Chapter 47: Allies [1]

Ten paces away, frozen half-in and half-out of a thick wall of ferns, stood Raven Harbringer.

Her short, dark hair was messy, clinging damply to her pale forehead. Her jaw was entirely unhinged, hanging slack in pure, unadulterated shock. Her dark eyes, usually as flat and emotionless as obsidian, were blown wide, darting from Cane’s bare, sweat-glistening chest, down to his hands buried in the bare ass of their team leader, and settling squarely on Yelena’s completely exposed, flushed breasts.

For two agonizing seconds, nobody breathed. The entire forest seemed to hold its breath.

Yelena shrieked.

The sound was a panicked, high-pitched squeal. She scrambled backward against the bark, her arms crossing frantically over her chest in a desperate, flustered bid for modesty. Her elbows pinned her bare tits, squishing the pale mounds together into an absurdly deep cleavage that somehow made her look ten times more naked than before. Her skirt was still bunched around her hips, her thighs trembling as she looked at Raven like she had just been sentenced to the gallows.

Cane, however, didn’t flinch.

He slowly pulled his hands back, wiped a smear of Yelena’s saliva from the corner of his mouth with the back of his thumb, and turned his head toward the intruder.

He lifted a lazy, unbothered hand and offered a cheerful, friendly wave.

“Hey, Raven. You’re a little early.”

Cane lifted his arm high and waved.

Not a casual flick of the wrist. Not a discreet, shoulder-level twitch of greeting. He threw his whole shoulder into it, carving massive, sweeping, wildly unnecessary arcs through the woodland air with his entire arm, the sort of exuberant, two-handed pantomime usually reserved for weeping deckhands waving farewell to transatlantic steamships leaving harbor. The muscles of his bare chest flexed with the exaggerated motion, sweat catching the broken beams of sunlight filtering through the canopy.

Raven just stood there at the edge of the tree line.

Her jaw hung completely unhinged. She did not blink. A dead leaf drifted down from an overhead bough, bounced off the curve of her shoulder, and tumbled into the ferns, and still her dark eyes remained fixed in a stare of pure, paralyzed incomprehension. It was the exact look an otherwise reasonable person might level at a plow horse that had suddenly cleared its throat and begun reciting court poetry in perfect high imperial verse.

Slowly, agonizingly, her gaze crept down from his cheerful, grinning face to the girl pinned against the oak beside him.

Yelena was still half-collapsed against the gnarled bark, her breath catching in wet, frantic hiccups. Her hands were clenched into tight, trembling white fists, desperately bunching the torn fabric of her cropped blouse together over her bare breasts. The silk did an abysmal job of hiding anything; the pale, rounded mounds of her tits were squeezed together into an absurdly deep, quivering cleavage, capped by rose-pink nipples that poked defiantly against the thin cotton. Her skirt remained hitched well above her hips, bunched in wrinkled folds around her waist, leaving the smooth, milky swell of her plump thighs and the flushed curve of her bare hips completely naked to the afternoon draft.

Raven’s eyes tracked every square inch of the wreckage. They slid from Yelena’s swollen, reddened lips down to her heaving chest, drifted over the bare, damp skin of her thighs, and then traveled all the way back up to Cane’s face.

He could practically hear the iron gears inside her skull grinding against one another, stripping their teeth as they attempted to jam this catastrophe into any recognizable version of the tactical operation she had planned for the afternoon. Her brow furrowed, smoothed out, and then violently collapsed into a furious knot.

Her arm came up stiff as a pike. Her index finger leveled itself like a loaded crossbow—not at him, but directly at Yelena.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

The question tore out of her, raw and incredulous.

Cane stopped his sweeping wave, letting his hand drop to his side. He turned his head and looked at Raven. Then he rotated his chin and looked down at Yelena, whose golden-brown eyes were dilated with pure, apocalyptic horror. Then he turned back and looked at Raven.

He repeated the sequence twice more, slow and deliberate, like a tired proctor double-checking the answer key on a trick question.

He let his shoulders rise in a lazy, unbothered shrug.

“I was making out with her.” He gestured between his bare chest and the half-naked noble girl shivering against the tree trunk. “Which, honestly, I’d have thought was fairly self-evident from the context, the trees, and the general lack of shirts.”

Raven choked.

A sound halfway between a cough and a strangled hiss escaped her throat. Her pale cheeks, usually as cold and unreadable as carved marble, flushed a hot, violent crimson.

“I—I know that!” she stammered, the words tripping furiously over her tongue. “Obviously I know that! I have eyes! But that doesn’t—who is she? Why are you doing that with her? Why is any of this happening in the middle of a fucking exam?”

She waved her clenched fists in the air, the stiff, disciplined posture of an elite scout shattering into chaotic gestures.

“You’re supposed to be—we had an arrangement! You were supposed to be securing ground! Instead I walk thirty paces into the brush and find you shirtless, with your hands buried in—”

The sentence derailed completely. She snapped her teeth shut, her chest heaving against her tight academy uniform, the fabric pulling taut across the firm, athletic swell of her breasts. Finding herself entirely out of words, she simply planted her boots into the moss and glared at him with enough murderous intensity to turn wet timber to ash.

Cane’s lips curled, the lazy smile sharpening into a slow, devilish smirk.

“Are you jealous, Rave?”

The question was sweet as spun sugar, dripping with insolent amusement.

The glare she gave him in response was hot enough to ignite a small brush fire. Her lips peeled back over white teeth, her mouth opening to deliver what Cane was reasonably certain would have been a deeply creative and anatomically impossible sequence of threats.