The predawn sky was always a time of relief—a time when Bri finally felt safe to rest—but not this morning, not as she was awoken from her steady slumber by a sweet voice in her ear saying it was time to go. She’d grumbled, and Lina had told her she didn’t have to come, but Bri got up anyway and followed her.

As the shadows pulled back and the obsidian sky turned to charcoal gray, the muscles in Bri’s core clenched, remembering their passionate night before and how easily she had drifted off to sleep.

Normally, even when exhausted, she’d have to coach herself to sleep, forcing her mind to think of something until stubbornness pulled her under. With Lina, she just closed her eyes and she was gone. They’d both gotten up in the night to relieve themselves, shifting from the position they’d fallen asleep in to lying side by side. She’d curled around Lina’s back, burying her face in Lina’s neck, her arm gently slung over Lina’s side. Tucked against that gorgeous Princess . . . it was the best sleep of her life.

Carys walked out onto the quiet patio, wearing her fitted running garb. She pulled up short as she eyed Bri tying her bootlaces.

Glancing out to the harbor where the sun would soon rise, she asked, “You’re not going to sleep?”

“Lina wants to hike out to the point,” Bri said as if it were answer enough.

“Bri.” Carys’s voice was cutting as she said her name.

“What?”

Carys crossed her arms, her large blue eyes piercing into Bri. “What are you doing?”

“Going for a hike,” Bri muttered, moving to her other boot’s laces. “I’m Lina’s guard. I’m not letting her hike through the Western forests alone.”

“You could have told her no.”

Bri huffed. “She would have just gone without me.”

“Listen, this is more than I thought—”

“If you’re going to give me another lecture about good things, Car, I already know,” Bri cut in, looking up at her friend.

“You’re normally good at finding people as unattached to you as you are to them,” Carys murmured, rubbing her anxious hands down her legs. “But this . . . this isn’t casual, Bri.”

“It’s only for a couple more weeks,” Bri replied. “We’ll find the Queen’s killers and go our separate ways.” She searched her friend’s face. “We both know it’ll hurt but neither of us wants to end it now.”

“Ugh,” Carys chided. “This is a disaster.”

“I know.”

“I knew you’d fall for someone like her,” she sighed, dropping into the chair across from Bri and resting her head in her hands. Carys seemed more concerned for her than Bri did for herself.

“Like what?”