I was never one to think of time as passing too fast or too slow according to things that were happening to me, but as soon as the trigger on the crossbow was pulled, time neither hastened nor slowed.
It stopped.
I was staring at him, and he was staring back at me with a cocky grin on his face. My pretend mother appeared beside him with arrows in her hand, handing him one of them.
“Here,” she said to him so that he could reload the crossbow.
The arrow he had just shot was still lodged in my stomach, with pain exploding from the spot and into different places in my body that I had never even felt before.
“You…” I whispered, breathing in and lifting my own crossbow to get a hit before he could get the second one in.
“Put it down, Nailea. Surrender, and they won’t have to kill you,” Nat
