Page 37 of Remmen

The bond had knocked me flat on that dock and it had never once let up. And if anyone spotted us together, it would still be the end.

Anne backed up a step, until the counter stopped her. She looked at me like I’d shut a door on her. And I couldn’t even blame her for it.

“Nothing in my contract says this is okay if fate says it’s okay, Remmen.” She was very careful now. Her knuckles were white on the cup. “I don’t even…” She stopped. Took a breath, long and unsteady, and set the cup down with both hands, like it might spill. “I don’t hear anyone outside right now. I think you should go.”

She didn’t say don’t come back.

I held onto that. It was the only thing in the room left to hold.

CHAPTER 16

ANNE

What did it mean to be a minotaur’s mate?

I sat with the question roiling inside me for two days while I did my best to avoid Remmen. It almost felt like I was angry at him, but that wasn’t quite it. I was angry at the world for bringing him so close to me and threatening to tear him away if I took one step toward keeping him.

Fate was a real bitch.

I also owed Alistair an apology. Maybe. Not because the asshole cheated on me with my best friend… okay, no, I never owed him an apology for anything. But I understood it a little better now, how he’d said you don’t understand. We tried to stop this. It just happened.

Would I say the same thing to Nezara when she fired me?

If. If she fired me. We hadn’t been caught yet.

I didn’t delude myself into thinking that I would stay away from him for good. I could only fail so many times before I stopped trying.

A screeching yowl tore through the air and I jerked my gaze to the north side of town.

I’d never heard anything make that sound. No animal in a barn made a noise like that. It was a hunting sound, a wrong one, and every hair on my arms stood up.

A figure came around the grain store at a dead run. It took me a second to see it was a person. Rauf. He ran with everything gone loose, his arms swinging, his head down. When he got close I saw it. His left side was a ruin. Something had opened his collarbone to the bone, a long ragged gash gone dark at the edges, and the arm under it swung and didn’t work. He’d run to town on that, the whole ten miles.

He grabbed me by my shoulder and nearly took us both down.

“Where’s Remmen?”

“Probably in his office.” My hands went to the wound on their own, and he was burning up under them, fever or shock or both. “What’s wrong, Rauf? Someone needs to see to that. You should go to Otho.”

“No time!” He shoved me, not gently, and put me backward on my heels toward the tavern doors, hard enough that I stumbled. “Get inside!”

Then he threw his head back and bellowed, in a voice I didn’t know a body that wrecked could still make. “Remmen! Get out here! Now!”

Doors opened up and down the square. Across the way the city hall door swung wide and Remmen came out of it, unhurried, coming to answer a shout.

Rauf’s mouth moved fast. I watched Remmen’s face change. It went from the patient nothing he wore for the town into what I’d seen come over him once, out at that yard, the day he stepped in front of a charging beast for me.

A second runner came in off the north road.

Mestyn. He was in worse shape than Rauf, a wet red mess down one thigh he was favoring, his belly wound bleeding through his shirt. Some idiot reflex moved me before the rest of me could vote, out from the tavern step into the open, a hand up like I could flag down a seven-foot man mid-sprint.

The gorrel was hot on his heels with blood on its mouth.

I got a good look at it, and I froze.

I’d heard it in a barn. I’d caught a half-second of it in the dark of that yard the day everything went wrong, a shape, an impression, Remmen’s arm shoving me behind him. I hadn’t truly seen it. Not like this, in the flat noon light.

It was huge and it was wrong, every part of it, too low and too heavy, running on six legs when nothing on Earth had ever needed more than four. It was covered in black fur with hints of white. Its mouth opened way too wide, crammed with more teeth than any mouth had any business having, and they were bloody. It swung its head around and it saw me, standing out in the open like an idiot with nothing in front of me.