Chapter 44

• Ivory's POV
• The strides became stronger, closer, and as time passes, the strain all around thickened. Rolf's body was snaked like a spring, each muscle tight with expectation, prepared to strike at the smallest incitement. However, even as the danger of the obscure lingered before us, I wound up torn, trapped in the pains of an inner fight that took steps to consume me from the inside.
• Celene's urgings reverberated through my brain, begging me to confide in Rolf, to embrace the security that bound us together. However the ghost of my dad's admonitions waited, giving occasion to feel qualms about uncertainty the actual groundworks of my confidence. Might I at some point genuinely give myself over to this man, this encapsulation of the animals my dad had forewarned me against? Or on the other hand could doing so be a disloyalty of all that I had been educated, a dismissal of the heritage that had been gone down through ages?