The Master and The Marionette (The Pawn and The Puppet series Book 2)

His chest smells like cedar and the forest before a storm passes through.

I breathe him in as he carries me to a place where my ankle can be assessed. There is no central point of pain anymore; the throb stems from the tips of my toes reaching up to my thigh. It clenches around my bone like an iron fist covered in thorns. My head starts to pound each time Dessin takes a step. Skinny daggers puncturing my brain at the beat of my pulse.

As we get closer to the North Saphrine Forest, the chill in the air grows. Dessin even stops to bundle me up in both my winter coat and his. I refused to take his only source of warmth, especially since he gave up his shirt to bandage my ankle, but he insisted the cold didn’t bother him. He spent more time educating me about how the human brain can actually control the body in a way so that we can adjust our body temperatures to adapt to any environment. With or without a coat. It just takes more concentration and focus than the average human can handle. And he is most certainly not average.

“That hole wasn’t there by accident, was it?”

“No, it wasn’t. Someone is trying to slow us down, and it worked.” He motions with his head at my ankle. “Stopping to clean and dress the wound is what they were hoping for.”

“But I thought Demechnef wanted you alive. Why would they risk hurting us?”

He narrows his eyes in the distance. “I’m not convinced that they’re the only ones after us. The hole isn’t really their style. They will send soldiers, disarm us, and capture us. This is the work of an individual. Someone’s tracking us. I’m just surprised DaiSzek hasn’t caught them yet. That must mean they know we have him on our side and they’re keeping a safe distance.”

“Another enemy to add to the list. Swell.”

He shrugs with a cocky expression. “I’m not concerned in the slightest.”

I laugh. “Of course you’re not. Because an entire government trying to capture us was child’s play. Now add an assassin with a personal vendetta and expert tracking skills and we’ve got ourselves a semisatisfying game!”

“It’s like you really get me!” He squeezes the spot under my knee, and it tickles. I squirm and squeal to get him to stop.

We walk for a time that stretches out peacefully. My muscles ache from newborn bruises, so I’m grateful to be resting in his arms.

“We’re almost there,” he says as we maneuver through a wall of pine trees that veers off our current path we’ve been on. We get poked and scratched by the green needles and the sun finally blasts its way through as we exit the shelter of the Evergreen Dark Wood.

Finally emerging from the swamp of trees grown too close together, a small house. No, not just a small house, an approximately four-hundred-square-foot cottage. It includes a river rock chimney/foundation with half logs that serve as steps to the cedar seating platform.

It’s an oasis.

“Wowwwwwww!” comes blurting out of my mouth. “It’s so cute.”

He walks us up closer, a soft reflection of sunlight beaming through the windows. There are hand-hewn milled sidings and a log post-and-beam porch. It’s breathtaking. Aurick’s giant mansion seemed less like a home and more like a museum to me.

But this—this is a home.

“Do you think someone still lives here?” We stop inches from the front porch. “Do you think they’ll help us?”

He’s silent. Staring at the cottage blankly.

“Or… maybe it’s not wise to enlist help? I mean, we could get them killed,” I add.

“There’s no one here to help us. They’re already dead.” Cold, frosted glass hardens Dessin’s usually warm eyes.

“How do you know that?” I gawk back at the cottage.

He breathes in and out three times. “Because this is where Kane’s mother and little brother were killed.”

I gasp. Loudly. Way too loudly. It’s almost a shriek. I stiffen against his chest.

“Oh my god.” I look at him and then back at the property. “Oh my GOD!”

He moves his foot up toward the first step of the front porch. It hovers over that first step. It’s stone, unwilling to bend. He drops it back down. Laughs roughly.

“What?”

A frustrated sigh. “He’s not going to let me go inside.” He shakes his head.

“We really shouldn’t go in there,” I agree.

Dessin looks around the house, clearly inconvenienced and unwilling to discuss the war waging inside of the two minds at this moment. I’m okay with that though. I’m heartbroken for Kane. I can’t imagine his pain right now. I’m scared for what would come of his mental health if we stepped foot through those doors.

“There’s a small shed in the back. We can go in there.”

“Are you sure?! I think we just need to leave. You don’t even have to carry me anymore, I can hop!”

He glances at me from the corner of his eye while he walks us around the side of the house. “He’s not going to object. He knows you’re hurt. The shed is a safe option.”

As we move around the side of the cottage, I try to get a peek inside the windows. Something brown is splattered on the other side of the window and curtain. It’s covered in frosty dust so I can’t see anything else inside. The grass around the perimeter of the house is long and full of weeds. I bet it was once groomed and flourishing with garden beds. The small shed is around the back. Walnut wood, worn down by rain and time.

Dessin kicks open the door. The air is stale and musty, smelling of sawdust. Thankfully there are windows letting in light, otherwise, I don’t know how well he would see to take care of my wound.

“Can you take off our coats and throw them to the floor?” he asks, still holding me in his arms. I do as he says but expect a rush of frigid air to bite and claw at my skin. But this barn is like a greenhouse. It’s not exactly warm in here, but not exactly cold either.

He gently sets me down on the coats, cushioning my back and bottom. I lean my back against the wall while he walks back to the shed door to prop it open. My eyes instantly flash to the burns on his back. How have I not ever noticed this before? When we’ve hugged? Where did they come from?

“Oh, Dessin…” I whisper, my hand covering my mouth like I have to filter the next words that come out of it. “Your—Your back… what happened—”

“An unfortunate side effect of training.” He’s now kneeling in front of me, peeling the tunic from my ankle. It’s stiff and sticky with my blood. I want to pry and ask him more, but I can see he is trying to process being within this close proximity to Kane’s house, and I don’t want to add more to that burden.

“Shhh!” I hiss, dropping my head back in pain and bang it against the barn wall. “Ow!” I thump my fist against the floorboards. “It stings!”

He chuckles while examining the damage. “I need alcohol, water, and clean cloth.” He thinks for a moment. “Wait here.”

He returns with a crate of bottles of vodka, white towels, and two jugs of water.

“Where did you get that?” I ask.

“There’s a cellar under the house.”

He hands me a slat of wood to bite down on.

The gesture sends me back a year, when Scarlett’s wrists bled. The carpet was stained. Her dress was dark and sodden. But she missed the vein. I had her bite down on a washcloth while I cleaned it and sewed her up.

Mentally, I draw the strings, the arms, the head.

Dessin wraps a coat around my shoulders as I shiver. The cap for the first jug of water falls to the floor before he pours it over my ankle. The coolness is soothing and relieves some of the sting. Blood and water snake around each other in the streams that travel down the sides of my leg.

“Bite down now,” he orders.

I groan. Place the stick between my teeth. Squeeze my eyes shut. I nod to let him know I’m ready, and for the first millisecond it feels cool like the water, then I’m resentfully biting down on the wooden slat as hard as if I were trying to break my own teeth. My skin boils under the stream of poison. A cast-iron skillet, fresh from the stove, melts around my ankle.

I whimper, gasp, and squirm under the river that seeps into my wound and straight to the bone. He switches back to pouring the water and is now dabbing my wound with a white cloth.

I spit out the wood with a gasp. “Doesn’t it ever get lonely? Knowing what you know and not being able to share any of it with me?” It’s a genuine question. But I’m mostly asking to distract myself from the pain.

“I share a lot with you.” Another tight pinch. He’s done binding my ankle.

“You tell me stories and keep me entertained, sure. But something’s going on and it involves me. Neither you nor Kane will let me in on it.” I try to straighten out my legs. “Must get lonely.”

“Kane is dying to tell you. Sometimes it is all he really thinks about. But I’m afraid it’s as simple as… telling you would mean the difference between life and death.”

My eyes snap up to meet his. Death? “Whose death?”

He begins to smile again like I’ve just said the punch line to an inside joke.

“What? Whose death, Dessin?”

“Both of ours.”