A Girl Named Calamity (Alyria 1)

I glanced at Weston, uneasiness settling in my stomach. He was getting a drink from the stream, with his cloak still on while the men rode up next to our horses. There were four of them, completely covered in white material. The only visible part of them was their dark eyes. I jumped up when they began to dismount their horses.

“Weston,” I urged.

He didn’t turn around, not even when one of the men said, “My, my, what do we have here?”

“Weston,” I hissed.

He didn’t move, and I was perturbed but mostly scared, as terror crawled up my back. I felt for the knife in my sheath, and the white-clad men watched the movement.

“A fighter, huh?” one of the men said as he nudged the man next to him. “I always like the fighters, don’t I, Keistan?” He walked towards me, and I stepped back in Weston’s direction, but the man was faster than I thought and lunged at me, grabbing my wrist. He twisted it so hard that I thought he had broken it. I cried out, and the knife tumbled out of my hand.

“Weston!” I screamed while the man’s leather glove bit into my pained wrist and he pulled me over to their group. Fear snaked through me. What was Weston doing? Why wasn’t he helping me?

“We’ll deal with your beau later, but it looks like he’s pissing his pants over there with the thought of fighting Untouchables.” The men were so unconcerned with him that they had given him their backs. The breath was knocked out of me as the man slammed me to the ground. Even though I was fighting to catch my breath, I could still make out Weston’s taller form behind the man in front of me before a knife sliced the white-clad man’s neck open.

It felt as though it happened in slow motion as the man fell to the ground, and Weston snapped the neck of another before the other two could even react. The men hurried to take off their gloves, but a knife ended up in the crux of the third man’s neck. The last man had one glove off before his neck was cut from behind. He was so close to me that thick, warm blood sprayed across my face. It dripped down my cheeks as I watched the man fall to the ground with his mouth open.

My stomach rolled, and I wiped some blood off my cheek with the back of my hand. I blew out a breath, trying to calm my nauseous stomach. My gaze traveled to Weston, the metallic taste of blood in between my lips. He was watching me while he stood in the carnage. He had lost the cloak somewhere in the act, and he looked like a true Titan at that moment.

Bloody. Cold. Unstoppable.

I glanced away from him and down at my blood-stained body. The first thing that came to mind was a question. “What are Untouchables?”

“They kill with only a touch,” he said indifferently.

We stared at each other for a moment.

I got to my feet, calmly brushing the dust off my hands. “Are you saying that I would be dead if just one of those men had touched me?”

“Essentially.”

Red spots clouded my vision.

“Are you mad!” My heart thudded out of control. “They almost raped me while you kneeled at the stream like an innocent bystander! Did you want to watch? They could have killed me when they touched me the first time!” How could he have let it go that far? I didn’t think I had ever been angry enough that my hands shook because of it.

His eyes hardened. “They wouldn’t have killed you until the first man got his pants down. They’d want you alive as long as possible. They wouldn’t want to fuck a cold body,” he told me while standing in the middle of four bloody, dead bodies.

My blood ran cold at his indifference towards my rape and murder. He was an assassin, so why had I expected any different? I stared at a drop of blood running down his arm, and everything became clear to me in a rush.

“Why the cloak? You knew they were coming? Didn’t you?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I expected him to deny it. But why would he? He had no conscience.

“You’re disgusting for even letting it get that far!” I snarled.

“I saved your life. Have some respect. If I didn’t do what I did, you would have been dead. One look at the brand on my arm and not one of them would have put their guard down enough for me to do anything. So shut your fucking mouth. I didn’t have to save you.”

“You put that cloak on long before they came into sight! There was plenty of time to elude them, and you knew it. The whole thing was unnecessary!”

He didn’t answer the question, but I read the dark truth in his eyes. A shiver went down my spine as a storm of resentment and distress blew around me with the next breeze.

There was time to evade them. He didn’t want that.

He wanted to kill them.

And I was his bait.