She stays where she is, rubbing her wrists, and glaring at me.
“You had the knife at my throat for over a minute.” I focus on that instead of the memories trying to take over. “If you’d cut when you first touched steel to skin, you might have done damage before I could stop you.” I cross to the window, putting my back to her. “Hesitation will get you killed.”
“I cut you. I drew blood.”
I laugh. It sounds rusty, even to me. “You’d have had better luck using your fingernails.”
There’s silence for a moment, and then the bed creaks as she climbs back onto it.
“Why didn’t you?” she asks softly. “Kill me, I mean.”
“Go to sleep.”
She doesn’t argue. Whatever fight she had in her has drainedaway, at least for now.
I turn my attention to the town outside the window. Most of the windows are dark, the folk of this place tucked into their beds with no idea of what is sleeping near them tonight. A dog barks somewhere, a lonely sound that echoes off the buildings and fades into silence.
My thoughts go to my people. Caged, waiting to be chosen as a new pet or for a hunt. I don’t know how many have survived. We were kept apart, isolated in separate cages, and rotated so we couldn’t form bonds. I saw faces through the bars sometimes, heard the screams when they took someone to be modified for a hunt. But I don’t know how many of my warriors they caught, how many are still alive, and how many have already been mounted on some noble’s wall.
I need information. I need to know how many guards the Dell has, what kind of wards protect it. I need to know if there’s a way back in that doesn’t end up with me dead or back in iron.
But first, I need to regain my strength. Each day without iron wrapped around my throat, my magic will recover a little more. Every day I’ll move closer to what I was before they caught me.
So I must wait and plan. And when I’m strong enough,thenI will make my move.
Behind me, her breathing has evened out again. She’s asleep, or close to it. I stay at the window a while longer, watching the empty street and letting my thoughts settle. The cut on my throat has already stopped bleeding. It was shallow enough that it’ll be healed by morning, even with my weakened state.
I give another soft laugh.
She tried, I’ll give her that. If she’d had the nerve to follow through, been a little faster, a little more decisive …
But she wasn’t. And that knowledge will eat at her, making her doubt herself, and make her wonder if she’ll freeze again thenext time she has a chance. Fear and doubt are useful tools. I’ll let them do their work.
Yet … when I had her pinned, when she should have been begging, she spat in my face and told me to get it over with.
Foolish human. If I’d wanted to hurt her, defiance would only have made it sweeter.
But I’ve known fae who would have broken after what I’ve put her through. Warriors. Nobles who survived the war. Yet this soft human princess … thisMoirthalen… hasn’t broken yet.
I turn, studying the shape of her in the dim light. She’s on the far edge, curled into that tight ball she’s assumed every night we’ve been together so far.
I move toward the door, then hesitate. The floor is hard and cold, my body is depleted, my magic barely a flicker, and the ache in my bones goes deeper than discomfort. I needrealrest if I’m going to heal.
I turn and walk to the bed, lowering myself onto the edge. She doesn’t stir when the mattress dips under my weight. I stretch out with my back to her, putting as much distance between us as the narrow frame allows.
It’s just a bed. I’ve endured worse things than lying next to a human female.
I keep telling myself that until my eyes close and I return to dreams of iron, cages, and the sound of screams that might be mine.
TEN
ALLERIA
I wake slowly,drifting up through layers of warmth.Realwarmth, and not the memory of it I’ve been clinging to for days. Heat soaks through my clothes, seeps into my bones, and melts the cold that’s lived inside me since the clearing. I burrow closer to the source, press my back against it, and something tightens around my waist, pulling me in.
Warm. So warm.
Then my mind catches up to my body, and I stiffen.
