Page 13 of Chained to the Champion
Anger hit next. Not a warm, fiery burst, but cold, sharp, the kind that cracks stone. That performance out there, his hands on me, the snarled words for the crowd, “defiant pet” in front of a ring of slaver-eyed bastards, it scraped a layer raw I didn’t even know I had.
Touch what’s mine again, and you’ll pay for it in blood.
The memory of his growl throbbed in my skull. Possessive. Threatening. Directed at everyone, except maybe not. Because he’d looked at me when he said it, like I was prey.
No.
He looked at me like I washis.
And God help me, the worst part, the part that made me wish for brain bleach, for a way to peel my own skin off and scrub it raw, a small, mutinous coil of heat had burned low in my belly. Not fear, not hatred. Something sideways, embarrassing, something an awful lot like want. Betrayal, from the inside out.
Get a grip, Cross.
I started to pace in the dilapidated little room. Three steps. Turn. Three back. The planks shivered, some catching and snagging at the soles of my boots. Splinter, pinch, ignore. Think.
I needed my mind on the same page as my body. Zarvash was Drakarn. Scalvaris’s favorite strategist, legendary for his utter lack of trust in anything soft, squishy, or human.
Not my friend, not my ally except by some spectacularly terrible accident of necessity.
He'd nearly gotten Orla killed with his machinations with the Forge Temple. Zarvash’s loyalty was only going to last as long as the tactical advantage did. I was an asset. A chess piece. Expendable. His equation had to be: How much is she worth dead? How much alive?
I couldn't trust him. Not deeply, not with my plans. With my life? It was a fool's bargain, but he was the only person I knew there, and anyone else would sell me … or worse.
That act out there? Pure theater, the sort of thing baked into the bedrock of survival in that suns-poisoned garbage heap of a planet. Nothing personal. It wasn’t supposed to feel personal. Except it did. The way his claws had wrapped around my shoulder, possessive, tight, just this side of pain, or the heat that had rolled off him, vibrating with banked violence.
I’d known exactly where I stood: one inch from the teeth, a heartbeat away from being used as a weapon or a shield.
The moment where it felt like he was defending me? It wasn't real. Couldn’t be. Just tactics wrapped up in violence. I hated that a part of me—the dumb, hormonal, lizard-lusting part—had registered something else.
I glared down at my wrists. Red, swollen, angry where the strap was biting in. I fumbled at the knot, fingers half-numb and clumsy. The thing was stubborn. I yanked, swore, and yanked even harder. Of course the bastard hadn't thought to untie me before he ran the fuck away.
The knot finally gave, the restraint falling to the ground. I kicked it across the room with a tight jerk of my leg. The relief stung. I flexed my hands, shook them out, rubbing at the sensitive places that were almost bleeding. A reminder of how bad this could all go.
Dust motes, slow-motion, spun in a lone blade of filthy sun slicing through crooked shutters. Everything smelled like sweat and old metal and the ghosts of blood and old fucking. The centerpiece of the décor: one bed. More a slab, barely wide enough for Zarvash’s wingspan, half-covered in a blanket that looked something close to clean. I didn't want to get close enough to give it a sniff.
My stomach cramped, that distinct edge of hunger making itself known. Where was Zarvash? Part of me wanted him to vanish forever and let me figure this mess out solo. It simplified the math. But the practical, unkillable survival part knew better. Getting whatever humans we could find out of Ignarath would require Zarvash.
Just setting foot in the city had been like jamming my tongue in acid. The tension there was different, meaner, broader than Scalvaris’s honest echoing danger. Scalvaris was shadowed, claustrophobic, but it didn't hide anything in those shadows. Ignarath was a wound left open under twin suns, all blood and teeth and who could bite deeper.
You walked in, and you were evaluated, weighed, flayed alive by a dozen watching eyes: predator or prey, asset or waste.
I’d hated the caves. But now? Scalvaris was starting to look like home.
Here? The way that guard had stared at me, cold calculus. The slaver’s look—what can I get for her, and how much pain can she take before it’s too much work? Even pretending, it soaked in. The powerlessness. Didn’t matter if I’d signed up. I wanted to burn that humiliation out of my bones.
Were the others looking for me? Hawk, Terra, Selene? Had they already marked me as dead, written my name on a gravestone and moved on? And then there was Kira. I hoped she wasn’t blaming herself. My mistake. My overreach, my need for answers, my faith in my abilities at the worst possible moment.
Damn it.
The ache in my stomach was starting to bother me when the door rattled. My hand shot to the knife strapped at my calf, muscles tensed tight. But it was Zarvash. Even seeing his familiar form, it took me several seconds to calm down.
He stepped in, filling the doorway: shadow and scale, tired eyes. Just a man, or dragon monster, and not at his best. I saw it, the bronze of his scales streaked with city dust, the slump in his left wing, injury hidden but not gone. He was running on fumes. Just like me.
He had a bundle in one clawed hand, steam rising, food smell laced with a tang of oil, and a battered waterskin hanging at his side. He didn't say anything, just gave a nod at the miserable excuse for a bed, then dropped the food onto its threadbare blanket.
I didn’t argue. My dignity had already moved out. I sat, tested the edge of the slab, half-worrying it might collapse under me. But Drakarn preferred stone sleeping platforms, and this was as hard as I'd come to expect.
Zarvash dropped down at the end. Proximity: suddenly way too much. The room shrank by half.
