It doesn’t let up, not once in all the strides, the fast paces, the sudden turns that stagger me into him.
And not once do my whimpers stop.
Can hardly call them sobs. They don’t reach all the way down to the pit of my gut. They’re dampened by the darkness, the urge to be as quiet and small as I can be in the presence of beasts, so they are shallow, pitched breaths, a wobbling mouth, thick swallows—
And wet cheeks that so isn’t ideal for the winter.
A breeze is drifting over me, prickling the dampness on my face, freezing me from the prickling of my raw cheeks down to the bones.
Between the cold, the tears, the injuries, I don’t know how I’m still standing, let alone stumbling through the dark with him, but this dark trek goes on for so long that the ground beneathme becomes a road, no slippery ice to unbalance me, no snow to crunch, just slush and mush and asphalt.
I can’t see shit, but apparently this dark fae can, apparently he can see everything, because he takes another sharp turn, his arm smacking into me, and the edge of my boot scuffs along something curved and solid—like the side of a pavement.
The chopped breaths that hitch through me are deepening now, the further I’m taken into the dark. Sobs are brewing from the pit of my insides, hiking up my chest, higher and higher—
And every fucking step has my body screaming.
When the fae smacked me down on the hood, my back hit the metal too hard, and even though my backpack softened the landing a bit, the canned food packed in there really dug into the bones around my spine, and I can hardly breathe now without a crackle in my lungs.
It doesn’t help that the impact of my boots hitting the road reverberates up my bones—all the way to the bleeding knife wound burrowed into my shoulder.
I don’t know how I’m still standing.
I think, at first, adrenaline—that pure, unfiltered fear pumping through me—was keeping me going. But now, my lashes are dull over my watery eyes, my legs are starting to slow, to sink.
Without missing a beat or a step, a sound hisses from the fae, something like frost forming over a blade, and his nails dig into the crinkled, torn flesh of my wrist.
A sharp sound catches in my hoarse breaths, a wince that doesn’t quite take root.
Then he smacks into me, the side of his solid, muscled body striking me, and I lose my footing.
I stagger into something hard, but not solid, and it rattles with a deep hollow sound—like a plastic tub or bin.
The rattle is fast left behind, and the fae is turning me onto another direction, down another road.
But this one is different, this road, it leads down a dark narrow path like all the others, but at the end, there’s light. Hot crimson firelight tunnelling down a narrow alleyway—a lane that ends in a wrought iron gate.
A frown creases my face under the glare of the light that the fae hauls me closer to; but there’s vertigo climbing up through me, too. With each dizzying thump in my head, blur of my vision, I feel the blood loosening from my shoulder, the slick threads of my jacket growing heavier.
My steps are clumsy and lethargic; his are purposeful and swift. It leans my upper body closer to him, a growing sag down the lane.
The fae stalks to the gate, undeterred by my stumbling weight, and—with the hand bound in leather reins—he hits out at the metal in a swift strike.
I flinch.
The gate swings open with so much violence that the lock shatters, and a shard of metal strikes me on the knee.
I double over, my hand smacking to the curve of my kneecap. The guttural wince coiling through me is suffocated.
Then I’m pulled upright by the yank of the tether—and the warrior drags me through the gap of the broken gate.
The light spreads out ahead.
Out the mouth of the lane, I see it better now.
Firelight.
It glares from torches impaled into the earth, protrusions of long, black wood that don’t seem to catch fire from the flames dancing on their tips. Dozens of them, peppered all over a campbeyond the metal barrier of the highway, between the woods and the road…
