Page 19 of Flesh & Divinity

“Inside,” he says.

“I took him down,” she sneers.

“We handled it.”

“I handled one of them.”

“With a chain you stole from my field.”

She stares at him. “Your field.”

Duke makes a sound beside me that he converts immediately into a cough.

“Inside,” Gus says it again and this time there is something underneath the command that is not quite anger. She holds his gaze for another three full seconds—two more than most men on this island manage—-then drops the chain, turns, and walks back through the kitchen door without another word.

The three of us stand in the yard.

“She went for them,” Duke says quietly.

“I saw.”

“She didn't run.”

I look at the chain on the ground. At the fucker still not moving. At the kitchen door swinging shut behind her.

“No,” I say. “She didn't.”

She had the chance to use this as a distraction and try to escape. The collar wouldn’t have allowed her to get far but she didn’t even try. She chose to stand and fight alongside us. She’s fucking with my head.

No good can come of me feeling anything other than hatred for Cinder Charming, she ruined our lives.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

DUKE

I watch her from the corner of my eye.

She is holding herself together through sheer, furious will. Chin up, shoulders back, the picture of composure with only her clenched fists giving her away. I know her tells now. I know the specific way her jaw tightens when she is afraid and refuses to show it. I know the way her breathing changes. I know more about this woman than I have any right to after everything she did, and I hate that I do.

She is scrubbing the counter with the same focus she brought to that scavenger's forearm, and the thought is so absurd I have to look away before she catches what’s happening on my face behind my mask.

Jaq hasn’t spoken since we came inside. He’s sitting at the kitchen table thinking hard, and the particular quality of his silence means he has arrived somewhere he didn’t intend to go.

So have I.

The anger I have spent two years tending like a fire is still there. It has to be. It’s the only thing that keeps us alive on this island—the specific, focused fury of men who lost everything because of a lie told by someone with a pretty face, an air of innocence and not a shred of conscience. I held onto it through the worst nights this island offered.

I’m holding onto it now.

She turns from the counter and catches me looking.

She doesn’t look away.

That’s the thing about her I was not prepared for. I expected submission or defiance, and she gave us both in rotation. What I didn’t expect was this, the steady, considering gaze of a woman who is trying to solve a problem. Like I am a locked door she is determined to find the key to.

“Those men,” she says.

“Not your concern.”