Chapter 116: Don’t Touch Her

Liona’s POV

He pulled his fist back.

The gold in his eyes had not faded. It was still there, burning at the edges of the grey, and he was looking at me the way people looked at things they genuinely could not make sense of. Not angry exactly. More like someone who had encountered something that did not fit any category they had prepared for.

"You would throw yourself in front of a wall of stone," he said. "For her."

"I would do a lot more than that," I replied.

He studied my face. Not quickly. With the particular patience of someone who was used to taking their time with things because they had always had enough of it. His gold eyes moved across my face like he was reading something written there.

"She has done something to you," he said. "Twisted your thinking. Made you believe her life is worth more than your own."

"Nobody made me do anything." I kept my arms out. My back against the rocks. "I chose this. I choose it every time."

"That is what the enchanted always say," he replied. Quiet. Certain.

He reached for my face.

I flinched before I could stop myself. The instinct came faster than the thought, my whole body pulling back slightly from his hand coming toward me.

He stopped.

His hand stayed where it was, suspended in the air between us, and something shifted in his eyes. The burning quality of the gold softened. Not gone. Just less sharp than it had been a moment before. He pulled his hand back slowly.

"Fine," he said. "I will not touch her." A pause. "But you have to move."

I shook my head.

I folded my arms across my chest. The movement pulled at my ribs and lifted my breasts slightly. I kept my face completely neutral and held my position.

His eyes dropped.

Just for a second. But long enough.

I followed his gaze down to my own chest. Then back to his face.

My arms stayed crossed.

"My eyes are up here," I said. "You pervert."

He looked up. Something crossed his face that was not quite a smile and was definitely not nothing. He reached up and brushed his white hair back from his face with one hand, a slow unhurried gesture.

"I promise," he said. "I will not hurt her."

I looked at his face. The structure of it. The grey eyes were steadier now than they had been thirty seconds ago. I looked at him the way Azura looks at her mate to show him she is serious, not just at the surface of them but at what was sitting underneath.

"Then do as I say," I said. "Whatever happens, you do not hurt her. Not a mark," I took a breath before dropping the last sentence.

"Unless you want me to destroy whatever we have."

The sound that came out of him was low and deep and it was not a word. It landed somewhere in my chest before I understood what it was and the goosebumps came up on my arms before I had given them permission to. Not the pleasant kind. The kind that came when something in your body understood a danger that your mind was still catching up to.

He stepped closer.

He bent down. Lowering himself until his face was level with mine, close enough that I could see the detail of his features, the sharpness of his jaw, the particular way the grey of his eyes caught the light coming through the trees.

"Do not," he said, his voice dropping to something that was barely above a whisper, "ever say those words with that pretty mouth of yours."

I swallowed.

I made myself hold his gaze. I made myself not step back. My heart was going considerably faster than I wanted it to be going and I kept that information entirely to myself.

"Then keep your promise," I said. "You said you would not hurt her."

He held my gaze for a long moment. Then he straightened up. He looked down at me from his full height with those grey eyes that gave nothing away and everything away at the same time.

"I will not hurt her," he said. "You have my word."

That was when I stepped away from the rocks.

He raised his fist.

"Wait." I moved forward slightly. "Do not hit too hard. The rocks could fall inward. She might be close to..."

Too late.

One punch. His fist connected with the wall of stone and the sound of it was not the sound of a fist hitting rock. It was the sound of rock deciding it did not want to be a wall anymore. Everything gave way at once, the stones crumbling and separating and falling, dust erupting into the air in a thick pale cloud that moved outward in every direction.

When the dust settled, the entrance was open.

He stood at the threshold. Not moving. Just looking into the darkness beyond it. His breathing was even. His hand at his side looked the same as it had before he put it through a wall of stone.

I did not wait and moved past him and into the cave.

The cold hit me immediately. Damp air. The smell of old stone and something underneath it that I could not name. The darkness was heavy, the kind that had been sitting undisturbed for a long time.

I looked around. My eyes adjusted. The shapes inside the cave came forward from the dark slowly.

Then I saw her. She was on the ground.

Lying on her back with a book clutched against her chest, both arms wrapped around it, her bag beside her. Her eyes were closed. Her face was pale in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.

She was not moving.

"Azura." I was already running. Already dropping to my knees beside her. "Azura, wake up."

I grabbed her shoulders. Shook her gently. Then less gently.

"Wake up. Come on. Look at me. Please."

Nothing. Her head moved with the shaking but her eyes stayed closed and her face stayed pale and the book stayed pressed against her chest like her arms had decided to hold it even when everything else had stopped.

"Do not do this." My voice broke somewhere in the middle of that sentence. "Come on. Wake up. Please wake up."

Tears fell from my face onto hers. I felt them fall and I did not stop them and I did not stop shaking her and she did not open her eyes.

"Azura. Please."

Footsteps behind me.

His boots were on the stone floor of the cave, slow and deliberate, moving toward us from the entrance. I heard them and I moved before I thought about it. I was on my feet and between him and Azura before the pain from my ribs finished sending its message about that decision.

"Do not touch her," I said.

He looked at me. Then at Azura on the ground behind me. His grey eyes were steady and completely unreadable.

"She is alive," he said.

He moved toward her and I moved with him, keeping myself in the path, which he navigated around with the calm of someone who had decided that arguing about it was not the most efficient use of the next thirty seconds.

He crouched beside her. He reached out and touched her neck, two fingers, holding them there for a moment.

"Alive," he said again. "But she needs warmth. Somewhere safe and warm to come back from wherever she went."

I looked at him. "You think I am going anywhere with you."

He looked up at me. That almost-smile crossed his lips again. "You are going to be difficult, aren’t you?"

He stood. He looked toward the entrance.

"Get the other lady," he said.

I frowned. He was not talking to me. I turned.

A man walked through the cave entrance. Tall, broad-shouldered, dark-haired, with horns rising from his forehead that curved back in the same shape as the Dragon King’s. He moved with the ease of someone completely familiar with walking into places other people found intimidating.

I looked past him.

Outside the cave, in the clearing that had been empty when we arrived, there were men. Dozens of them. Standing in organized positions throughout the clearing, armed and still and completely unbothered by the fact that they had appeared from nowhere.

I looked at them. Then at the cave entrance. Then at the Dragon King.

"Where did they come from?" I said.

The horned man reached the Dragon King and stopped. He inclined his head slightly.

"Everything is secured, your Highness."

"Perimeter clear?"

"Yes, your Highness."

The Dragon King looked at Azura on the ground. Then at the horned man.

"Get that one."

The horned man moved toward Azura. I stepped in front of him before he got close enough to crouch down.

"Do not touch her," I said.

He stopped. He looked at me. Then he looked at the Dragon King with the expression of someone waiting for clarification on a situation that had introduced a variable he had not been briefed on.

The Dragon King walked toward me.

I did not know what he was going to do and I was not fast enough to respond to whatever it was before it happened. His hands found me, one under my back and one under my knees, and he lifted me with the complete absence of effort that he seemed to apply to everything that should have been difficult.

"What are you doing?" I pushed at his arm. "Put me down. Azura is still..."

The cave was gone.

Between one breath and the next, between the word still leaving my mouth and the breath that was supposed to come after it, the cave was simply gone. The cold stone, the dark, the sound of the horned man’s boots, and the distant noise of dozens of men in a clearing, all of it gone between one moment and the next without any transition between them.

I stopped talking and looked around.

Stone walls with warm light coming from a fire burning in a large hearth against the far side of the room. A bed with rich dark fabric. High ceilings. The smell of warm air and something burning clean in the fire. No cave. No clearing. No Azura.

My heart started going very fast.

He set me down on the bed. Carefully. The same care that kept showing up in the places I did not expect from him, surfacing between all the other things he was.

I tried to stand immediately.

My ribs made their position on that extremely clear. I fell back against the bed and the sound that came out of me was not something I was proud of.

"You need rest," he said. He had stepped back. He was standing a few feet away with his arms at his sides, watching me with those grey eyes.

"I do not need anything from you." I pushed myself up on my elbows. "Take me back. Right now. Take me back to where Azura is."

He did not move. He did not speak.

"Did you hear me?" I looked at him directly. "Take me back to my friend. Now."

He turned. He walked toward the door with the same unhurried pace he moved through everything. His hand found the frame. He stopped.

He turned his head just slightly. Enough that I could see the side of his face. The jaw. The white hair falling around it.

"She is safe," he said quietly. "The men I left will not harm her."

"I do not care about your men." My voice was rising and I let it rise. "I want to be with her. She needs me. You do not understand what she is going through in there and you do not get to decide..."

"You are no good to her with broken ribs." He said it plainly. Not unkindly. Just as a fact being placed on a table. "Rest. Heal. Then you can go back."

He walked out.

The door closed.

I sat in the silence of a room I did not recognize in a place I did not know and stared at the closed door and felt the anger moving through me in waves that my body was too hurt to do anything useful with.

I grabbed the nearest pillow.

I threw it at the door as hard as I could.

"I am not your prisoner!" The words bounced off the stone walls and came back at me. "Do you hear me? I am not your anything!"

The door did not open.

Nobody answered.

I fell back against the bed. My ribs made their complaints. I ignored them and stared at the ceiling and thought about Azura lying on the cold cave floor with a book pressed against her chest and her eyes closed and the colour gone from her face.

She was safe, he had said.

She is safe.

I pressed my lips together and looked at the ceiling and tried to decide whether I believed that.

The fire crackled in the hearth.

The door stayed closed.

I was alone.