Lara shrieked once, flailing her arms as she struggled to catch hold of a vine. She slammed into a pool of water, the force driving the wind out of her. Water closed over her head, bubbles streaming from her mouth as she kicked and thrashed her arms. Her boots knocked against the bottom, and she bent her knees to kick off . . .
To find herself only waist deep.
“Bloody hell,” Lara snarled, wading to the water’s edge. But before she reached shore, a hiss caught her attention.
Freezing where she stood, Lara scanned her surroundings, eyes landing on the brown and black snake shifting angrily in the underbrush. The creature was longer than she was tall, and it was caught between her and the cliff wall. She took a tentative step back into the water, but her motion only seemed to agitate the creature. This is what she got for not heeding Eli’s warning.
It took a great deal of self-control not to reach for one of the knives belted to her waist, her ears picking up the scuff of boots and a faintly muttered oath. Throwing knives were her specialty, but her follower was at the top of the cliff and the last thing she needed was to be seen using one of her weapons.
The snake reared up, its head eye level with her. Hissing. Angry. Ready to strike. Lara breathed steadily. In and out. Come on, whoever you are, she silently grumbled. Deal with this creature already.
The snake swayed from side to side, and Lara’s nerve began to fray. Her hand closed over her knife, her finger clicking open the case around the hilt.
The snake lunged.
A bow twanged, a black-fletched arrow spiking the creature’s head to the ground. Its body thrashed about violently, then went still. Lara turned.
Aren knelt on the edge of the waterfall she’d so gracelessly toppled off, bow in hand, a quiver full of arrows peeking over his broad shoulders. He straightened. “We have something of a snake problem in Ithicana. Not so bad on this island in particular, but”—he leapt off the edge, landing almost silently next to her—“if she’d sunk her teeth into you, you wouldn’t have been long for this world.”
Lara glanced at the dead snake and its body twitched. Despite herself, she flinched, and she attempted to conceal the motion with a question. “How can you tell it’s female?”
“Size. The males don’t get this big.” Crouching, he jerked the arrow out of the animal’s skull. Wiping blood and bits of scale from the arrowhead, which was three-edged, unlike the barbed broadheads Maridrinians favored, he turned his dark gaze on Lara. “You were supposed to stay in the house.”
She opened her mouth, about to tell him that she’d been given no such instruction, when he added, “Don’t play the fool. You knew what Clara meant.”
She chewed the inside of her cheek. “I don’t care for being confined.”
He snorted, then jammed the clean arrow back in his quiver. “I would’ve thought you’d be used to it.”
“I am used to it. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
“You were kept locked up in that desert compound for your own safety. Consider my motivations for keeping you confined here the same. Ithicana is dangerous. For one, the entire island is booby-trapped. And two, you won’t walk two paces without passing by some manner of creature capable of putting you in your grave. And three, a coddled little princess like you doesn’t know the first thing about taking care of herself.”
Lara ground her teeth together. It took every ounce of control in her body to keep from telling him just how wrong he was on that account.
“That said, you did make it farther than I expected you would,” Aren mused, his eyes raked over her body, her soaking wet clothes clinging to her skin. “What did they have you and your sisters doing on that compound? Running laps and shoveling sand?”
It was an inevitable question. While her frame was small, she was also corded with lean muscle from endless hours of training—hers was not the body of most Maridrinian noblewomen. “Desert living is hard. And my father wanted me prepared for the . . . vigor of life in Ithicana.”
“Ah.” He smiled. “How unfortunate that he didn’t also prepare you for the wildlife.” Reaching up with his bow, he flicked the tip of it across her shoulder, and out of the corner of her eye, Lara watched a black shape sail through the air.
A spider the size of her palm landed in the dirt before scuttling off into the shadows. She watched it with interest, wondering if it was poisonous. “No worse than the Red Desert’s scorpions.”
“Perhaps not. But I suspect the Red Desert isn’t littered with these.” Picking up a rock, he tossed it a dozen paces to the left.
There was a loud crack, and a board covered in wooden spikes snapped up from the ground. Anyone who triggered the device would find themselves sporting half a dozen holes in their body from the waist down. She’d seen the dew clinging to the tripwire a dozen paces back, but in fairness, it would’ve caught her in the dark. “You’ve won the pissing contest,” she said in a way that implied he really hadn’t. “Shall we carry on?”
Instead of snapping back with a witty rejoinder, Aren stepped closer, his hand closing on her wrist. Lara should’ve recoiled, but instead she froze, remembering the feel of that hand on her naked body, the soft strokes up and down her thigh.
She started to pull away, but he rotated her arm, frowning at the shallow cut on her elbow. Reaching into the pouch on his belt, he extracted a small tin of salve and a roll of bandage and proceeded to tend to the injury with practiced hands. The muscles of his forearms flexed beneath the steel and leather of the vambraces buckled around them. This close, she gained a new appreciation for how much larger he was than her, head and shoulders taller and easily double her weight. All of it lean muscle.
But Erik, her Master of Arms, had been just as big, and he’d trained Lara and her sisters how to fight against those who were larger and stronger. As Aren finished bandaging her arm, she imagined where she would strike. To the arch of his foot or his knee. Knife to open his guts. Another to the throat before he had the chance to get a grip on her.
He tied off the bandage. “I gave up a great deal in this exchange with your father, and all I got in return beyond the promise of continued peace was you. So you’ll excuse me for not wanting to see you dead within the first days of your arrival.”
“And yet you obviously were content to allow me to wander your dangerous jungles.”
“I wanted to see where you’d go.” Motioning for her to follow, Aren moved through the deadfall covering the jungle floor, making minimal use of the glittering machete he held in one hand. “Were you trying to escape?”
“Escape to where?” She forced herself to accept his arm as he guided her over a fallen tree. “My father would have me killed for dishonoring him if I returned to Maridrina, and I possess no skills that would allow me to survive elsewhere on my own. Whether I will it or not, Ithicana is where I must remain.”
He laughed softly. “At least you’re honest.”
Lara contained her own laughter. She was many things, but honest wasn’t one of them.
“Then what were you doing out here?”
Save the lies for necessity. “I wanted to see the bridge.”
Aren stopped in his tracks, turning to give her a sharp look. “Why?”