Chapter 194: He Looked Bigger in Her Bad Memories

Ash moved toward her before she had passed through the freight-yard gate, and Dove stopped so suddenly that Thorne’s hand settled against her back. Behind the dragon, workers rolled loaded carts between the brick office and the shaded loading bays. Workers steered their carts around him without slowing. He had clearly been there long enough for everyone else to get sick of it.

"Dove," he said, and for a second he looked almost relieved. Then his gaze dropped to Thorne’s hand. "You’ve changed your hair."

"I was there when it happened."

His mouth tightened, but he kept looking at her as though the right thing might appear if he stared hard enough. Her hair, her necklace, the fingers she had hooked through Edrik’s. She had dressed for the heat in a blue shirt and shorts, and now she wished she had brought something with a pocket big enough to hide her whole head.

Absolutely not. She had spent too many mornings worrying about this man’s face. He could worry about hers for once.

"I’m sitting over there," she said, pointing to the table beside the office. "If you’re coming, move. You’re blocking the gate."

Thorne pulled out her chair. Edrik stayed standing behind her until she tugged his shirt, then sat beside her with one arm along the back of her seat. Ash watched that small, easy movement with an expression that made Dove’s shoulders stiffen.

"You can look at me while I’m talking," she told him. "My husband isn’t going anywhere."

Ash’s attention snapped back to her. "Thorne," he said, looking at the hand near hers.

"I meant Edrik. Thorne’s my husband too."

For a moment the loading yard seemed much too loud. A wheel squeaked behind them, someone shouted for another crate, and Ash sat motionless with his hand around a metal cup. The cup gave a thin creak beneath his fingers.

Edrik smiled without any warmth. "We can repeat it if you need us to."

Dove pressed her knee against his. She had wanted him beside her, but she wasn’t ready to spend lunch explaining a dead dragon to a clerk.

"I read your letter," she said. "You wrote that Garren couldn’t decide who left anymore. That he’d been stopped."

"He has. The keeper and Varek have given their accounts. The correction went to the road stations."

"Good. He shouldn’t get to go back to dinner and forget what he did."

Ash leaned toward her, and she made herself stay where she was. His eyes were the same deep red she remembered, but there were shadows beneath them now. She noticed those and immediately resented noticing. A few bad nights did not make him the injured party here.

"You should have been safe," he said.

"I know that. I was the one trying to stay alive."

Thorne’s thumb brushed the inside of her wrist beneath the table. She held on to it. She had imagined giving Ash a wonderful speech, sharp enough to leave him with nothing clever to say. Now she wanted him to stop looking at her as though they had simply missed each other on the road.

"It wasn’t only Garren," she said. "When the oil cart nearly hit my stall, Thorne got cut stopping it. You stood there asking what I’d promised him. I was trying to wrap his arm, and you were talking about what I must have offered to get him on my side."

Edrik’s arm left the back of her chair.

He knew about the expulsion and the search notices. She had told him those parts because strangers had kept trying to drag them back into her life. She had never sat him down and described every ugly morning in the Warren. She hadn’t wanted to live through them twice.

"You said he saw whatever I wanted him to see," she continued. "You didn’t even wait to find out whose shift it was. Varek had to tell you."

Ash looked at Thorne, then back at her. "I remember."

"So do I. Funny how being treated like shit sticks with you."

Edrik’s voice was quiet when he spoke. "You thought she was selling herself for someone to stand beside her."

Ash’s jaw worked. "I was wrong about what happened."

"That wasn’t what I said."

Dove looked at Edrik’s hand on the table. His fingers had gone still. No shaking, no raised voice, nothing she could dismiss as a man showing off. She touched his wrist, and he turned his hand enough to let her fingers rest against his palm without looking away from Ash.

"I thought she’d made promises to Thorne," Ash said. "I should have listened."

It was the admission she had wanted, and she hated that it came so easily now. Back then she would have settled for him shutting his mouth while she finished tying a bandage.

"I didn’t need you to like me," she said. "I needed you to stop making everything worse."

Ash reached across the table. Thorne caught his wrist before his fingers reached hers.

"Don’t," Thorne said.

Ash looked down at the hand stopping him. "I’ve crossed half the state to get here."

"Yeah, so?" Dove pulled her own hand back. "Did I ask you to?"

Something in his face changed. He stared at her, then at Thorne, as though one of them had moved a door he had expected to walk through.

"I came for you."

"And I came to hear you admit what you did. Those aren’t the same thing."

She stood, suddenly done with the table and the waiting and the hopeful way he had said her name. Thorne rose beside her. Edrik was already on his feet.

Ash stood too. "You haven’t heard everything."

"I don’t owe you shit, Ash. You treated me like shit, and I don’t need to answer you just because you finally decided to show up. Go away."

He moved into the space between her and the gate. Perhaps he meant to say something else. Perhaps he thought being bigger would buy him another minute, the way it always used to.

Edrik hit him before he got the chance.

The blow knocked Ash sideways into the table, sending cups across the concrete. Thorne drew Dove clear as Ash caught himself, blood at his mouth and his eyes fixed on the man who had struck him.

Edrik stepped forward, pushing his sleeves up with a calm that frightened her more than shouting would have.

"You don’t get to corner her again," he said, and Ash came off the table swinging.