Ryn doesn’t say anything.
My stare moves from Ryn to Zeph. “You should have let me kill her when I had the chance,” I tell him, anger and unmasked accusation leaking into my tone. “If you hadn’t stepped in and saved her, maybe all of this could have been avoided.” I gesture—or at least try to gesture—at the cave all around us, but my weak muscles don’t want to cooperate with the level of drama I’m trying to achieve. It’s all I can do just to sit here...sitting up. I glance over at the grot berries and contemplate plugging my nose and just going for it. My weak state is really starting to worry me.
“What are you talking about?” Ryn breaks his silence and asks.
“Your sister tried to kill me while pretending it was a training exercise. I’m pretty sure Zeph purposely kept Sutton away from me, because he’s a petty little shit, and put Loa the Betrayer in charge of training the kiddies,” I explain.
“He had his hands all over you,” Zeph snarls from the other side of the fire. The flame’s shadows dance over his skin and muscles, and a flash of him underneath me as I use his solid chest for leverage and fuck him hard and fast pops up unbidden in my mind.
“Oh right, and you didn’t have your hand shoved in the top of some female practically fucking you in front of everybody?” I counter, reminding him of the lap trophy he was playing with that night of the festival. “The difference between you and me that night, is that I didn’t know you were my mate...you did.”
“Is nothing sacred to you?” Ryn snarls at Zeph.
“It was just Neece. I didn’t do anything with her, but I had to keep up some level of pretense while I was waiting for you to bring back answers,” Zeph defends. “Sutton crossed a line. I could smell his want from a league away, for rut’s sake. Neece knows her place.”
“Oh, I’m sure she’s very good on her knees,” I snap at him. “Loa fucking challenged me, and then you stepped in to save her ass when she lost! Stop pretending like Sutton was the problem, and not you and your bullshit issues with trust!”
“My issues with trust?” Zeph growls. “I have to be careful. You’ve been in our world for less than half a sun cycle and you think you know the dangers we face? You have no idea what we’ve been through.”
“I know enough to get why you’d be cautious. But I was your mate. Where was the trust in that? That should have meant something to you. It should have allowed for some benefit of the doubt. You threw me out,” I scream at him, my voice and soul suddenly feeling raw and painful. My throat throbs, begging me to stop talking and abusing it even further.
“You tried to Ouphe bend me!” he shouts back.
“Are you fucking crazy?” I demand, furious. “I didn’t do anything to you other than attempt to make you stop trying to fuck me after I said no. It was just an instinctual reaction to what you were doing!”
In a flash of movement, Ryn is over the fire and attacking Zeph before my eyes can even focus on what’s happening. I’m so shocked by the burst of action and the violence of it all that it takes me several heartbeats to react. They’re a blur of fists and movement, and the sound of punches landing and threats being spewed fill the entire cave until I’m drowning in them. They’re brutal in their attacks against each other, and I can feel the promise of blood and death in the air.
I try to stand up and then curse my useless, uncooperative body. I crawl over to the pile of grot fruit and shove handfuls into my mouth in hopes that it will help me get up and try to stop this. Pained bellows and enraged growls bounce off the cave walls, and panic surges through me so potently that it steals my breath. I swallow down as much grot as I can between dry heaves and terror-laced tears. I hate Ryn and Zeph right now, but I don’t want either dead.
I’m on the verge of doing the last thing I want to do right now, which is letting Pigeon out and hoping she can somehow stop them, when Ryn and Zeph both explode into their gryphons. Instantaneously the massive cave seems small as the two gargantuan beasts circle and snap at each other. The setting sun fills the cave with oranges and purples, and it makes Ryn’s huge white and gray gryphon look like it’s splattered with watercolor. Zeph’s all black sky shadow soaks up all the different hues like they were never there in the first place, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think I was watching the night and the sunset themselves fighting.
I search for the steel vault I trapped Pigeon in at my center, but before I can do anything else, both gryphons leap up and take off one by one through the hole in the cave roof, like cyclones of rage and torment. I stare at the open ceiling and surrounding cave, an imprint of fury and pain now seemingly stamped over every surface. I feel like I’m choking on the hate both of them just expelled, and I hold my chest and try to get up.
I scream when a hand clutches my wrist, stopping me from moving. My head snaps over to find Treno staring at me with concern. Fuck. I forgot he was here for a moment. Fear and relief slam into me as his blue
