All Chapters of Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Amara We'd been moving for days, and the forest had stopped being a stranger to me. That should have been a comfort. It wasn't. "You've got your face on," Sela said, falling into step beside me, chewing something she'd taken from someone. "The one where you're doing sums nobody asked for." "I'm always doing sums." "Not like this. This is the bad-sums face." She studied me sideways. "Are we about to have a problem?" "I don't know yet," I said. And that was the truth, which was the part that frightened me. It had started small. A bird going up from the wrong place, at the wrong time, when nothing should have put it to wing. A break in the brush the wind hadn't made. And then, the morning before, tracks... at the eastern edge of a camp we'd already broken. I'd doubled back alone for a strap I'd dropped, and I'd found them in the soft ground: three sets, spaced the way trained people space themselves when they don't want to crowd one another's sightlines, fresh enough that the dew h

Zane We came out of the broken country half a day ahead of anyone hunting us, exactly the way Amara said we would, and made camp in better ground... rolling, treed, a stream running through it. Sela celebrated by stealing the largest piece of dried meat from Bram's pack in plain sight, daring him with her whole face to say a word about it. Bram watched her do it, and turned his head away, and almost... almost.. smiled. I should have been resting. Instead I sat against a tree and watched Amara across the camp, which was apparently a thing I had decided to do with all my spare hours now. I'd watched my brother for three weeks, and I know Aldric the way I know my own hands. I know what his stillness means when it's the watching kind, and I know what it means when it's the other kind... the one that has nothing to do with threat assessment and everything to do with not trusting his own face. I'd seen him stop his blade-work when she crossed the camp. I'd seen him match her pace on the

Amara We broke camp at first light and climbed. The ground went to loose rock, the trees thinned, and the path narrowed until we were moving single file... Bram in front, me behind him, the others strung out below. "Remind me," Zane said from behind me, breathing harder than he'd admit, "why we're going up. When down is where all the nice flat walking lives." "Because up is where Seraphine won't look." "Seraphine strikes me as a look-everywhere sort of woman." "Not here. Horses can't take this ground. She thinks in cavalry... units, lines, riders. A place you can only reach on foot, she crosses off the map without checking it." "And you know that how?" "I know how she thinks." "You keep saying that." The joke had gone out of his voice. "Like the two of you are old friends." I didn't answer. I climbed. Below us, Sela's voice floated up. "If anyone's interested, my legs have filed a complaint." "Noted," Bram said, without turning. "That's it? Noted?" "Filed it next to mine.

Amara Nobody slept after the sigil. Bram set a double watch. Zane stopped reaching for jokes. Aldric walked the ruins twice, slow, reading the ground, and came back with nothing. "They left no trail," he said, crouching by the dead fire. "Everyone leaves something. Even the good ones. This one left a carving and not one footprint." "So they're better than good," Zane said. "They're better than me." Flat. No wound in it. Just fact. "We can't track what leaves no trail," Bram said. "And we can't outrun what's already ahead of us. So we don't do either. We stop. We hold here." He looked at Aldric, and Aldric nodded slowly. "If this one wanted us dead, we'd be dead. They want something else. So we let them come and get it on ground we've at least walked, instead of ground they choose." "That's a terrible plan," Zane said. "It's the only one that isn't worse." "There's a way to know more before we sit and wait," I said. They looked at me. "If they left one sign, they left others.

Amara Bram put the water on. Of all the strange things about that morning, that was the strangest... that the woman who'd waited lifetimes at the edge of my fire now sat at it, wrapped her hands around a tin cup, and drank Olan's tea like any tired traveler who'd walked too far. We sat around her. All of us. Even Aldric, who never sits where he can't watch the trees, sat where he could watch her instead. "Ask," Maren said, when the cup was half gone. "You've held the questions since I said your mother's name. Ask the one that matters most. I'll answer that one first." I had a hundred. I asked the one that had lived in my chest since the clearing where Reed died. "Why does he keep killing me." Maren set the cup down. "What do you believe the answer is?" "That I'm an Omega. That I'm nothing." I'd believed it a long time. "That I keep getting born into his reach, and he keeps stepping on me. That I'm small, and he's large, and that's the whole of it." "That's what he needs you to