CHAPTER 1
SOMEWHERE IN THE NORTH SEA
?
It was a good day, because I hadn’t had the urge to curl up and die even once.
That had become a standard over the years I’d been in the cell, especially during the weeks it took to recover from being drained. Being left with so little energy that eating was a near-impossible chore rather than the one good thing that happened to me in my prison, well...
Some days I didn’t bother.
Still, my body had stubbornly refused to just die, even if my willpower had given way years earlier. Was it years? Decades? Centuries?
I had no way of knowing how long it had been, truth told. I wasn’t fed on any kind of real schedule, and even if I had been, there wasn’t a convenient notebook to write things down. I could have scratched hash marks into the wall like some kind of prison stereotype, but it was hard to make a dent in the walls of my cell, and I didn’t have the extra energy for it.
Any and all energy I had went into weakening the back wall behind the pile of straw I slept on. I’d been working on it for...well, again, no idea. A long time, though.
Every time I could manage it, I grew a claw and scraped away at the mortar that held the wall together. One of the stones was so loose I was certain I could shove it right out, but the unfortunate fact of being a full-grown man was that I was a bit bigger than the width of a single stone. Even as pitiful and starved as I was after what was probably years of captivity, I wasn’t quite that small. I had most of a second stone loosened as well, and when I finished with it, that might be enough room, since they were pretty sizable stones.
Three would be plenty for sure.
The only problem after that was that I had no idea what was on the other side of the wall. I thought it was an outside wall, because it was consistently the coldest one in my prison. I only kept sleeping there because the straw hid the progress I’d been making on getting out.
And while it was dangerous to make a hole in an outside wall, it seemed much less likely to be fruitless and result in immediate recapture. Even if the other side was a five story drop, or went straight into the ocean—that I swore I occasionally heard past the stone and blood rushing in my own head—death was preferable to being held prisoner and drained of energy again and again.
At least then it would all be over, one way or the other.
CHAPTER 2
AVALON
Flynn
The look on Davin’s face was the dictionary definition of dubious, and for some reason, I thought it was the cutest fucking thing in the history of ever.
“But why does it have glitter at all?” he was asking the server, a very confused young woman who clearly just wanted him to hurry up and understand food trends so she could sell a dessert and have done with it.
“That’s just how it comes. It’s edible glitter, I promise.” Her tone turned bright on that last, like maybe she thought he’d been worried that they were trying to feed us plastic kids’ craft glitter on our dessert.
He just blinked up at her, confused and unimpressed.
While he was willing to try new things with me, Davin’s taste in food definitely tended toward the...well, I didn’t want to say stodgy, but a little. If it wasn’t basic meat and potatoes, he was initially suspicious.
Well, unless my mother fed it to him, in which case, it could have been a bowl of white glue with craft glitter floating in it, and he’d have been game to give it a shot.
Once I got him past his initial suspicion, he usually enjoyed new things, even if he didn’t like to admit it. So I smiled up at the server and nodded. “Sounds delicious. We’ll try it.”
Instead of taking that as her cue to get out of there before Davin had more questions, her brows drew together. “I don’t think the glitter has a flavor, actually. It’s just?—”
“Fine,” I told her, trying to beam my thoughts into her head to let her know that I was just trying to get her out of explaining the glitter to Davin, not declaring my love for eating powdered mica.
“If it doesn’t have a flavor, why put it in food?” Davin asked, and I had to stifle a laugh.
Welp, she’d stepped in it now.
I threw up my hands and let her stammer through a conversation with Davin about how she thought they were just trying to make the chocolate torte extra pretty.
Seriously, she was talking to a man whose cultural dish of choice was bacon and cabbage. Was it delicious? Absolutely. But it looked like scraps meant for the trash and smelled like...well, like cabbage. Really salty cabbage, because salt was apparently Ireland’s main—only?—seasoning.
