The noose of bones around my waist loosened, forming a wider hoop around me. The pressure of the spikes and hard edges eased. The pain was gone, but the whip did not release me, keeping me in place.
We passed by the path carved in the side of the cliff, the same path that our caravan of camels had used to descend onto the Ashgate beach just a couple of hours ago.
The sun was up now, shining brightly and heating the black sand. I’d been in direct sunlight so rarely lately that it hurt my eyes. I kept my head down, to protect my eyes from the sun and to avoid looking at my newest captor. He might’ve paid a lot of money for me, but he was just another captor who held my life in his hands…and my body on his lap.
I held still, afraid to move a muscle and stiff from being this close to him.
“Let me walk,” I ventured a request.
“Stay,” he commanded, as if I were a dog.
He slipped his left hand out from under his shroud and placed it on my knee to keep me in place in addition to his bone whip. I felt the heat of his hand through the material of my dress over my knee, his hard thighs under my butt, and his wide chest next to my shoulder. I could smell him—the warm scent of the heated sand, the hint of the ocean salt, and a trace of the sweet, musky fragrance of the male fae.
My muscles tensed, my body getting ready to flee. But his hand flexed on my knee, and the hoop of the spine moved with a rattling noise around me, reminding me who was in charge.
We rounded a small outcropping of rocks with a thin sapling of a tree struggling to survive between the rocks and sand. There weren’t many huts at this end of the beach. Most of them remained on the other side, past the stone path and closer to the auction tent. Out here, I couldn’t see any people at all. Only a few piles of rubble dotted the beach, but it was impossible to tell whether any of them were dwellings or just discarded garbage.
Timur steered us to one such contraption. Made of clay and rubble, it looked like an abandoned sandcastle about to fall apart with the next wave that would run ashore. As we stopped in front of the wooden door, the ends of Timur’s cloak moved, revealing his hands.
I’d seen the left one before, with and without the ring that had sealed my fate as Timur’s property. At the sight of his right hand now, I sucked in a breath of shock. It was white, the same color as the weathered bone-whip around me. It wasn’t really a hand, but a skeletal image of it with no skin or muscles, just sun-bleached bones with sharp knuckles tipped with long, curved talons.
Frozen in horror, I curled my hands into my skirt. I was both ready to run and afraid to move a muscle at the same time.
Timur placed his nightmarish hand on the door, pushing it open. We entered the small, dark place inside, and he closed the door behind us.
“This is home,” he said gruffly. “For now, anyway.”
The loop of the spine uncurled from around me and slithered to hide under his cloak. I instantly pushed away from him with a strangled cry. I scrambled from his lap and onto the floor, crab-walking away from him until my shoulder hit the opposite wall.
The place was small and empty, save for a grass mat on the floor. The walls had no windows. With Timur sitting by the entrance door, I had no way of getting out of here.
He flicked his wrist. A wisp of green magic curled around the bronze cuff that was too wide for a bangle or a bracelet but not long enough for an armor bracer. His chair lowered all the way to the ground and the green glow disappeared. The whirring sound stopped.
In the sudden silence, the place seemed even smaller. The air in it felt too hot and suffocating, and the figure in front of me looked like a true creature of nightmares, looming over me as if waiting to snatch my soul.
He wasn’t a human. He was no ordinary fae either. He might not even be a fae at all.
“What a-are you?” I exhaled the question I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer to.
Three
Timur
“What are you?”the Joy Vessel had asked.
A simple question, but even if I wanted to answer it, I had no answer to give her.
What was I?
Not yet a beast, but no longer a fae.
Not yet dead, but hardly still alive.
I’d lived in this world for a hundred and thirty years, not a long time, but over the course of those years, I’d been many things. And today, I bought a Joy Vessel, which made me…
“A pleasure trader,” I said. “I’m a pleasure trader, Sweet One.”
She looked terrified, but I had no comfort to offer her.
