His nightmarish face?
His screams and roars?
Our pain?
I didn’t know, but everything inside me vibrated with the frantic need for all of it to be over. All of it.
It had started suddenly, but took what felt like an eternity to pass. Slowly, so torturously slowly, his shaky, shallow breathing deepened. The tension in his arm muscles over my breasts eased. He dropped his head to my shoulder, pressing the side of his face—the softer, more human-like side—to my neck.
“Please…please, let me go,” I whimpered.
With a long, body-shuddering breath, he finally raised his head.
“Just don’t touch my feet.” It came out on a long exhale like a plea, as if he’d run a marathon or had just come out of a long battle and was begging me for a moment of peace.
Gingerly lifting me from his lap, he set me down next to his chair. The spine bone uncurled from around my ankles, releasing me. I swayed before finding my footing.
He leaned his head back, lowering the eyelid over his left dark-blue eye. The glow from the flaming-red monster eye had also dimmed.
My path to escape was open. Just a few moments earlier, I would’ve died for a chance to get out of this shack. Now I stayed, with my feet rooted in place.
“I…” I shifted my weight from foot to foot, unsure what to say. “You should’ve told me about your legs… I wouldn’t have kicked you.”
He remained silent and motionless. With his features relaxed, he seemed to be focusing on his breathing as his chest rose and fell in perfect rhythm. Or maybe he couldn’t move much without pain? That could be why he escaped the auction tent, dodging the fight. If the pain from a simple kick could incapacitate him like this, no weapon would’ve helped him win that fight anyway.
He might be big and scary, but he was right, he was far from perfect. Oddly enough, learning about his weakness made me feel something other than just fear or anger toward him. Other than mere curiosity.
Compassion stirred inside me.
I avoided looking at the right side of his face, but the white glimmering bones were hard to ignore in the darkness. It looked like a skeletal beast had almost swallowed a handsome fae man, and I wondered what happened.
“What’s wrong with you?” I blurted.
“An easier question to answer would be what isn’t?” he said without moving.
I waited a little longer, but he didn’t answer either of those questions. After a few more deep, measured breaths, he lifted his head.
“We should go.”
“Where?” I asked, then remembered that I had to pee. “Actually, I need a bathroom. Badly.” I snorted a nervous laughter, my senses still frazzled and my nerves frayed. “It’s a miracle that I hadn’t peed myself during that scare you put me through.”
He nodded wearily. “You can do it outside.”
With a flick of his wrists, his cuffs lit up with green. The tiny gears and wheels inside them turned, and his chair whirred, lifting off the ground.
I tipped my chin at the chair while grabbing my sweater from the floor and shaking the sand out of it. “That’s neat. I’d never seen anything like that before.”
“It’s not from Alveari.” He adjusted his cloak around his shoulders, then pulled his hood up, drawing it low over his face again.
“Where is it from?”
“From the Lorsan Wetlands, the Gorgonian Kingdom up in the Above.” He removed one of his cuffs and hung it up on the door before opening it.
Once we exited, he touched his wrist with the other cuff to the closed door. With a flush of green, the gears moved again.
“Is that how you lock the door?” I asked, watching his ministrations with growing curiosity.
“Yes. The cuffs are pulled toward each other by magic, making it impossible for anyone but me to open the door.”
