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“Yes, that was the deal, little sun, and you performed better than even my lofty ambitions expected.”

“My freedom. I want my freedom back.”

He barked a laugh, full and deep, before he was cut short by a venomous hiss as he snatched my face between his claws and dragged it to his until he was, once again, stabbing me in the nose. “Thought you were clever with that, did you? You’re not clever, Cricket. Did you think I didn’t expect you to ask for that? Stupid girl. You think to outwit a Far Darrig? I’ve had thousands of years to hone my craft. I said I would give you whatever you wanted back. But I cannot give back what I do not own. I no longer own your freedom, stupid girl. The Ard Rí, Glory of the New Dew, owns your freedom now.”

Thunder clapped down and shattered me. I thought I had been so brilliant for thinking through that one. He’d stolen my freedom, hadn’t he? But he had timed it so that, when I asked for it back, he was no longer the one who could give it back to me.

I yanked my head free and spat full and hot in his face. “Fuck you, Rictus!”

His clawed hand wrapped around my throat and cinched down as he forced me backward toward an unseen destination. “Remember that sentiment, little sun. When you are riding to Sceach Gheal an Bith alongside The Raven of the Dawn, remember how you treated Old Rictus. Remember when he carves your flesh up and heals it over and over again or lets his beasts rape you or uses you as target practice that it was not I who treated you so poorly.”

My brows lifted, my eyes going owl-like as his words sank in. Rictus had transformed me in the most painful process I had ever endured, but that’s all he had done. He had not touched me any more or any less than was entirely necessary for his aims. He had not been malicious or vindictive in his callous touch. He had been economical, if anything.

A slow, evil chuckle slid from his paper-thin lips as I felt the velvet bars of my cage press against my back.

“Oh, you did not know, eh, little sun? Did the little bird and the deadwood not tell you? The Raven of the Dawn, deposed Princeling, favored son of a rapist-infested house, the highest heretic of Breacadh an Lae, bought you for the Ard Rí as a gift. His house was disgraced and seized by the Ard Rí after the war with the léaspáin witches, for I believe you humans call it ‘war crimes’? War is war in the land of Fae, but even we have some lines we do not cross, and what the Dawn did to their enemies was a crime against magic itself. And their leader, the Ard Tiarna of Dawn himself, is who bid on you. I have very little faith you will survive the ride to The Sacred Hawthorne of the World, little sun. Not with him as a travel companion.”

“Why would you sell your masterpiece to someone like that?” I hissed as he stuffed me back into my cage and let the bars solidify behind him.

“Because a true artist destroys his magnum opus as quickly as possible.” He snapped his fingers, and the darkness began rolling in like a foul fog until all I could see was his smirking face.

Chapter 6

Anormal person probably would have kicked and screamed the entire time that infernal catlike cage held them prisoner. I was decidedly not a normal person. I had never been under the delusion that I was. On the contrary, I had always known I was a little nutty. From the moment Rictus had his meatheaded associates lifted the golden plated sun mask from my face to the moment he bid me goodbye, all I did was sit in my cage and listen.

The stables, where they had offloaded my cage, was a noisy place, but the fog cloaking my cage gave me only snips and clips of conversation. A strange word here, a raucous laughter there. Frustration set in deep razor claws by the second hour of strained eavesdropping against the velvety bars of my cage as I tried to get a clue as to what happened next. When the world went still and silent, fear entwined with a growing desperation laced through me. The absence of life, save for the soft breathing of horses and perhaps the cage, was unsettling and reminded me of how helpless I was.

The soft rumble of a masculine voice cut through the unnatural stillness, but I didn’t understand what it said. Something about the dark blanket my cage afforded me twisted and warped the words into strange syllables I couldn’t decipher.

Warm amber lantern light pierced the veil of the cage and stabbed into my still-too-sensitive eyes. It was The Raven of the Dawn, and he was crouching before my enclosure, watching me with something dangerous flashing in his old growth forest green eyes. But even the murder boiling behind his gaze did not stop the threads of whatever chord had been struck within me from humming a siren song, pulling me toward him. It lured me away from the back of the kennel and closer to the enormous hand he was extending through the bars. My eyes were riveted by the sun-kissed expanse of muscular forearm, where his tunic shirt was pushed up, following the map of his veins.

Quick as a cobra, the moment I came within arm’s reach, he grabbed hold of the front of my gown and pulled me flush with the bars. I tried to yelp and fight, but my new friend pain lanced through my head. I had never been prone to headaches—I’d had maybe three real migraines, but I knew well enough that the inferno that shredded across the left side of my head was no headache. Headaches did not feel like you dunked your skull in a bonfire. They did not crawl across your scalp, sink into your bone, and burn away at the tender meat they discovered unguarded.

Seconds turned into hours turned into years turned into millennia as my brain roasted in the oven of my skull until stars burst across a night sky and offered a millisecond of reprieve, and I took it. I twisted and, without a single shred of hesitation, bit down on the tender inside of his forearm as hard as I could. Blood peppered my tongue and salted my awareness before being washed away by electric sparks sizzling across a brain that should’ve been nothing but charred, smoking ashes.

Our eyes connected, and I watched a maelstrom of complicated emotions burst across his expression before they finally settled on a bemused, chilled passiveness.

“Release.”

The command was a simple one. There was no or else. There was no following threat. The word itself was a dictate and a threat all on its own.

I didn’t want to. I wanted to bite down hard and only come away when a mouthful of his flesh accompanied me so I could spit it back in his face. But my jaw had other ideas, and like an obedient puppy, it let go with only a whisper of reluctance.

He shoved his wounded hand back into his black glove and pushed up from his crouch. I watched him examine the trickle of blood that ran from the brutal, angry red wound with an enigmatic half smirk.

“There’s more where that came from, asshole,” I hissed, finally finding my voice through the tender ache of my head.

“I’m sure there is.”

The simple statement was a razor blade in an apple, some unrecognizable emotion buried within the heart of innocuousness—but deadly nonetheless.

The black fog of my prison rolled down over me again, extinguishing the lantern and muffling his retreating footfalls, leaving me to try to think around the scorched remnants of my mind.

I sat in silence, brooding in my bitterness over being brutalized once again, tracing the two and the one on my thigh with distracted anger, pushing my nail deeper into my skin.

There is a certain amount of comfort that falls over men who have spent too much time with each other. They start to forget to hide their conversation. They forget to pull on the air of casual cautiousness that is normal around an outsider. And I was not going to miss the opportunity to soak in all the sounds I was afforded during our journey.

Rictus had not allowed sound to freely pass the black fog that hovered around my cage out of kindness. Or at least not a sense of kindness he would recognize as such. To me, the waves of conversation I heard pass through the six men who surrounded me helped ease the panic of the unknown. It allowed me to center myself and think.