House of Darakai: Bonus Chapter
Annoyed, Zaethan chewed a shred of nail, rolling it between his teeth, and spit it aside, watching the match resume. He lowered his thumb as the players circled the basket like scavengers around their next meal. The ball of stitched hide shot into the air, garnering a swell of excited shouts when a duel of ladled staffs warred to capture it.
Kumo stood as the ball plummeted into the catch of the seasoned player’s motumbha stick. But across the basket, the Yowekaon’s opponent jabbed him between the ribs and tossing the double-ended staff into both hands, knocked the ball upwards into the air, reclaiming it for his own.
Scarred and savage, his rival tore down the octagonal court.
“Shtàka,” Zaethan swore.
It wasn’t that he necessarily wanted the Yowekaons to win.
He just wanted Wekesa to lose.
With a surly thump, Kumo sunk back onto his perch atop the shelf of neighboring voyeurs. For an informal match, it was more crowded than usual, littering the smooth stone that overlooked the motumbha court below. Zaethan had played it on multiple occasion before he’d officially been restationed to the crown city, upon his Ascension. Though it was custom to leave one’s House and assimilate into court life in preparation for a future on the Quadren, his haidrenship had stolen aspects of his Darakaian expression. Casual games such as this—the harsh competition unfolding between his brethren—was just one example of what could never be replaced by stately receptions, ten course meals, and tired rumor.
Beside his gunja-swathed knee, Zaethan spread his fingers across the red-rock shelf. A continuous balcony, it rounded the recessed earth, warmed from Owàa’s cloudless wrath coloring the skies. The pulse of Zaethan’s people thudded through the Andwelestone beneath their onslaught of shouts and pounding fists. He missed it—this connection. This sense of belonging.
Not this place, ano. Nor those currently occupying its court.
Propping up his bootheel, he feigned an ease he’d not felt since crossing the border. Zaethan hugged his shin and slouched, carefully letting his gaze skim the spectators engrossed in Wekesa’s spirited sprint toward the first basket. From the eastern vantage, General Lateef and his brother—the weapons master—sat, surveying the wall of bodies that shielded Zaethan’s rival in his pursuit. At a whooping call, the shelf erupted for the archer who steered Wekesa’s throw into the basket. The general clapped, measured and calm. A contented smirk puckered his full mouth as he muttered to the younger man beside him.
Zaethan’s teeth clenched. In response to Lateef’s comment, the alpha of the Faraji Pryde nodded.
Exerting a relaxed façade, Zaethan exhaled coolly and averted his eyes, unwilling to be caught staring at Wekesa’s backers. No need to stir more gossip when he’d already sown enough doubt throughout Làtoh Ché. While Zaethan was studying them, others surely studied him with the same unforgiving sharpness. They always had.
Disappointment deflated those in his periphery when the ball changed ownership to the Yowekaon team. A pair of elder warriors barked their jeers, taunting some horrible recompense over the clever play. Their zeal rankled Zaethan. It festered beneath his buckskin tunic, laced loosely across his bared abdomen. Support for his rival was growing. Daily.
If Faraji was this upset over their beloved alpha losing a kakka-shtàka game…
Just imagine when I rip his throat open, Zaethan considered, suppressing his grin.
He didn’t bother glancing down, hearing the modest celebration peppering the shelf when the Yowekaons scored yet again. Out of habit, Zaethan instead peered northward, high above the arrow’s trajectory toward a jutting of boulders. It was a reflex, and he instantly regretted the history that inspired it.
As if she could feel the burden in his eyes, Kehari nimbly shirked it off and arched her spine at his attention. She occupied her usual roost with unrefined regality. Her prominence there was unsurprising. Kehari owned the height, just as she’d done when Zaethan first spotted her lofty image through his sweat-soaked locs from the middle of that same bloodied court. A stupid and naïve cub, he’d only been sixteen. The memory prodded his chest from the inside.
At the sting, he almost believed he was that young once again. But the phantom feeling passed. As did his captivation with the woman across the frenzied gap.
Had things unraveled differently, Zaethan would have made Kehari his uncrowned queen; the sole keeper of nothing and his everything in between. And in so many unfulfilling, poisonous ways, that’s precisely what she’d chosen for herself.
Kehari met his watch. Her multicolored skirt was hiked, and she stretched taller under his slanted stare, dragging her dark legs apart in a lithe unfolding so that they straddled her seat upon the tallest rock formation. Catching the sun’s beam, she angled her long neck for him, encouraging the tail of her ring-gathered hair to sweep backward. Her plush lips pouted. A tactic his ex-lover had developed over recent years, it was one Zaethan never understood, pouting like a spoiled child to entice him—a grown man. There were some who paid steeply for that sort of service in Orynthia; men Kehari should never wish to meet.
With languid, overstated effort, she wrapped her lean fingers over the brim of the stiff boulder between her spread legs, clenching the stone with her right hand. Her grip was framed by the sheen of her thighs. Zaethan remembered their satin feel and the hard-earned sweat that used to coat their smooth muscle. He’d exhausted that first summer together, left slickened and wasted by her unquenchable nature.
Facing her here, in the place of their meeting, seven years later, his palms were bone dry.
Zaethan popped his knuckle and hitched a brow at her cynically. For her unending conquest, Kehari saw herself the conqueror of his rival, strutting below in fierce competition with Yowekao’s best. She thought Wekesa belonged to her—the freest of women—even when she’d been locked outside the chief warlord’s byumbé like a yancy’s discarded nightcaller. Zaethan couldn’t help but snort to himself at the irony.
In reality, it wasn’t Kehari who had conquered Wekesa into submission, but he who’d conquered her.
Hollering and angered roars ricocheted around the expansive Andwelestone shelf, pulling Zaethan’s interest lower, back toward the motumbha court. Jumping to his feet, Kumo clapped enthusiastically for the unpopular player barreling through Wekesa’s oncoming teammates. Severely tattooed in Darakaian runes, his nearly blacked-out torso plowed past them headfirst and ducking under a network of oversized ladles, carted the ball away from their hold. The Yowekaon player punted it high for his archer, as if straight into Owàa’s fiery care. Soon, Zaethan was standing too, whooping with zeal.
Within seconds an arrow spliced the hide. It’s fletching blue, rather than red.
“Depths!” Kumo barked. The arrow pierced ball plunged right into the basket and the crowd boomed with excitement for the steal. “Yowekaons should have swapped their archer out last round, yeah? By the Fates, it was right there! I would have hit that kakk, no doubt.”
Zaethan’s head rolled aside at his massive beta. “Cousin, even your sweet mhàdda knows you could never make that shot.”
His Aunt Léola would’ve admitted as much.
Mocking Darakaian practice, Kumo ran the edge of his thick palm, pinky to wrist, along his belted navel and flipping his hand over dramatically, drew his thumb across his chest to mark his suffering. “You wound me, Ahoté.”
“Your aim wounds everyone.”
Presenting him a cheeky grin, Zaethan erased it and turned back toward the match underway. They’d entered the final round, the game becoming tighter than ever with Wekesa’s team gaining behind the mountaineers’ increasingly narrow lead. Beside the beta, Zaethan combed the players who’d paused their play to stomp out intimidating, triumphant chants. There he found his rival smiling up from the rugged basket, torn ball in hand.
White as the absent cloud cover, Wekesa’s teeth beamed against his chicory, sun-soaked skin. Teeth Zaethan would soon knock out in challenge.
Perspiration doused his rival’s rippled frame, bulkier than it used to be. He’d put on weight—a substantial amount. Zaethan’s thoughts returned to the weapons master sitting around the bend. It took sheer brawn to wield some of Darakai’s mightiest weaponry. Nearly the same height, his father’s favored had always been brawnier than Zaethan through the shoulders and thighs.
His lips ticked, unable to stifle their upturn. Wekesa might be bigger, but that just made him slow. In converse, speed was an emerging advantage in Zaethan’s combative arsenal. He’d developed the scars on his feet to prove it.
As well as a healthy fear of whips.
Yards off, Wekesa sneered, finding his alpha zà unfazed. He spat on the ruined hide and hurled the ball into those at the sidelines, careless of the scrawny cub he knocked over who tried to catch it. Cords of navy and azure lashed Wekesa’s forearm when he gruffly saddled his motumbha stick over a shoulder, wiped beneath his nose, and stalked off toward the rest of his team, where they beckoned him to their end of the court with a chorus of daring mantras.
Littering Zaethan’s periphery, the population was rising as new spectators crammed onto the shelf. At their increasing number, Wekesa’s gait turned into a strut. He craved an audience almost as much as a title. Born to the poorest district of Làtoh Ché, Wekesa was nameless, unclaimed and without a recognized sire. So, he strived to earn that sire within every watcher since they were children.
He sweat for their recognition. Bled for them too. It’s what made Wekesa so dangerous, so different than every other adversary—he fought for something he would never attain. And deep down, Zaethan knew Wekesa would rather die believing he could attain a name worth knowing, than live as ordinary and unknown as his birth.
Next to Zaethan, Kumo scratched at his coarse beard while the players regrouped. “Bastard thinks he has this in the bag.”
“Uni. Wekesa always does,” Zaethan murmured as they both lowered onto the sculpted stone riser.
A ram’s horn was blown, and the court burst into action once more. Within seconds, Wekesa was halfway to the central basket, its location impartial and viable for either team, though far less valuable than those guarded at either end of the vast, outlined octagon. Swarming from the north bank, a barrage of Yowekaon players cut off his advance while a lone punter, the mountain leader from before, bounded behind Wekesa’s swerving retreat. He jumped and vaulting off his stick, kicked two Faraji defenders in their middles, dispatching them to the red earth. Landing, he swung out. His catcher’s ladle swept Wekesa’s leg, driving him to join his teammates. The next ball reclaimed, the tattooed Yowekaon tore for the perimeter. He whooped to his archer and launched the leather sphere. Rotating his stick with record velocity, he batted it with the mirrored scoop on the other end just before Wekesa could hurtle into his spine.
The assembly behind Zaethan booed. Not because the punter was thrashed to the ground with unwarranted aggression, but because an arrow bearing crimson feathers had sent his shot right into Wekesa’s basket.
Though the match was not quite over, coin clanked all around Zaethan and Kumo to the grumble of more than one unlucky gambler. Regardless of the local frontrunner, he’d never be foolish enough to bet against a Yowekaon team. Motumbha—arrowball—was their game after all. Faraji might boast its archers, admittedly the best in the realm, but the sport had originated in Darakai’s most remote mountain tribe centuries ago. Thus, so did a pedigree of athletic contenders.
A fact which only inflamed Wekesa’s assault.
Zaethan’s rival got in a few punches until the rune-darkened player bucked him off and tried for a few of his own. But evading his fist, Wekesa ducked and rolled. Snatching the other man’s motumbha stick, he slammed it down over his kneecap. The crack was heard even from above.
Strained and surely in pain, the punter grimaced. He scraped himself upright and limped over to the sidelines.
“Eh, did you see that?” Zaethan leaned forward, elbows braced on his thighs.
“See what? That Wekesa beat the shtàka out of Jabari’s long-lost relative?” Kumo asked.
“Tsk, ano.” He whacked his beta’s bicep and nodded to where Wekesa paraded both sticks around the court with flourish, as the opposing team decided on their replacement. “Left…. No matter what’s coming, he tends to swerve to the left.”
“Ah, you’re right,” his beta agreed. “Favors that shoulder too, I think.”
Zaethan followed the tip of Kumo’s forefinger. Wekesa had discarded the second stick as if it were trash, and while his team repositioned their formation, was slashing his own through the empty space, showing it off for the hungry crowd. Applause was the only response to his antics.
“Uni. Wekesa rolls it back whenever he strikes,” Zaethan noted.
“Weak move, yeah?”
Rubbing his bottom lip, Zaethan responded, “Maybe. Could limit the power behind his blows. He’s certainly got more of it now than he did five years ago…”
The ram’s horn queued the next play. Kumo folded his arms tightly and tilted his hefty build nearer so no others could listen. “Lateef’s brother can barely stock enough strawman-dummies on hand. Wekesa keeps obliterating them. That shoulder? Dhalili observed the same.”
“Except I never told Dhalili to observe him at all…” Zaethan’s face twisted toward his beta, waiting impatiently.
Emitting a sheepish chuckle, Kumo stooped under his alpha’s scrutiny; a pointless act that did nothing to equalize their differing heights. “Eh Ahoté, bit of recon never hurt anyone, ano?”
“Uni zà. It’ll hurt me if my scout gets caught spying on an alleged challenger. Especially when he’s been training on the general’s private turf,” Zaethan snapped. The warning seeped through his scowl. “By Owàa, Kumo, if you weren’t my cousin—”
“Then I wouldn’t fawn over you so much,” he replied with plucky optimism. “Don’t worry, Ahoté. No one is going to find out.”
His brilliant grin enlarged his pelt-covered cheeks. Zaethan frowned at his beta’s latest fashion statement, which had only gotten longer since departing Bastiion. He resembled a mangy goat herder more than a leader in the Darakaian militia.
Maybe Zahra can be bribed to sheer him in his sleep, Zaethan wondered.
“I find that hard to believe. Someone’s got to notice her coming and going at some point,” he instead replied to Kumo’s statement. “Explain to me how my scout is supposedly hiding in plain sight?”
“Well for starters, Lateef has this giant rain catch—”
“I dodge lookers with my flighty feeties, Alpha Zà.”
Jumping at the voice, Kumo spun around on the makeshift riser. “To the Depths, Dhalili! How long were you creeping right behind us?”
“Long enough to spook.” The petite scout tapped the tip of his bulbous nose with her childlike finger and clucked her tongue.
It was borderline insubordination, but Zaethan had to admit it did sort of substantiate Kumo’s point about her sneaking.
The beta growled and swiped for her hand, missing it. Between them, Dhalili crouched on her heels, barefoot and feral looking. Her oversized, burlap hood had fallen off the labyrinth of short, ruddy knots studding her scalp, the hair’s coloring a genetic rarity in the South—just like Zaethan’s eyes. The leather band stretched taut across her boyish bust creaked when she perched forward and plunked her tiny chin upon Zaethan’s shoulder. Nestled there, she clacked her teeth at Kumo mischievously, as she so often did.
The whites of his eyes showed, rolling them at her. “You’re like a nasty little gopher,” Kumo swore under his breath. “Always popping out of holes, from here to Rian!”
“Big Kumo is just mad he can’t find a happy hole to stick his big kwihila.”
Kumo’s cheeks flushed, visible even beneath his raven bristle. At the shade, Dhalili’s head bounced with Zaethan as he laughed.
When it came to late-night papyon in Faraji, her dig was probably accurate. The beta’s kwihila didn’t get out much.
She slipped off his shoulder, evading Kumo’s reach, and scooting further away, took residence on Zaethan’s opposite. Though he couldn’t see it, he was fairly certain she’d stuck her tongue out while she did.
“Shush now,” Zaethan said, reaching back to pet the top of her hair. “You’re both in trouble. I never authorized your snooping on Wekesa, Dhalili. Doru. You’re to stop, starting tonight.”
He could feel her sulking. “Uni zà, Alpha Zà,” Dhalili glumly answered, despite the loudening raucous all around them. As the match neared it close, most of the crowd had risen from their seats. The deafening rattle of a hundred shaking gourds nearly overwhelmed the scout’s quiet words in his ear. “We are worried about you.”
Dhalili’s fragile face suddenly seemed heavier than a bushel of bricks over Zaethan’s shoulder. He knew his pryde was concerned—and rightly so. For all his cockiness, Wekesa was a daunting contender. Zaethan couldn’t deny it. Nor was he the only person to remember how he’d almost lost his own challenge, when he stole the title from his rival the first time.
Inches away, Kumo soared upright to yell with their neighbors at the events unfolding on the court. However, Zaethan had stayed perfectly still.
He heaved a sigh and tilted his neck a fraction. “I will be fine, Dhalili. Yeye qondai?”
The scout’s bound knots tickled his skin as she said softly, “But you stopped sparring with us. Not even with Big Kumo bear.” He caught the emotion thickening her rough swallow. “How will you be ready to face him, Alpha Zà?”
Fixed in place, Zaethan’s focus returned to the playing field. Blood bathed most of them. For a violent game, it’d become a brutal motumbha match.
It wouldn’t be long until the same crimson score washed over him too. Wekesa’s challenge was days away—he sensed it in his bones. And unlike a game of meaningless trophy, Darakai would bleed them on a stage much grander than this.
Zaethan took in the crowd, stomping, vying for the next blow. The next spill. That’s why they celebrated Wekesa…he delivered what they demanded without second thought. In a blue-striped blaze, he carved a path for his teammates through the Yowekaons, dispersing their red-flecked barricade. Wekesa was relentless. Inexhaustible. Hungry.
“I have been sparring,” Zaethan assured his scout.
“But who with, Alpha Zà?”
While he’d not agreed to accompany Kumo to an old stomping ground because his rival was playing, it was certainly why Zaethan had decided to stay.
He really needed the distraction.
“With the one who makes me better,” Zaethan huskily replied.
Full of angst, he knotted his hands, disliking the recollection they carried of how the haidren to Boreal had felt in their hold. How she’d moved inside it. She was still there on his tongue, her name and taste alike. Her kiss had been a gambit—one that paid off—but one that stayed. Zaethan couldn’t scrub off her memorial. That smell, her essence of berry and alder, and something else indiscernibly crisp. He couldn’t get it out of his kakka-shtàka nose.
He wasn’t sure he even wanted to.
Over the course of these last weeks, he had come to know her so well. It was absurd how a single interaction could spin him into such maddening confusion. Were he being honest, it was less a state of confusion and more of sheer idiocy. He’d nearly stabbed himself with his kopar walking away from her on the bluff last night. Didn’t even look at what he was doing with it like a soft-schooled, yancy oaf. It wasn’t until the hilt rammed into the trunk of a tree that he’d realized where the blade was even pointed. And the idea that she might have seen was driving him more insane than he’d ever admit.
Unable to shake her story, told in her clear and convicted voice, the telling replayed through his mind on repeat like one of those impassioned tunes King Korbin used to order his orchestra perform over and over until their strings snapped. He’d been unable to sleep after he trudged back to his byumbé that dusky morning. Laid there on his bed foolishly counting the support beams around the daub ceiling, like he hadn’t already memorized their number every other sleepless night. So Zaethan had kept busy all day, lest he stew on the details and grow enraged by her tale of beasts playacting as men. It made his palms itch. Although what he wished to do with them was not the solution.
The Boreali haidren had not asked him any real question during their conversation, and yet he’d spent hours trying to answer one.
Zaethan couldn’t say why he had turned back for her on the bluff when he should have departed. Not in any intelligible sense, at least. Only that he’d forgot himself after he did—seeing her standing there in the dawn, alone, unarmed as the sun lit her alabastrine image afire. She hid herself, her bleak and brilliant making, under all those countless layers of unblemished control. For modesty or shame, it didn’t matter. No such material could contain her fully. She radiated through it regardless.
And like the absolute oaf that he was… Zaethan had told her as much. Right there, without pause or an ounce of discretion.
Idiot.
Zaethan needed her wraiths to win, he reminded himself, to beat Wekesa to the ground.
He needed her for that alone.
His sight shifted on Kehari in the distance, and he held it there in appraisal. As a forgotten itch, it’d become so easy to overlook when she was nearby. She was beautiful, he’d always thought so. There was no denying it. Limber and golden-eyed, his former flame stood out from the females scattered about the base of her perch. Atop the boulder, Kehari bowed her breasts for him alluringly, cinched into her beaded, buckskin corset.
How many times had he unlaced it?
“You watching this, Ahoté!” Kumo batted at Zaethan excitedly.
“Mountain man licked that punt-runner, uni!” Dhalili exclaimed, her chin bouncing off his shoulder. “Ugly alpha getting mad now…”
He scoured the court, targeting Wekesa amid the cloistered fray of clashing sticks and bruised bodies. His rival chased a Yowekaon past the central basket as the player carted his stolen ball by the easier goal and toward a bigger win.
It was an insult; already up in tally, the Yowekaons would win regardless. He’d picked the farthest basket so their win would be remembered. As would Wekesa’s loss.
Zaethan scooted off the natural bench to stand beside his beta, fixated and alert. Piling at their backs, the spectators yelled after their favorite player. An army of gourd shakers lifted for Wekesa when he bull-rushed the flanking defenders, breaking one of their noses by the blood that came squirting after his motumbha stick. Unable to see the action, Zaethan felt Dhalili tug on Kumo’s tunic, and with his absent consent, she was boosted skyward onto his shoulders.
At Wekesa’s advance, the percussive wave rattled to a clattered crescendo throughout the packed shelf. The new punter whooped to his archer just as Wekesa’s stick locked around his gut. But falling backward, the Yowekaon headbutted him in the face and launched the ball from his ladle within the same maneuver.
The shakers stopped. No one moved as silence fell upon the court like with the ball, descending in a skillful arc.
Fletched with scarlet-stained feathers, their arrow scoured the hide, sinking it into the well-guarded basket triumphantly.
Dhalili’s fit of giggles echoed off the solemn rocks. Downright delighted, she squirmed in place atop Kumo’s hold, shattering the quiet. Soon the Yowekaon team was hooting in celebration at their dramatic win, the noise coupled by their few fans occupying the shelf overlook.
Zaethan grinned. From the bitter curve of Wekesa’s toned hunch, he could tell his rival was riled by the sound, especially that of the dispersing tread that followed it. As disappointed feet vacated the risers, Wekesa tightened on the Yowekaon fighting his hold, his stick still bolted around the other player’s ribs. A single insult sounded in the crowd’s swift, disinterested evacuation. Wekesa kneed the player in the kidney and watched him collapse.
Zaethan crossed his arms, but not wishing to linger more than he already had, made to leave. He paused at Dhalili’s caution.
“Alpha Zà…. He looks,” she said from Kumo’s shared height.
Looming over the player, Wekesa glared up at Zaethan. His rival’s braids swung over the black venom that brewed within his seething stare. The tension distorted his shaved scarring more horribly than before. Yet when something caught his eye, Wekesa twisted. So did Zaethan.
Kehari had rounded the shelf. Hips swinging, she was headed straight for them.
Something boiled over in Wekesa’s eyes as they toggled between Zaethan and Kehari, surely forming a narrative that didn’t exist. Zaethan’s hands rested on his hips, and he tilted his crooked smirk at his future challenger. This role reversal was not lost on him—being replaced by another.
And it was absolutely not lost on Wekesa.
Zaethan heard Kehari stop in her tracks when Wekesa’s deadly look skewered her still. On the court, he twirled the motumbha stick. The ladles at either end whisked the dirt as he stalked a semi-circle around the player who coughed on his hands and knees. In a burst of unhindered strength, Wekesa wheeled the wood down upon the Yowekaon’s skull. The man thudded to the dirt and laid there motionless.
With alarming composure, Wekesa rotated and extending the stick like a noble scepter, offered Zaethan a derisive bow. Then, slinging it over his back, turned from he and Kehari both, and abandoned the unconscious Yowekaon on the court.
Zaethan ground his teeth. “Get that man to a physician,” he ordered Kumo.
Constricting his grip on Dhalili’s slender calves, the beta nodded grimly and headed toward the sloped trailhead which led to the sidelines.
Alone on the shelf, apart from the sprinkling of whispering witnesses bordering the perimeter, Zaethan turned for Kehari. He recrossed his arms as she continued closer. Wekesa’s brash reaction only spurned her onward, he learned from experience. Kehari thrived on the jealousy of men. It was her only real currency.
Her posture turned to liquid before him, like one of Faraji’s cascades, slinking into another posed invitation. Apparently, his refusal to her previous proposition—outside his father’s byumbé—had not communicated his stance effectively. But then again, Kehari rarely listened to what a man said until what she wanted to hear rolled off his tongue.
“He intends to declare his challenge soon, Zaeth.”
“So you’ve said.”
“Every passing day is an opportunity missed, yeah?” Kehari purred, reaching out to stroke the hardness of his forearm. “Tonight could be the last chance to revive our passion, our lost papyon.”
He doubted Kehari heard her own insult—how unflattering it was to be desired just because he was soon assumed to be dead.
“Papyon missed by you more than I, yaya,” Zaethan remarked, idly eyeing her trailing nails.
She dropped them with a scoff. Cocking her hip, Kehari’s inhales rustled her ample corset against his muscle, replacing the failure of her fingers. “You used to be a dreamer, Zaeth,” she said and craned her neck up at him. Her tongue skated the underside of her lip seductively. “Uni zà, you used to thirst for me every single night...”
“I still dream, Kehari,” Zaethan replied, flat and absent of yearning. “Just not of you. Not anymore.”
She jerked away from him as if she’d been slapped. Her brows contorted. It almost seemed that genuine pain laced them together. Perhaps it did. In fleeting goodbye, Zaethan mined the flecks of gold dust that enlivened her lovely eyes and stepped backward, distancing himself from his first love.
At his unhurried retreat, Kehari shook, but did not speak. Instead, she mimicked Kumo’s earlier gesture by slicing her middle with the edge of her shuddering hand, gutting herself. Zaethan persisted in his backsteps as she flipped it over and basted in pretend gore, raked her thumb across her heart.
Zaethan harbored little sympathy for she’d made sure he understood exactly how it felt.
Because Kehari chased nothing. Kehari chased everything. No matter who she caught, it would never be enough.
So neither was she.
