“You left the other Sabers outside the barrier without a key?” Pax realizes.
“They’re doing a job,” she counters.
“Jada, you were doing a job,” I say, softer than Pax would have and only just getting in before him.
“And I’ll return to it when I’m needed.”
“I’ll do it myself,” Pax deadpans, his tone so heavy with irritation and dominance it comes off as flat and beyond argument.
“When are you going to see that you’re not their servant, they are yours?”
Pax gets to his feet, dusting his pants off for no real reason, before walking up to Jada – and past her. Even I thought he was going to stop and honor her question, and she looks downright shocked he hasn’t.
“Pax, it’s better to serve the ruler that rules than die in the dirt no better than a peasant,” she shouts after him.
Then he’s gone, and she turns to glare at me.
“Don’t look at me,” I declare. “I’m never going to rule. It’s Pax or no one.”
“You can rule together,” she snaps.
“There’s only one Crown, Jada. As many people can stand beside him or her as they want, but there has always only been one crown, and usually the daughter wears it. My mother wore it, her mother before her. Pax might have been her prophesied successor, but I sure wasn’t. I’m not made for it. I won’t do it.”
“Killian can,” she says.
And it makes me smirk that her next choice wasn’t the Chaos brother.
“Good luck,” I say, rather more cheerfully than I intended, then I turn and pick up my book. I’ve more important things to worry about than the literal crown anyway.
Five Paces
All of them leave me alone with Killian once more.
“Good doggy,” I mutter, patting myself on the head, because that’s exactly what I am right now.
I guess the conversation’s over.
“Follow,” Killian says, moving towards the kitchen and giving me just enough time to roll my eyes at him – and scramble off the couch.
“Are sit and beg also in my list of commands?”
Which makes him chuckle.
For some reason Killian’s laugh always stops everything, including my grumbling.
He turns the handle to the oven door, the thing giving a slight creak as the cast-iron hinges move, and I switch to a new topic.
“So, you and Rose?”
“No.”
“No what?”
“You know. No.”
With a nearby towel, he removes two loaves of bread. The steam rises off their soft white tops, swirling in the air and filling my nose with that delicious fresh bread scent. He sets them on the board on the bench. It’s not a very big kitchen, made just right for the quaint little house with a sink on the far wall, a bench down the left wall, half a bench floating out to separate the space from the sitting room, and the larder door and almost bare shelving on the right wall.
It’s cozy.
I hop up onto the bench that juts out from the wall, giving me the full view of the kitchen and what Killian is doing and putting the rest of the world behind my back.
“Cow,” I say stabbing my thumb over my shoulder toward the last place I saw Rose, then pointing at him. “Bull.”
My math is pretty simple.
He just frowns at me. And here I was thinking the analogy was funny. “No,” he repeats.
“She already told me that you two were lovers, Killian. What I want to know is whether you were just occasional bed companions or in love.” And if they’re still in love.
That last part is very important.
“No.”
He flips the hot tray and drops the loaves violently onto the bench, sending the scattering of flour still on the surface into the air. Then he grabs two proofing loaves from next to the sink and slides them into the oven – closing the door with a louder thud than necessary and dusting the flour from his hands.
All I’m going to get are ‘no’s, which twists my lungs into a tight, hard-to-breathe knot.
“Who baked?” I grumble – which is so far from what I want to know that asking it makes me angry.
“Someone.”
Right. Sabers like their food. They’re probably going to eat that whole deer that Rose killed and then want more. I rub my hands up and down my arms – trying to calm down and failing. Getting all emotional about Rose again was the perfect distraction from my bubble. And now I’m thinking about Rose and my bubble – and Teegan, Teegan is definitely on my mind too.
“Cold?” Killian asks.
“Agitated.”
“Angry?”
“Scared.”
“Not scared,” he tells me, his brow drawing down.
“I think I know how I’m feeling,” I snap.
“I know how you’re feeling too,” he says, pointing a finger at me, then running it up and down to indicate all of me. “You smell like –” he trails off, like he’s still searching for the right word. “A caged animal.”
Which puts a crease in my brow.
“I am a caged animal.”
“Caged mortal. Hungry caged mortal,” he says, turning to rip a chunk off the fresh loaf of bread and shoving it in my direction.
Steam lifts and swirls into the air, and my stomach twists, ordering me to grab and devour.
“That’s too hot,” I say, managing to use common sense to not grab and devour it just yet.
He lifts the bread, blows just once, then holds it back out to me – which has absolutely no effect on the temperature but does make my insides freaking melt, because that was adorable. The huge, scarred warrior before me just blew delicately on my piece of bread.
I smile at him, but I still don’t take the bread. “That honestly doesn’t feel too hot to you?”
“The cast iron would be,” he says, waving a hand at the stove beside him.
Then he grabs the tea towel and tosses it at me. For half a second I see a shadow dart from the material and vanish behind Killian’s shoulder. So quick. Too quick to see what it was, or even be sure it was something
