Page 122 of Black Sea

I pressed one hand to my chest, gasping from the pain and feeling like I was running out of oxygen in my burning lungs.

Gasping in fear.

I had to move, move, move.

I had to raise the alarm.

He gave a half-laugh heavy with resentment. “But I suppose she had foreseen all this. Isn’t that right, Calien?”

Hearing him say my grandmother’s name felt like a whip that snapped me out of that state of paralyzing terror.

It brought me back to my senses.

I blinked fast to clear the last of my tears before shifting my gaze from him to the statues along the circular perimeter of the room. Gingerly, I began moving toward the ones on my right.

“You can’t take it,” I declared in Elvish, drawing the elaborate gold sword from the scabbard of one of the sculptures.

“Yes, Elf,” he said in the common tongue, a hint of annoyance in his voice. “I clearly recall the spell you cast when you pulled it from my armor.”

With adrenaline surging through my veins, I kept the sword behind me as I moved until I was to his right, close enough to strike a fatal blow.

Close enough for every fiber of my being to be magnetized by his presence.

“It must be given,” I said in a furious hiss.

His head canted toward me so slowly and sinisterly that I shuddered. “And you will give it to me, Nauriel.”

He said my name as he had done all night, as if it were the most erotic word there was, rolling his tongue around the last syllable as he had done when he had stuck it into my sex.

I felt like throwing up, the hilt suddenly slippery in my palm.

His vulturine gaze pierced me like a blade as he turned fully to face me. “You, and you alone.”

A scorching wrath skewered me like lightning.

In a quick motion, I seized the sword’s hilt with my other hand as well, spun on the spot, and swung a horizontal blow aimed to decapitate him.

He raised one hand.

The sword hit an invisible barrier.

But that wasn’t what startled me.

It was his fingers.

They were dreadfully black, as if he had dipped them in coal dust.

Fingers that knew me by heart. Fingers I had squeezed with all my being. Fingers that had comforted, saved, and loved me.

Fingers that had lied to me.

Slowly, my eyes returned to his, and a lacerating pain twisted my face when I realized there was no humanity left in them.

They were the eyes of evil.

And they were so intense that they wore out my spirit and crushed my willpower.

They made me his slave.