Page 5 of Ruling the Green

Prepare me?

For what?

I swallowed hard, trying not to panic.

This was good, wasn’t it?

There was only one exit in the cellar.

If I was brought upstairs, there would be doors, windows. And, possibly, weapons, if a clean escape wasn’t an option.

I was no heroine, but I was as good as dead anyway if I couldn’t get back to my water.

I made my way across the filthy floor and toward the stairs. The last thing I wanted was to be manhandled again. Better to seem resigned to my fate than end up with another busted-up wrist.

The door creaked open.

Golden light streamed in.

And I was pulled out.

To what fate, I had no idea.

And even if you gave me my unending lifetime to think it through, I never could have guessed what was about to happen to me.

CHAPTER TWO

Jet

The fucking redcaps were following me everywhere.

“Fuck off,” I snarled, grabbing a rock and hurling it at the closest one.

There was a crack as the rock collided with the man’s cheek. It probably said a lot about me that the sound was satisfying, as was his yowl of pain, and the blood that crept down his cheek.

But watching his comrades step forward to catch the blood in their hands and rub the fluid on top of their heads—how they got their name—reminded me that these creatures were more beast-born than fae.

Turning away, I continued my walk into the woods, listening to the crunch of their blasted footsteps a few yards behind me the whole way.

For the record, I was entirely too old for babysitters.

But my father (rightly) believed I would do just about anything to get out of the spectacle commencing in just an hour’s time.

I’d already gagged and bound the officiant and stuck him in a storage closet and accidentally set part of the kitchens on fire.

Fate had been on my side the past three times my father found me the ‘perfect bride.’

One of them conveniently ran away. With an enslaved dragon shifter, of all things.

The second one had poisoned herself into a coma. Bit of a kick to the ego, that one. But, fuck, I could understand the sentiment.

And the third, well, she disappeared. Though the word I heard while eavesdropping on the servants was that she’d had a lover in her father’s employ and he’d helped her escape out of her bed on the eve of our wedding.

There were no runaway, missing, or unconscious brides this time, it would seem.

There was no way out of this.

I was finally going to be married. As a pawn. In a political move by my father. To prepare for a completely fucking useless, but seemingly inevitable war.