His hands move, reaching for the hem of my tunic.
“No!”
The word rips out of me, and then I’m moving,fighting, my hands shoving at his chest, my legs kicking out. I don’t know where the strength comes from, and I don’t know how long it’ll last, but I will not lie passive. I will not let him take anything more from me without a fight.
“No. Don’t.”
He grabs my wrists in one hand, pinning them above my head, and straddles my hips, his legs either side of my thighs. I scream, thrash, trying to twist away, but he’s too strong, and I’m too weak. His other hand is on my shirt again, fingers curling into the fabric, and dragging it up.
Cold air hits my chest, and I’m sobbing now, great heaving sobs that make my broken ribs hurt more, but I don’t stop fighting. I don’t stop begging him to stop.
“Be still.” The two words are delivered in the same flat, accented tone he used in the forest.
His hand flattens against my stomach and slides upward over my ribs. I go rigid, waiting for whatever comes next.
Heat.
It starts at where his palm is resting over my ribs and spreads outward, sinking through skin and muscle, into the place where the bones are cracked. When it touches them, they start to move.
I scream. My back arches off the floor, almost throwing him off me. My wrists strain against his grip. My heels beat against the ground. My ribs are moving. I canfeelthem rubbing against each other, shifting beneath my skin. The pain is … There are no words for it. Worse than when he kicked me. Worse than when he choked me. Worse thananything.
My body is being torn apart from the inside and remade by hands that don’t care if I survive. Yet his palm doesn’t move from its position on my ribs. There’s nothing in the world except the pain, and heat, and the horrible grinding sensation of my bones moving.
What new torture is this? Is he remaking me into a new shape, the way the Dell remade him?
The heat keeps flowing, rising up to my shoulder he damaged. It sinks into the joint, wrapping around the muscle and tendons there. The pop as the joint shifts back into place echoes in the cave.
I open my mouth to scream again, but nothing comes out.
My body is shaking so hard my teeth are chattering. Tears stream down my face. His grip on my wrists doesn’t loosen, and the palm on my ribs doesn’t move. But that heat … that heat keeps flowing … down my arms to my hands, washing over the cut he made, and over my ragged fingertips.
I’m whimpering, crying, babbling pleas that he ignores, and the pain keeps increasing.
He’s going to kill me. This is it. This is my death.
I try to fight it. I try to hold on. But darkness is creeping in from the edges of my vision, and I don’t have anything left to fight with.
The last thing I see is his face above me. Pale skin, sharp features, and golden eyes.
Then the darkness takes me.
SEVEN
The female is still breathing.
I can hear her from across the cave. The steady pull of air in and out through lungs that were filling with blood a short time ago. I broke her ribs, dislocated her shoulder, almost shattered her wrist, then poured my dwindling power into mending it all.
The pathetic thing will survive, which is fortunate because I spent magic I couldn’t afford to fix her. Magic I need. Magic that should be rebuilding me, instead of keeping a human princess alive.
Three hundred years of iron draining me to nothing, and I spent the dregs on her because I still need her.
It’s amusing. In a way that makes me want to hit something.
My gaze moves from her to the cave. It’s small, barely deep enough to block the wind. I picked it for the overhang, and the way the entrance narrows to a gap I can ward. The wards themselves are thin and fragile, held together with scraps of power I scrounged up from somewhere buried deep within me. But they will hold until dawn.
Theyhaveto. Because my people are still in cages, while I sitin a cave with the princess who came to mount my head on her wall, wondering how long it will take for my powers to return.
She doesn’t know how close she came to breaking free. I made sure of that. Every step, every word, every time I dragged her upright, I hid how much it cost me. I’m exhausted, but she never registered it. She saw only what I showed her. A necessary performance, and one that drained me, because my body is a ruin.
