I might find their impressions stitched into my skin.

He thought he was winning.

The thought annoyed me back to myself. Seduction might not come as naturally to me, but then, seduction rarely worked on Arin anyway. How many stories had I heard in Mahair about the Nizahl Commander’s rejection of perfectly suitable royals or the most coveted women of the season? Arin’s control over himself was merciless. He allowed himself no quarter for error. As long as he remained so tightly wound, no one could ever snag a thread to unravel him.

I remembered the snide remarks I’d made to Jeru and Wes as they escorted me to the training tunnels.

Oh dear, did you thinklustovercame your Heir?My caustic laugh.Are you calling your Commander frigid?

Despite the tight fit of our bodies, I drew my arm out to grab his chin and yank his face toward me.

He offered no resistance. He let me cage his jaw in my hand, his eyes rapt on mine.

What I understood of desire wouldn’t fill the eye of a thimble, butI knew mine didn’t feel like what Marek described or what the girls at the keep gushed about. I wanted to taste his pulse and trace the sharp curve of his hip. I wanted his poison-tipped tongue and his moon-stricken hair, my nails in his thighs and my lips at his throat.

But I also wanted to crawl into his chest until the rest of the world went dark and quiet. I was losing the battle against my dread, flagging beneath the force of my uncertainty. I had been fighting alone since I was ten years old, and the thought of trusting someone else to fight for me, to fight alongside me… the force of my wanting pulled me apart, exposed every crack and scar where the world had taken a swing.

“Come back, Suraira.” Arin tilted his chin in my grip. Something seized my spine when the corner of his mouth brushed my thumb, his lips too soft for a man who rarely used them for anything other than chiseling daggers out of every conversation. “You’re hiding again.”

Suraira.Two names in my possession, yet Arin chose to name me after a Nizahlan demon of mishap said to haunt Sirauk Bridge and lure the unwary to their doom.

I rasped a laugh, and with no small amount of force, welded myself back together. Maybe someday I could rest behind someone else’s armor and trust it to hold the world away, but it wouldn’t be today.

“Hiding is what I do best.” I flashed him a grin. “You and your ocean of maps still haven’t found me.”

He offered me an arch look. “Is that what you think?”

“It’s what I know. You can try to track me until my hair is as silver as yours, but if you could have found me, you already would have.” I slid my hand from his chin to the back of his neck.

Arin swallowed, and for a second, I wondered if he had ever wanted to rest behind someone else’s armor. If he would ever trust me to hold the world away.

“Why should I bother tracking you when I need only to wait?” He pressed the words against my temple. “The moment you leave the mountains, you’re mine.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

MAREK

Covered in soot and the remains of a shredded zulal, Marek had gained a newfound respect for Sylvia.

Even with hundreds of soldiers at his side, battling the creatures infesting Galim’s Bend had taken every last ounce of his strength. The fact that Sylvia had fought her way through Dar al Mansi alone, carrying nothing more than an axe and a knife? Oh, and Al Anqa’a hadn’t been conveniently incapacitated for her, either.

Thank the Awaleen he and that girl were on the same side.

The wagon hit a bump, jostling the group of them shoved in the back. Marek groaned when his bruised arm hit the side of the wagon. Galim’s Bend had wrecked him. Holes riddled his boots, the leather eaten through by the nisnas’s corrosive blood. His hair dripped with a variety of eviscerated organs.

It shouldn’t be long until he fell into a hot bath and a warm bed. The upper towns had opened their homes to some of the recruits while the recovery at Galim’s Bend continued. Several of the more experienced recruits had been annoyed to learn Marek was assigned to the same block of nobles’ houses as them. “Who sent you tothisneighborhood after you’ve only muddied your boots once? Your mother must have left a feather by the bridge for you,” Zane had grumbled, clapping him a little too hard on the shoulder. The reference was lost on Marek, though not the general sentiment.

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