For two days I let Roan's message do to me exactly what he'd built it to do.
I watched Cain everywhere. I flinched when he rode the perimeter without me. I lay awake with the bond open, feeling his heartbeat in the dark, terrified of the night it might stop. Roan had put a blade against my heart with a burned grain store and a sentence, and for two days it worked I stopped being the strategist and started being the frightened woman, which was the whole point.
Then, on the third morning, I got angry.
Not at Roan. At myself. Because I'd learned everything I knew about this war from watching men underestimate me Damien, who thought I was too small to matter; Roan, who thought I was a piece on a board. And here I was, doing the one thing that let Roan win: treating my love for Cain as a wea
