Snarling, she whirled again, this time turning to meet the vicious male that had ruined her.
Hadim. His mane standing rigid, clawed grip leaving deep gouges in the muscle where he’d caught her.
But the decision she’d made was not one to be easily unmade, and with a nasty smile perched on her lips, the girl took a swing. Lashing out with her free hand, she punched her master in the throat.
The sound he made was nearly gratifying enough to make her do it again. A strangled squawk she’d never heard an Anhur make, let alone one like Hadim. A named prince. Recognized heir to the Karahmet throne. It was enough that his grip faltered. That he let her teether toward oblivion as he hacked and coughed, red in the face.
Going rigid, she let the weight of her body carry her over. And as she slipped free of Hadim’s grip, the slender muscle of her bicep was scored from armpit to wrist.
Coughing, his hand darted out, eyes ablaze with outrage. Halting her fall with the hand not clutching at a bruised windpipe.
But he missed her wrist entirely.
Instead, his fingers caught at that severed limb. Her tail. The shaved and bleeding end clutched in her fist, the fluffy black tip clenched in his. Crunching when he tried to yank her back, she watched the end lurch to the right. The vertebrae dislocated, forever kinked—and she didn’t feel even a whisper of phantom pain, though the sight of it made her sick. Queasy with a sour, out-of-body sensation to see her tail separate from herself. Now broken and bent.
Held frozen in a tableau—her weight suspended over the void beyond the wall—Hadim was unable to move, lest he shatter the delicate balance that held her still.
“Omega,come,” he said, issuing command in a voice that had once made her quiver with the need to submit.
Now absent.
Instead of desperate obedience, a brief flare of seething contempt, then… nothing.
She glanced down, to the thousand-foot drop separating the Silver City from the wilds of the great beyond.
“Omega,” Hadim growled, and tugged on his end of their ghastly life-line. His voice hoarse and raspy.
She met his glare. Saw the malice simmering behind a thin veneer of civility and knew it to be a lie. What looked to be meek was merely waiting for a chance to strike. Poorly disguised beneath a thin and tattered cloak, a monster waited. One that wouldneverabide her abhorrent behavior. That she’d dared to strike him.
A smile creased her lips—the first that had ever done so.
And it was beautiful, stripping years of torment off her skin in a single instant.
Hadim had taken much. Everything he could.
But not this.
Still smiling, she simply… let go. Her stomach lurched, the wind roaring in her ears as she began the free fall toward the only truly independent decision she’d ever made.
She’d always wondered what it was to fly.
Chapter 6
She was falling.
The wind screaming in her ears as Hadim’s shocked face grew tiny and distant, her tail still locked in his grip as he stared over the edge of the wall. Watching her escape his claws for good.
Death would be ugly for her—she’d always known that truth—but at least it wasn’t the life of a dishonored royal concubine sentenced to breed for the cretins doomed at the wall.
She tried to relax, letting the wind take her remaining limbs and whip them around. It wouldn’t be long, now. Not long at all, given just how fast she was plummeting toward the ground.
But when she felt the impact, it wasn’t the world-ending thump it should have been.
At first, all she felt was the sting of rock kissing skin. The nip of her elbows sliding along the sheer face of the wall, happening too fast to be anything but irritating. Maybe a little shocking. Too fast for the pain to register, certainly. It wasn’t until she physically struck an outcropping that she was spun around. Not until she was forced to really see that she understood.
The base of the wall was sloped stone, polished by a thousand years of exposure to the elements.
A giant slide, ending in what was once a moat.
