Or have I just been trapped for so long that I've forgotten what needing anything else feels like?
I'm falling for him.
Wanted. Unwanted. The words have lost all meaning.
The thought makes me sick. Makes me want to claw my way out of this frozen body and run as far as I can. But I can't move. Can't speak. Can't do anything but feel as he plays with my nipples and sleeps inside me and holds me like I'm something precious.
I don't want to have feelings for him.
Maybe I am precious to him. Maybe this is what love looks like when it's twisted by isolation and obsession and fifty years of having no one else.
Maybe I'm just as twisted now. Just as obsessed. Just as isolated.
We're both prisoners here. He's just the one who can walk away.
Except he never does.
I don't want to need this.
But in the darkness, in the endless prison of my own mind, I can't lie to myself anymore.
I am beginning to love him.
God help me.
I'm beginning to love my captor.
And the worst part, the truly horrifying part, is that I don't know if these feelings are real or if they're just what happens when you have nothing else. When someone becomes your entire world. Your only source of touch, of warmth, of care, of pleasure. How can you not develop feelings for them?
Is this love? Or is this just survival?
Is there even a difference anymore?
I feel that flutter again. That loosening in the magic. And I try again, try to move my lips, try to make a sound, try to do anything that proves I still exist as more than just a body for him to possess.
Something shifts. Just barely. Just enough that I feel it.
My mouth. I think... I think my mouth moved.
Terror floods through me, cold and sharp.
And beneath the terror, something else.
Hope.
CHAPTER 3
THE DRAGON
I run my clawed fingers through her long blonde hair, and she doesn't flinch. She never does.
Seventy-three years, two months, and sixteen days since I laid her down on this bed. Since I glamoured her into pricking her finger on that spindle, and watched her eyes flutter closed. Since I carried her away from that gilded prison they called a palace, where her father had already arranged her marriage to some brutish prince from the northern kingdoms.
I saved her.
She doesn't know that yet. Or maybe she does. Maybe in the darkness behind her eyelids, in the prison of her own beautiful body, she understands what I've done for her.
"Good morning, my love," I whisper, though it's well past noon.
