“And it didn’t work.”
“No.” Her grip on my hair tightens. “But I kept him. The human. As a pet.”
My stomach drops.
“Why do you hate her so much?”
“The Wild Courts are pets. Creatures. Beneath us.” Her voice is still that eerie monotone, her mind only partially present.
Something is deeply wrong with her. More than the usual cruelty and calculation. Something broken in a way I’ve never seen before.
Her grip on me is fading. Her attention fragmenting.
“How am I bound to you?” I take the chance, hoping to catch her in this dissociated state.
“After your parents died.” She whispers it like a secret. Like a confession.
“I denied you.” The memory of that night is far from forgotten, it burns through me, sharp and vicious and raw. Her standing over me in the aftermath of the execution. Offering her hand. Offering more.
Me refusing.
“You denied me.” She smirks, coming back to herself all at once, and bites my ear hard enough to draw blood. “And yet, I was so generous. Allowing you to live after your parents died. I could have had you executed right alongside them.”
I thought it was mercy. Thirty years, I thought some small part of her was capable of kindness.
I was a fool.
She sits in my lap.
Every nerve in my body screams. My skin crawls where she touches me, revulsion rising like bile in my throat. I can smell her, roses and something rotting underneath. The scent of a garden left to die.
I want to shove her off, want to run, want to scrub myself raw until I can’t feel her anymore.
I can’t move.
“Amarantha.” My voice comes out hoarse. “I don’t want this.”
“I know.” She smiles. Straddles me. Rolls her hips against me like she has any right to my body, like my consent is an inconvenience she’s already dismissed.
“Stop.” The word tears out of me. “Amarantha, stop!”
She laughs. Rolls her hips again. Watches my face for a reaction I refuse to give her.
Inside, I’m screaming. Outside, my body sits frozen in her power, a puppet she’s decided to play with.
The bond at my wrist pulses. Faint. Warm.Ash.
I close my eyes and fall into it.
Not metaphor. Choice. I pour every scrap of awareness I have left into that golden thread, into the memory of Ash’s laugh,Ash’s fury, Ash’s hand in mine when she chose me back. I build a wall out of her and hide behind it.
Amarantha can have my body. She can make it move, make it respond, make it perform for her twisted satisfaction.
She will never have this.
“Yes, Summer Sword.” She pauses, laughing at something only she finds funny. “You denied me. And the magic of me saving your life had to go somewhere.”
“That was...” I can’t even count. Can’t think past the horror of what she’s telling me.
