My lashes flutter over sore, bloodshot eyes.
Still, he holds my gaze—and there is nothing friendly in that look.
“You,” he starts, his upper lip curling over teeth that curve my shoulders inwards, “follow me. You obey, you do not run.”
He inches his face closer to mine, the tip of his nose brushing my own, and it rattles me with a shudder.
His warning comes quiet, but not soft. “You disobey, you run—I break your legs.”
A shudder rinses through me.
I cringe harder into the crate.
All I can manage is a stifled moan in answer.
My voice is gone, lost back on the road with Bee’s capture, and Emily’s swift, brutal death.
To risk speaking…
That stare warns me of the response I’ll get.
If I dared tell him that the moss is not enough on my shoulder, that it aches in the bone, that I lost so much blood, that I am broken and bruised all over, or that the rope wound around my wrists is tight enough to slow the flow to my hands…
If I say any of that, then he might rip my throat out—just to save him the bother of my existence.
So I keep my mouth shut.
No matter the deal that was struck between the fae and Bee, no matter the alleged promises and bargains, I don’t see my survival happening.
I look into those cold, empty eyes—and mine flood with tears.
I am so going to die.
FIVE
However long I’ve been restrained to the cart, I’m not exactly sure to the minute, or even the hour, but I know it’s been long enough for naps to drape over the camp, then consciousness to return.
I can hardly feel my arms anymore.
That numbness throbs in my veins, pulsing through my arms, and I squirm against it, like if I can find the perfect angle to sit, then it will relieve the numb ache and get my blood flowing again.
My attempts halt the moment a human man rushes by me, his boots smacking on the earth much too close to mine.
I cringe my boots back, closer to myself, and watch him rush up the camp to the peak. The creases of a frown burrow into my sleepy face.
I must have drifted off again, passed out, because the restrained human is gone and, with a heavy glance around the carts, the other is, too.
The tents that were erected down the camp, most of the ‘stage’—the throne and table and whips and maps and post—has been dismantled and packed away.
Now all that’s left up there is a wooden crate-like box of blackwood, slick and glossy. The human man grips it by thebrass handles then, straining with a face that’s fast to turn into a beetroot, he leans into his own weight and heaves it away.
For a while, I watch him struggle with the crate. Must be heavier than it looks, and not of this world. He hauls it onto the back of a cart, the kind that are steed-drawn by the skeletal beasts.
The man wrestles the crate onto the cart, shoving his weight into it, the toes of his sneakers sliding over the frosty dirt. It goes on a while until, finally, it’s pushed against the throne, already packed on there and fastened to the edge of the cart with rope.
I wonder if they brought the throne with them, here to our realm, or if the dark fae are running around old castles and stealing thrones before burning down our historical landmarks.
But then, even in my haze and stupor, I can make out the resemblance between the crate and the throne—
