Page 72 of Silver & Gold
Seth twisted to look at Raider. He was angry. He’d been afraid—and that fear hadn’t quite left him.
“I didn’t mean to get hurt.”
Raider’s right eye flashed gold. “No one ever means to get hurt. But you took so many risks. And you didn’t tell me what you planned!”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry isn’t enough! I’m so fucking angry with you! You almost died, Seth!”
When tears spilled from Raider’s eyes, Seth took his face in his hands. He bore Raider down to the mattress and stroked the tears away from his cheekbones.
“Baby, it’s okay.”
“It’s not okay!” Raider grabbed hold of Seth and flipped him onto his back. Straddling Seth’s hips, Raider planted his hands on Seth’s chest and held him down.
It flipped a switch in Seth. He twisted out from under Raider, throwing him face down on the bed and pinning him in turn. Seth ground his hard cock against Raider’s ass, gratified when that perfect ass lifted to meet him.
There was a decorative stone balustrade at the head of the bed. Gods, did that give Seth ideas.
Then Raider got angry again. He threw Seth off—all the way off the bed.
Seth clamped down on his instinctive, angry reaction as Raider got up from the bed. He stood there staring down at Seth, gorgeous, visibly aroused, and furious.
“We are not fucking,” Raider informed him, his right eye brightening again. “Not until you explain yourself.”
Raider turned and stormed across the room to the open doors. He went out and sat on the steps, his back to Seth.
Seth gathered himself up from the floor and tried to think. Raider was right. On so many levels. Seth needed to get himself under control.
Doing his best to ignore the way his body was screaming for sex, he went to join Raider on the steps. Planting his bare ass on stone, clamping his hands onto his knees, he looked out at the most incredible landscape he’d ever seen.
In the imperial library, Seth had read as much as he could about the garden-cities of the djinn. According to the accounts, Jannat was the largest and most spectacular. Seth had been skeptical. He was used to overblown tales, especially when they came from poets and nameless wanderers. But in this case, the stories didn’t do the place justice. He’d never seen anything like what lay before him now.
The endless garden was too perfect to be wild, too wild to be planted. It was a staggered landscape with a hundred levels, where buildings and greenery mixed in unexpected synchronicity. Waterfalls spilled from steep crags into sparkling pools. It flowed through channels and even, in places, through the buildings.
It didn’t look real. Oases never did after the harsh emptiness of the desert, but this was a different level of the surreal. The desert was nowhere to be seen.
Seth had a thousand questions, but he owed Raider answers first. Where to even start?
Raider helped him with that. “You never intended to seek Ulam,” he accused.
“No. I intended for us to escape. But we couldn’t escape directly from Kastari. Zarina was watching us. All avenues were closed. While researching Ulam and the Alchemist’s Stone, I was also looking for escape routes. That canyon …” A vague memory filtered up. “What happened there?”
“It’s not your turn to ask questions,” Raider snapped. “What about the canyon?”
“The river flowed south. I had planned for us to follow it out of the gorge, then to keep going south to the sea. To find a town. To find a ship.”
“And go where? The whole point of finding the Stone for Zarina was so you could return to Masir.”
Seth’s temper rose. “First of all, stop talking about me returning to Masir. Wherever we go, it is us.”
“I didn’t mean without me, for fuck’s sake. Now finish your goddamn story. To go where?”
Relief swept dizzyingly through Seth. “Anywhere, Raider. That’s the end of the story. You and I, together, go anywhere.”
Raider shook his head, clearly annoyed. “You would hate it. Being a fugitive.”
“I’d deal with it.”