“Can you imagine?” she says to Thorne who looks down at her dutifully.
“Yes, Mrath,” he says, voice flat.
“Perhaps it wasn’t such a shame that you showed up on my doorstep tonight. You’ve been most diverting. Go, rest. You will leave in the morning.”
I look around the room, unimpressed with the revelry. “May we go back to our camp?”
She rolls her eyes, clearly annoyed with my request, but waves me off.
“Whatever you want, just leave me alone now. I intend to be thoroughly mussing my sheets with my gorgeous pet in the next quarter hour.”
She points her finger at one of the dryads, and they move forward, prepared to take us out. Thorne leans over and bites her pointed ear, and she lets out a giggle. She casts him a heated glance before capturing his lips with her mouth.
I turn, tired of the display, and wait for the dryads.
It isn’t until we’ve left the enclave that I take my real first breath.
I look around the camp and sigh. Then I fish out one of the stones that Liana gave me. Its black sheen gleams in the light.
Raising it to my lips, I say, “We’ve secured help. Tomorrow we ride to Zlosa.”
I watch the color shift from black, to red, and then yellow and gray. The message must have been sent because the stone turns dull and lifeless.
I drop it to the ground and walk to my tent.
There are only a few more hours until the sun comes up, so I plop down a pillow and lay my head upon it—entirely content to let the emptiness consume me.
Chapter 13
Nuummite
ESTELA
It’s fucking bath time.
Again.
At least Rholker isn’t here.
“What, exactly, did those women do to you?” Melisa asks me as she pours another bucket of heated water into the tub.
Though she showed me kindness and did not force me into the water during her last visit, Rholker is not an inconsistent man. He wants me pristinely clean every time he takes me into society. Yesterday was a reprieve; today is a trek back to the depths of hell.
The sound of the water gives me chills and puts pressure on my lungs as my stomach churns.
“They… Rholker has always wanted me for himself. When he realized that the Enduares had taken me, he tried to get me back. When he finally brought me here, it was too late. I was already in love.” The words burn my eyes.
They are things I never said to Teo, sentiments I never thought I’d say, and now even his name causes my throat to tighten and my eyes to fill with tears.
“Bah.Love. Rholker oft declares his love to you in this very room,” she says. “It hasn’t done you any favors.”
I shake my head. “This is not love. He wants me to be an appendage that gives him whatever he desires.”
She frowns. “Yes, yes, that I understand. So what didthey—those black-clad women—do?”
I swallow, prodding at the shredded bits of my mind, and think about last night’s nightmare where Teo moved in to bite me, but not for pleasure. To kill.
Sweat breaks out across my body.
