The Wolves and the Vipers

Chapter 53 - Hard Truths

I shifted back in the cover of a holly bush and pulled on my clothes. It could be a pain, carrying them in your jaws, but I preferred it to hoping the rogues were willing to lend me something. Once my shoes were on, I trudged out into the open, where Jace was already dressed.

"I can hear the waterfall," he noted. So could I. But we weren't close enough to see it, by careful design. Rhys had gone to find the woman in charge and bring her to us, rather than have us walk into another camp full of rogues and hope they let us live.

"Do you think she's here?" I asked him.

"I don't know," he said. There was a sad note to his voice that was quite unlike him. "I can't feel her through the link. And I'm not completely sure that I'll recognise her."

I took his hand and squeezed it, not entirely for show. "She's your sister. You'll recognise her."

Zach joined us, and I let go of Jace's hand. He pulled his shirt over his head and made a face in the direction Rhys had gone. "What are the odds he's setting us up all over again?"

"Fairly high, I would say," Jace replied. "But we're close to your territory now. If something happens, your men could be here in what? Twenty minutes?"

He scratched the back of his head. "If they hustled, yes. But these bastards could kill us in a fraction of that time. I'm starting to think my father was right about this."

"His plan was to talk to Rhodric," I reminded them, "which is hard to do when someone has vanished into thin air. Goddess only knows how long it would have taken."

"We don't know for sure that he's vanished," Jaden pointed out. He always took the longest to dress himself, for some reason. "That bastard rogue lied about most things — why not that, too?"

That was a good point. It wasn't often Jaden said something sensible. For all we knew, Rhodric was sitting in the camp on the other side of the waterfall, waiting to butcher us. And wasn't that a pleasant thought?

"You've had a wasted trip," someone called from behind us. I span around to see Rhys standing barely five metres away, with a pair of rogues beside him. The taller of the pair was a black woman with an impressive scar running from her cheek to her lip. The second was white with red-brown hair and a smattering of freckles.

"Aria Lloyd is not in my camp," the second woman said. She was the one who had spoken, I realised now. "She's been dead for six years. A house fire, I heard."

Jace took a step towards them. If he was startled by their appearance, he was doing a good job of hiding it. "Are you Jaz?"

"Yes, I am," the second woman said. "And this is Makayla, my mate. I know who you are, and if you're wise, you'll go home now. There's nothing for you here."

Her mate? I had to bite back a smile. I wasn't sure why I was so excited to find out they were lesbians. Maybe it was the way she had said it, so matter-of-factly. It reminded me of home — of how things had been there, before it had all been torn away and I'd come to this more complicated, less tolerant place.

"Let's drop the pretence, shall we?" Jace asked coldly. "I have CCTV footage of your mate pulling Aria from the fire."

Jaz grimaced. To her credit, she didn't try to deny it. "Oh, do you? So you knew she was alive, and ... what? You decided to wait six years before getting her back?"

"I didn't know," he explained. "Not until very recently. We've only just recovered the footage."

"Well, I wish you hadn't. She was safer when she was 'dead,'" the rogue muttered. "Either way, she's not here — I wasn't lying about that. So clear off."