"Give me your hand, little defiant thing," he purrs.
It is a test. He needs to see if I will recoil.
I look at his hand. It is a weapon. It is the instrument of my future pain. But to refuse is death.
I reach out. My skin is pale, dirt-streaked, my fingers bony and trembling. I place my hand in his.
The moment our skin connects, the world tilts on its axis.
It is not a spark. It is not heat. It feels like plunging my hand into a bucket of freezing sludge. A sensation of absolute, visceralwrongnessshoots up my arm, racing through my veinslike poison. It makes my teeth ache. It makes the bile rise in my throat.
The ring on his finger pulses—a cold, dead heartbeat against my palm.
My breath catches in a sharp hiss. My pupils blow wide, the sapphire blue swallowed by black as my instinct screams at me to run, to hide, to get away from this void in the shape of a man.
Imas freezes. His fingers tighten around mine, crushing the bones together. He feels it too. He looks down at our joined hands, his brow furrowing, the arrogant mask slipping for a fraction of a second. He studies me, and for the first time, there is something other than hunger in his violet eyes.
Confusion.
"What are you?" he whispers, the words meant only for himself.
He pulls me forward, jerking me off balance so I stumble against his chest. The velvet is soft, but the body beneath it is hard as granite. He doesn't wait for an answer. He sweeps me toward the black carriage, pulling me into the dark.
3
LORD IMAS
The heavy oak doors of my private study slam shut, sealing out the damp draft of the corridor and the prying eyes of my household. The silence that follows is immediate and thick, smelling of old parchment, dry ink, and the metallic tang of the wards woven into the stone floor.
I release the girl’s arm.
She does not fall. A lesser creature would have collapsed, legs turned to jelly by the sheer proximity of a Khuzuth lord in his sanctum. But this one… this scrap of human refuse stumbles only once, catching her balance with a grace that seems alien to her jagged, starved frame.
She backs away until her shoulders hit the bookshelves. She does not cower. She watches me.
Now that we are out of the rain and the mud of the market, I can see what I have purchased.
She is a wreck of a thing. Her tunic is little more than rags, gray and stiff with grime, hanging off a body that is all sharp angles and hollows. I could snap her collarbone with two fingers. Her hair is a tangled mess of dark silk, matted with the filthof the pens, clinging to a pale neck that pulses with a frantic, rabbit-quick rhythm.
But her face…
It is deceptively fragile. High cheekbones cut sharp lines beneath skin the color of milk, leading down to a mouth that is currently pressed into a thin, white line. There is a tiny scar on her lower lip, a permanent mark of teeth biting down on words that dared not be spoken.
And then there are her eyes.
Sapphire blue. Not the dull, watery blue of the sky over the ocean, but the deep, resonant blue of a gem formed under crushing pressure. They are large, framed by thick, dark lashes that sweep against her cheeks as she blinks, clearing the rain from her vision.
They are defiant. They are terrified. And they are utterly mesmerizing.
I feel a stir in my gut—not affection, certainly not lust in the way a man desires a woman. It is the hunger of a predator spotting prey that might actually offer a chase. It is the anticipation of cracking a geode to see the crystals inside.
I touch my fingers together, tapping the pads against one another as I walk slowly toward her.
"Do you know where you are, little thing?" I ask. My voice is soft, a velvet shroud over a blade.
She watches my hands. Her gaze tracks the movement of my fingers as if they are vipers poised to strike. "A cage," she whispers. Her voice is hoarse, unused, but steady.
"A cage implies you are an animal to be kept," I correct her, stopping three paces away. "You are not an animal. You are fuel."
