Kinked

glowing like a flame lit from within. Her feminine scent bore a clean, sharp freshness, like she had captured a slice of the wild March wind and brought it with her.

The seat beside her was empty.

It was his seat.

Of course it was.

He looked around at the large, packed plane. It was filled with mostly human passengers, although he caught sight of one or two of the Elder Races dotted throughout the cabin. No other visible Wyr. There wasn’t another empty seat anywhere in sight.

Of course there wasn’t.

He looked down at the person who occupied the aisle seat. A young teenage boy, maybe thirteen years old, sat hunched over an electronic game.

“Hi,” Quentin said to him.

The boy grunted but didn’t look up.

“I’ll give you a hundred dollars if I can have the aisle seat,” Quentin said.

That brought the boy’s head up. As he opened his mouth, a woman from across the aisle snapped, “You’ll do no such thing. Robert, ignore that man. Never take money from strangers.”

“But mom,” the kid said as he blinked up at Quentin. “It’s a hundred dollars and it’s just an aisle seat.”

“Get over here! Change places with me.” Quentin rubbed the bridge of his nose, watching as the boy got up. Resignedly, he shoved his pack into an overhead compartment, slipped out of his jacket and stuffed it underneath the seat in front of his, then he slid into the middle seat, buckled himself in and crossed his arms.

He was over six feet tall. Aryal was just a few inches shorter than he was. Together they were packed in like sardines, their arms, hips and thighs touching. Her heat and energy washed over him, sharp like vodka straight from the freezer but hot like mulled whiskey.

“Before you say a word to me, shut up,” she muttered out of the side of her mouth. “If I have to look at you, I’m going to punch you.”

God, yes. Adrenaline flooded his system. He was ready and itching for the fight, but there was nowhere to take it. If they started to brawl here, they might blow out the side of the plane and take everyone else aboard down with them.

On his right side, the mother of the teenage boy heaved herself into the aisle seat and glared at him. He said, “It was just a hundred dollars, and just the aisle seat.”

“Don’t talk to my boy again,” Mom told him.

Jesus. He let his head fall back against the seat with a thunk. He had to fly nine fucking hours like this. It was a goddamn pressure cooker.

Something was bound to explode. If something didn’t let up soon, he thought it might be him.

The flight attendants did their show-and-tell while the plane taxied into position and accelerated down the runway, lifting into the air with a mechanical roar. Cranky Mom on his right played Sudoku with a pencil. On his left, Aryal finished flipping through her magazine and dropped it onto her lap. He glanced sideways at it. Somehow she had found the time to buy a copy of Rolling Stone.

Aryal mimicked his position, crossing her arms and tucking her elbows tight against her side, while she leaned as far away from him as she could get, hunching against the interior wall of the plane and glowering out the window.

The relief at the inches of space she managed to put between their torsos was marginal compared to the upsurge of irritation Quentin felt. She had no fucking tact. None whatsoever. Her body language screamed that she would do almost anything to get away from him—anything except deplane.

Besides, she could lean sideways all she liked, but the seats were so goddamn miniscule, their thighs still touched. He looked down at the length of her legs alongside his. Her bone structure and musculature were slimmer than his, undeniably feminine while also strong and athletic.

He had watched her bouts at the Games. Hell, of course he had. Like most of the contestants, he DVRed the bouts so that he could go through them again, analyzing each fighter’s strengths and weakness. He had pored over Aryal’s fights time and time again. It was only smart to study his enemy in an effort to discover any weakness.

During the Games, the contestants had their own box. Once they had gotten far enough through the rounds that the contestants’ numbers were limited, the new contenders mingled with the five sentinels, exchanging sharp, assessing glances and friendly smiles. When he wasn’t competing, Quentin had lived in that box.

Aryal fought with power and confidence. When she struck, she was fast as a snake, and the one time she chose to change into her Wyr form, she rioted across the sands of the arena like a joyous minitornado.

The sight was so magnificent, Quentin was on his feet before he realized it, along with the rest of the stadium. She laughed as she fought, her face vivid and wild, talons out and flashing in the white-hot lights, and everything about her aligned.

She never once lost command of the placement of those huge, gray-to-black wings, and once when her opponent, a massive, thousand-plus-pound polar bear, lunged to strike at her, she leaped into an aerial cartwheel that carried her soaring over his head. As she had flown over him, she reached down in an almost leisurely movement, the talon of one finger extended, and raked a thin, teasing cut along his muscled back.

It was a blatantly gratuitous maneuver, but it was so precisely executed, and the smile on her face was filled with such feral gaiety, Quentin found himself shouting along with all the others. In that moment all thoughts of resentment were temporarily suspended for sheer love of the artistry she displayed with such abandon. She owned that fight from beginning to end.

When she put her opponent on the ground for the last time, Grym, who had been leaning against the box railing beside Quentin, straightened and threw a fist pump into the air, roaring, “MY GIRL!”

The sentinel’s ferocious glee had broken Quentin out of the moment. Remembering it now, he scowled, shifting position carefully in his tiny space in an effort to get more comfortable. He sensed Aryal’s body tense. When he looked at her, he saw that her gaze had cut sideways. She watched him out of the corner of her eye as he tried to get comfortable.

Unbidden and unwanted, Alex’s words echoed in his thoughts. You’re both sentinels for a reason, you know, and we need you.

Damn that pegasus.

Quentin was born a killer. He had the instincts of a predator. Despite that, he had never killed indiscriminately. His impulse to throttle Aryal was one thing, but the quiet intention to murder her was an entirely different thing. It was too far off even his screwed-up moral compass.

You can have all the right reasons in the world. They don’t mean shit, my friend, if what you do causes harm.

He shifted again as his admittedly dysfunctional conscience nagged him. He had thought he had the right reasons last year, and then he’d ended up causing so much harm. This time, hell, he didn’t even have any right reasons. She just drove him crazy.

So quietly that only he could hear her, she hissed out of the corner of her mouth, “Stop moving.”

In a quick, neat move, he took the magazine from her lap before she had a chance to react. Her whole body twitched as she made an aborted move as if she would snatch it back before she could stop herself. He flipped through the pages without really looking at them while she glared at him. On his other side, Mom tucked away her Sudoku book, slipped a circular foam airplane pillow out of a canvas bag and anchored it around her neck, then settled back in her seat for a snooze.

He was saturated with Aryal’s scent, drowning in her presence, and there wasn’t any escape for eight and a half more hours. Thank God her flight had washed away that irritating hint of arousal. Honestly, he couldn’t figure out what she and Grym saw in each other. They didn’t match in the slightest.

“It’s going to be a long month for you, isn’t it?” he muttered.

The look on her face turned heartfelt. “Gods, yes.”

Everything about her goaded him. Unable to stop himself, he said, “I just can’t figure you and Grym out. You’re so mismatched. Other than you, he seems so sane.”

For a moment an amused smile hovered on her lips. “That’s because you’re an idiot.”