“The rest you’ll meet as you adjust here. Saner will take you to get your mark. Once that’s done, you’ll be free to make a life for yourself here,” Lazza tells me, like he’s doing me some massive favor.
It’s all so casual. Like he finds people all the time and just marks them and puts them to work. There’s no discussion, no explanation, no concern over whether or not I want this or even understand what any of it means. It’s like he expects me to fall at his feet and thank him for taking me in. Like I’ve been wandering through the mountains for days just hoping someone would claim me.
“But I don’t want a life here; I want to go home,” I interrupt, and the Syta’s bemused gaze turns just a touch colder.
“And where is home? How do you propose to get there?” he asks flatly.
“I…” I trail off, biting back that I know enough to try and wing it. “I don’t know,” I finally say, and he smiles arrogantly at me.
“We can’t have you wandering around. It’s a surprise you even made it alive as far as you did. There are savages out there in the mountains. Be grateful that we were the ones who found you and not them,” he snaps, and the room falls eerily silent once again. It’s like the water doesn’t even want to draw attention to itself, so it hits the mute button.
“Your place is now with us...as it should be,” he adds, his aqua stare running over my tangled white hair and landing on my lavender eyes.
I see a glint of something in his gaze that I can’t quite place, and unease pools in my belly.
“Saner, please escort our guest to receive her Vow and then to her new lodgings so she can clean up.
Fear breaks open inside of me, and I look around panicked.The Vow.That’s what the Hidden have spent their existence avoiding. What did Tysa say about it? That it allows them to control you?Fuck.I can’t let that happen. I need to get out of here. I back up and slam into a herculean sized guard behind me. I try to sidestep him, but huge hands come down on my shoulders to try to pin me in place.
Terrified, I look to Ryn. Is he really going to let them do this to me? His countenance is cold and disconnected, and I just barely stop myself from screaming out to him for help as another guard steps in to subdue me. This can’t be happening. He can’t just decide to mark me and that’s that.
“Please don’t,” I shout as I’m hauled off my feet and caged in by muscled arms the size of my thighs. “Please, just let me go home! I have a life there. I don’t want to be here!” I shriek as I’m carried out of the room.
Treno, the shifter I attacked, who apparently is the second in command here, shoots to his feet like my terror filled screams just lassoed him and yanked him out of his throne against his will. He looks pained, but I don’t know what to think if that before I’m taken away. The tall iron doors shut behind me, blocking him from view and sealing my fate.
Well, fuck that!
I fight...uselessly. I release a barrage of verbal abuses at the guard carrying me around like a sack of potatoes. I curse him, his friends, his family, and everyone’s children’s children’s children. I get a couple good eye gouges in and am halfway to ripping off his nipple when he just passes me to an even bigger guard. I shamelessly resort to biting.
I don’t pay any attention to where I’m being taken, I’m so hell bent on trying to get out of the guard’s hold. So when I’m dumped on my ass in what looks like some kind of church-like room, I’m surprised. A huge boot immediately pins me to the ground by my throat. I’m already struggling to catch my breath because this fucker just knocked the wind out of me when he threw me down; the boot to the throat is completely unnecessary.
Good thing I ripped out a chunk of the fucker’s armpit hair just before he dropped me. I add that to the score board of hits and then squeal and try to get out from under his boot. I wrap my legs around his tree trunk thigh and go for a good junk hit, but he’s too tall for me to connect properly. Fuck. Why didn’t Sutton teach me how to get out of shit like this?
Fucking Gryphons and whatever growth hormone that makes them giants!
I gasp and sputter when the guard applies more pressure to my airway, but I can’t stop fighting. I don’t exactly know what the Vow is and what all it entails, but I don’t want it. I have the sinking suspicion that it will mean that I can never get home, and I can’t have that. It’s the only thing I have to hang on to. That may be pathetic or delusional, but it is what it is.
Something hard and cold is pressed against my neck, and a slight stinging sensation there has me immediately going still. I pull my focus away from kicking in the guard’s dick and realize that one of the women from the Syta’s entourage is crouched next to me. And yep, she’s holding some kind of knife to my throat.
“Leave us,” she orders, her green eyes fixed on mine.
I realize quickly that it’s the seer-slash-lie detector chick. Ryn said she’d turn a blind eye to my half-truths. Despite the knife at my neck, a flare of hope goes up inside of me. Ryn said he would get me out of here, and she must be it. I release a relieved breath, grateful that he wouldn’t let this happen to me.
The guards that brought me here hesitate.
“I said leave,” the woman barks out again, and this time, the mountain sized males hurry to listen.
Heavy footfall moves away from me. I lie still, the blade nestled against my throat as a door closes and the room grows quiet. I pant from my escape efforts and from fighting the guards, and wait for the green-eyed woman to tell me that it’s time to run and get me out of here.
“Listen carefully, Ouphe Born,” she starts, and a sinking feeling in my chest warns me that maybe she isn’t the savior I was hoping for. “The Altern said we can’t let them mark you, which means we have to do to you what we did for him. I’ll mark you, but not with the Vow. It will be a dead marking. It will look and smell right, but nothing more. It will hurt, and we don’t have time to waste.”
At first I picture the mismatched eyes of the Avowed Altern and wonder why he’d be the one stepping in. But I quickly realize that she’s talking about Ryn. She presses the knife harder against my neck, and I can feel warmth spill around the blade.
“Here’s the thing, little one, you have to stay away from Lazza and his advisors at all costs. If they try the mark, they’ll know it’s not right, and you will have just exposed everyone who has one. Lazza doesn’t know that we can do this, and if you’re the one to reveal it to him, I’ll kill you. Do you get me?” she asks, the question more of a growl as she pulls the dagger from my throat.
I give her a frenzied nod yes.
“Roll over,” she commands, and she shoves my shoulders to hurry me into action before I can so much as blink and respond to the order.
