He closed his eyes again. “You don’t know me.”

When he stayed silent, she felt a tidal wave of exhaustion hit her. “No, I don’t.”

Looking past him to the trail ahead, she tried to imagine herself getting to her feet and walking again … and couldn’t get there. Sometime between when she’d last been on the vertical and this current, on-her-ass moment, she had gained seven thousand pounds of body weight—and that wasn’t all. Somebody had come along and beaten both her feet with hammers. Her head, too. And one of her shoulders.

Paradise glanced back at where they had come from. Had she really thought a little walk wasn’t that bad?

“You don’t belong here,” she heard him say.

Paradise rolled her eyes. “I’m bored with that line of reasoning. If you really believed it yourself, you wouldn’t have given me that advice at the beginning of tonight.”

“I felt sorry for you. I pitied you.”

“So you do have a heart.”

“No.”

“Then how can you feel sorry for me or anybody else?” When he just grunted, she was very aware they were two pushed-to-extremes individuals, neither of whom was making much sense. “Fine, take me out of this. You have no heart, why did you bother testing the bottled water out for everyone. The energy bars. That wasn’t just for me.”

“Yes, it was.”

Paradise stilled. His head was angled away from her, but she had the oddest sense that he had spoken the truth there.

“And yet I’m just a stranger to you,” she said.

“Told you. Felt sorry. The others could take care of themselves and there is safety in numbers.”

“So wait, which one is it—misogynist with a conscience or teammate-even-though-I’m-a-girl? You’re flipping back and forth like a politician.”

He groaned and brought up an arm. “You make my head pound.”

“I think that’s the endurance test at work. Not me.”

“Will you just leave? Much more of this conversation and I’m going to get as sick as your boyfriend was.”

“My b— Peyton? You’re talking about Peyton?”

Okay, were they really sitting here talking like nothing much was going on?

Well … arguing like there was nothing going on?

“Do me a favor,” the male said. “You see that rock over there?”

She glanced to the left. “That one? That’s the size of an ice cooler?”

“Yeah. Could you pick it up and drop it on my head? That’d be great. Thanks.”

Paradise rubbed her eyes, and then put both hands down when keeping her arms up on her knees became too much like work. “What’s your full name? If I’m going to kill you at your own request, I need to know what to inscribe on your grave marker.”

Those eyes came back to hers. Sky blue. They were a shockingly bright blue.

“How about we compromise,” he muttered. “You just leave me here to die on my own and then you won’t have to worry about getting blood on your shoes—or what my name is.”

Paradise looked away. “Three times is not a charm.”

“What?”

She waited for him to tell her his lineage. When he didn’t, she chalked it up to exhaustion … and his commoner’s background.

“Will you please go now?” he whispered. “As much as I’ve ‘enjoyed’ this little talk, I’m about to pass out—and I’d just as soon get on with that. I need the sleep.”

“You can do this—you can keep going.”

He made no comment to that or acknowledgment of it—and stupidly, she felt as though he’d rejected a gift she’d tried to give him. And how arrogant was that?

“So this is it, huh,” she said—mostly to herself.

Again he said nothing, but she didn’t think he’d actually passed out.

And then, just as he had before, he spoke up when she didn’t expect it. “It’s time for you to decide who you are. It happens in moments like this. Are you someone who quits—or who keeps going?”

But I’d always stop to help you, she thought to herself. And helping another person isn’t quitting.

“Don’t you want to find out who else you are—other than a receptionist?”

She frowned. “There is honor in all work.”

“And maybe there is greatness waiting for you—if you only get back up on your feet and keep going.”

God, she didn’t know … pretty much anything at this point.

With the heat of her anger dissipating, she was left with a weariness that threatened to collapse her bones in her skin.

Who am I, she wondered.

Good question.

And she had no idea what the answer was. What she was clear on? Paradise, blooded daughter of Abalone, First Adviser to Wrath, the Blind King, was not the kind of person who was going to sit next to some stranger who didn’t want her around and wasn’t asking to be saved while there was even a possibility she could go one more foot, one more yard, one more mile in this challenge.

She glanced down at Craeg. Like her, his clothes were ruined by blood, sweat, and dirt, his hair stiff from having dried without being brushed, his body a limp rag of bad angles.

“Take care,” she said as she struggled to get up.

He didn’t reply. Maybe he had finally passed out? Or perhaps he was simply relieved she was going. Either way … not her concern.