Free Arissa's Fate (Redemption Trilogy) by Amanda Daul

gaze.
                  “Of course I didn’t do it. The Governor was my friend. I was either set up or just had a horrible stroke of bad luck being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
    Landon rose to his feet immediately, running his fin gers through his hair, clearly aggravated. His eyes were dark, reflecting the subtle glow of the lamp. He turned back to Arissa with a miserable expression on his face.
                  “I am so sorry, Arissa. When I heard what you were being wanted for, I didn’t even stop to think that maybe you were innocent. I was too shocked and scared that they would come for my family because of our past together. Yasmine had just had the baby and my blacksmith shop had already been searched several times by guards. I know you too well and I should have known better before I assumed you were guilty. I’m sorry, Arissa. Please forgive me.” He was genuinely overwrought about this.
                  “Don’t worry about it, Landon. You were putting your family first and that’s exactly what I did, too.”
                  “You’ve got to be starving. I’ll make you something to eat,” Landon muttered as he turned toward the cupboards of the tiny kitchen. “By the way, what did you even live on while you were out there?”
                  “Anything I could find or kill.”
                  He didn’t answer right away. He worked studiously for a moment, preparing the dish in front of him. When he set it before her a moment later, she had no idea what kind of food it was and even though the last thing she wanted to do was eat, she began nibbling slowly. Her stomach immediately responded to food and she continued to pick at what appeared to be rice and some sort of shredded meat. It was delicious.
                  “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you were able to survive through all this. You were such a tough little kid when I first met you. When we were growing up, you were always the one picking fights with other people,” Landon recalled, chuckling.
                  For once Arissa cracked a smile, remembering their childhood together. “After my mother and father died, I thought I was going to have to fight to keep alive on the streets. I guess even after your parents took me in, it was a hard habit to break. Good thing I had you as a brother to pull me out of most of them.”
                  They shared a mutual smile and Arissa felt immediately enlightened that he no longer held the dark, threatening gaze when looking at her, like he had before.
                  In the next moment, Yasmine reappeared from the other room, her hair tied back with a torn strip of fabric and she was wiping her hand clean on a ripped piece of cloth. Her eyes were tired, but when she met Arissa’s hopeful, yearning expression, she grinned slightly and nodded.

Chapter Fifteen
                  Arissa spent over an hour sitting beside Cayl, who was still unconscious on a table. Yasmine had removed his ripped and bloodied shirt and now the wound was covered in a square of white cotton, tied by strips of rags around his torso to hold it in place. After escorting Arissa in to see him, she had briefly and quietly explained what she had done to help him. After removing the bullet, she had used an herb to knock him unconscious while she treated him and given him a strong dose of medicine. She had assured Arissa multiple times that she was confident that he would make a full recovery, but seeing him lying lifeless and abused made Arissa’s heart twist in agony.
                  She was shocked, and yet she wasn’t surprised at all when her eyes fell to examine the lengths of bruises trailing over most of his body. Some were old and nearly faded, but there were plenty of fresh ones that still stained his skin a sick, inky black. In one particularly bad place over