The muscles in his back tightened, and his shoulders tensed. He dropped her bag and slowly turned around. “Beautiful, if you let me explain?—”
Octavia punched him in the face.
His nose crunched on impact, and blood streamed from the wound.
“Fuck!” he shouted. His hands opened as they flew to cradle his broken nose, and something dropped to the ground with athunkbefore it rolled under the bed.
All the air was sucked out of the room.
He looked at her. She looked at him. Their eyes grew three sizes larger at the same time.
Then he released his still-bleeding nose and dropped to the ground on all fours.
Octavia was faster. Even with her injured ankle, she got there before him. She groaned as she slammed onto the woodenplanks, her foot screaming in pain, but it didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Not the lying, thieving witch. Not the pain.
Just the object.
A glimmer of green caught her eye. It had rolled beneath the bed. She flattened herself and crawled beneath the mattress, ignoring the presence of dust and other questionable things.
“Octavia, please let me explain. It’s not what you think,” Flynn begged, his hand landing on her good foot.
She kicked him off. There was no explanation that could fix this. Whatever they’d had, he’d shattered it into a million pieces.
Ignoring the duplicitous witch, Octavia reached for her prize. She stretched her arm as far as it could go, twisting until her fingers closed around the cool emerald.
A breath of relief whooshed out of Octavia, and for a moment, she rested her head on the ground. She still had it. She couldn’t lose it. If anything, the past twelve hours had taught her that witches were not the men for her.
She never should have kissed Flynn, never dreamed about him, never touched him. Clearly, her character judgement was seriously flawed.
Octavia wouldn’t be making the same mistake twice.
Keeping a firm grip on the emerald, Octavia extricated herself from under the bed. Leaning on her good foot, she hobbled over to her bag and shoved her prize inside.
A hand landed on her shoulder. “Please, Octavia?—”
“Don’t!” Tears pricked behind her eyes, and she angrily huffed them back. “Don’t fucking touch me. Last night was a mistake. This was all a mistake.”
“No, you don’t mean that.”
“Don’t tell me what I mean.” She clutched the bag to her chest and turned around. “Tell me the truth: were you trying to steal the emerald?”
He bit his lip and clenched his jaw. In that split-second of silence that followed, she got her answer.
“Fuck. You.” She shoved past him, limping to the door. Flynn called her name, but she ignored him as she yanked it open.
A guard stood on the other side. “Miss?”
“I’m ready to leave,” she snapped. “Can I please have my walking stick back? I’m goingalone.”
She emphasized the last word, ignoring Flynn’s hitched breath behind her. The guard must have seen something in her eyes because he did not argue.
Within half an hour, Octavia was on her way. Walking stick in hand, she trudged through the woods once more.
And damn it all, but even though he’d betrayed her, Octavia couldn’t get Flynn out of her head.
Four days passedin relative silence. Octavia hiked over hills and mountains. She’d long since stopped admiring the beauty around her. She was too tired for that. She was too tired for anything except putting one foot in front of the other.
Soreness had become her state of being. Every night, she stopped to massage her throbbing ankle when she found shelter beneath a tree or in a cave.