All Chapters of Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Amara "His feet are cold," my mother said from the doorway. "Build the fire up." I had my hands in the dishwater, and it had gone cold an hour ago, but I didn't say so. I dried them on my skirt and crossed to the fireplace and knelt on the stone where I had knelt a hundred times before. I could have built this fire in the dark. I broke the kindling small, the way it liked, fed it slow, and I didn't mention the cold coming up through my knees, because mentioning it wouldn't my mother attitude towards me. Behind me the chair creaked as she settled in beside him. Gareth murmured something I couldn't catch, and she laughed, soft. The fire caught. I stayed there a second longer with the heat on my face, and I let myself have that one warm thing. "Amara." Gareth, from his chair. I didn't turn around. "Yes." "Sweep the hall when you're done. And don't use the good broom. Make use of the other one." There were two brooms in the corner. They were the same broom. They had alway

Amara For a moment nobody moved, and the only sound in the house was the fire I'd built hours ago, ticking down to ash in the next room. Then the first one laughed... short, pleased... and pulled out the stool across from me and dropped onto it like he'd been waiting all night for me to ask. "Well," he said, stretching his legs out under the table like he owned it. "This is the best kidnapping I've been on in years." The second one didn't sit. He stood by the door with his hands loose and his eyes on me, and I understood that this was the real test. Not the words. Whether he would do a thing a small Omega girl had told him to do, in her own kitchen, in the dark, with no weapon in her hand and no one in the world at her back. I looked at him. He looked at me. Neither of us said anything, and I let the quiet stretch out long. He had the patience of a stone. So did I. But I'd had three lifetimes to practice, and he hadn't, and after a while something in his shoulders shifted.

Amara I was on my feet before my mind caught up to my body. That's the thing three lifetimes builds into you. You move first. You understand after. Reed was on his side in the dirt at the edge of the firelight, and there was an arrow in him, and it had come out of the dark so fast and so quiet that the fire was still burning the same as it had a breath ago... small, steady, indifferent... as if nothing in the whole world had changed. Everything had changed. The quiet brother was already moving. Toward the trees, not away from them... straight at the black space the arrow had come out of... and that one choice told me everything I needed to know about what kind of man he was. Bram went the other way, wide and low, weapon out, cutting off a second angle without a single word passing between them. Zane reached Reed first. He dropped to his knees in the dirt, and the easy thing in him... the joke always half-built on his mouth, the lightness he wore like a second skin... was

Amara Nobody spoke for the first two hours, and that suited me, because I had nothing to say that the dark didn't already know. We moved. That was the whole of it. Aldric set the pace and it wasn't a kind one, and I kept up. The forest at that hour was deeper than it had been by the fire, more wholly itself, and the sounds it made were the ordinary sounds of a forest at night. Reed was not with us. There had been five of us around that fire. There were four of us walking now. After a while Zane came level with me. I heard him before I saw him; he didn't move quietly the way Aldric did. I was beginning to think he didn't move quietly on purpose, so that no one ever had to be startled by him. "How are your legs?" he said. "Fine." "We can slow the pace if you need." "I said they're fine." A beat. Then, lower: "You're not going to ask where we're going?" "You're going away from Corvus," I said. "That's enough for tonight." He made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh.

Amara The waystation sat where the wild land started to remember what civilization was... a low building of old timber with smoke trailing off the chimney and warm light in the windows, and the moment we stepped inside, I understood why Bram had walked us three miles out of our way to reach it. I read the room before I let myself be in it. Three people already at the tables, none of them a threat. The smell of pine and old smoke and something simmering in a back pot. And Bram. Bram's shoulders, which I had only ever seen set somewhere between alert and more alert, came down a full notch the instant the door shut behind us. He trusted this place. That told me more about it than my own eyes could have. An old man came out from the back with the easy roll of someone who'd been doing this work longer than I'd been alive in any of my bodies. He set bowls in front of us before anyone asked for anything... before a single word about coin... and then he went back to whatever he'd been doing