Chapter 3 #4
“Your Majesty!” The four men escorting us dropped to their knees, their weapons crashing to the glass floor with a cacophony of clinking that reverberated through the hall.
Leslo squared his shoulders, placing a hand on the handle of his knife and pulling me closer with his other hand.
I no longer had any opinion about whether this was real, staged, or just conjured by my imagination.
But the existence of a being like this man defied all logic.
His skin didn’t just glow. The light seemed to break in it like inside the many facets of a diamond, transforming him into a piece of art.
Seeing him move, hearing him talk, was a surreal experience.
He simply couldn’t be alive. He was too gorgeous, too stunning, too ethereal to be corporeal.
His beauty left me breathless.
The pissed-off expression on his face as he approached was very real, however. His pale eyes sparkled like a pair of diamonds too as he glided a bored gaze over his four men behind us, then paused it on Leslo, sparing me no glance at all.
“Leave,” the king said.
He wore no crown. As he stepped out of the light, I noticed that he wore nothing at all. Not even underwear. His impressive dick swayed ever so majestically between his muscular thighs, unburdened by any fabric.
Wouldn’t that be a nightmare for pretty much anyone to show up in public naked? Yet the king seemed perfectly unbothered. In fact, he wore his nakedness with more confidence than most people wore clothes.
Leslo took a cautious step back as the king approached but didn’t cower like the guards did.
“I have a deal for you, King Kye,” he said. “Goddess Ghata graciously sent you a human in exchange for womora.”
A deal? I was part of some sick, twisted human trade after all?
The anger simmering inside me spiked. I wanted to scream, but shock choked me.
“This is illegal...” was all I could croak in utter disbelief.
“A human?” The king finally deigned me a quick glance.
Curiosity briefly flickered through his expression, but the emotion didn’t last long. Cool indifference replaced it, settling over his handsome features with practiced ease.
“What would I need her for?” he asked, sounding bored.
Leslo flinched, his cockiness wavering.
“There are currently no humans in Olathana, are there?” He didn’t sound completely sure about that fact.
The king shrugged. “So?”
Leslo perked up, taking it as a confirmation.
“You’ll be the only one with a human pet then,” he gushed, giving me a slap on the shoulder in the manner of a sleazy car salesman slapping the hood of a car he was hoping to sell.
Did he just call me a pet?
Indignant, I swatted his hand off me and opened my mouth to protest.
“What am I to do with a human pet?” The king looked utterly uninterested.
Yet he hadn’t ordered us out of his palace again. Apparently, Leslo and his proposal provided some kind of entertainment for the royalty after all.
“Do whatever you want with her,” Leslo shrugged. “You can keep her in your menagerie, show her off on a leash, fuck her while she is still young and...” he gave me an assessing look, like it hadn’t occurred to him to judge my potential attractiveness before, “...and pretty.”
“Asshole,” I hissed at him, using anger to combat the chill of fear seizing me.
Far stronger words pounded inside my brain, jostling each other out of the way in a rush to get out.
But the king spoke again. “She’s completely and utterly useless to me for any of those things, including fucking.”
Useless? Did he just call me useless?
I ignored the pinch of his words, trying to focus on the positive instead. If the king didn’t want me, then kidnapping me had been really stupid on Leslo’s part, which meant he’d have no choice but to let me go now. Right?
My heart pulsed with hope. Yet deep inside, some primal feminine pride did take offense. The king’s arrogance knew no bounds. He’d likely never been put in his place, had never been held responsible for his words, or accountable for his actions.
If there was anything I’d learned while working with powerful men, it was that their arrogance often masked their incompetence.
I smirked, imagining the mighty king “completely and utterly” incompetent in bed.
Whether or not it was true, didn’t matter.
Just imagining him fumbling between the sheets, unable to find a woman’s clit cheered me up.
“I’m sure you’d be pretty useless to me too, despite your pretty dick,” I muttered softly under my breath.
I was sure he wouldn’t hear me, but he unexpectedly jerked his head my way. This time, he ran a long, measuring look down my frame, taking in my bare feet, soggy clothes, salt-spiked hair, and whatever was left of my makeup after that mad swim in the ocean.
Leaving Leslo behind, the king strolled my way, and I learned firsthand the unsettling effect of his undivided attention.
A swell of power rolled from him, compressing the air like the first wave of an explosion. It felt so real, I was forced to retreat a step. After yet another step, I came to my senses, willing my feet to stop and stand my ground.
“What do you know?” he mused, tilting his head to the side as if studying a curious insect. “This butterfly can speak.”
He stopped about a step away from me, fisting his hands at his sides.
The reflection of the water in the pool cast an ever-changing pattern of light on his skin, bringing out that enthralling shimmer along the ridges of his muscles.
From this close, he looked even more different, not just from Leslo and me, but even from the men who had brought us here.
The king’s entire body appeared to be coated in a thin layer of glass, flexible and translucent.
Light bounced off it, bringing out a shimmer far more brilliant than even the pearlesque glow of his people.
His hair was both colorless and of all colors at once as the strands shattered light into prismatic rainbows.
His irises possessed the same quality too, looking like liquid diamonds with a million facets each.
“I’m not a butterfly,” I protested, finally finding my voice again. “I’m not some chattel you can just bargain away in a deal. You have no right to decide my fate without even asking me what I think about it all.”
The king arched an elegant eyebrow.
“Alright,” he said evenly. “What do you think about the deal the brack is offering me? Would you like me to take his offer? Do you want to stay in my glass palace with me?”
His deep, lyrical voice rolled over me like an ocean swell—warm and lazy, but with a hidden danger likely lurking in its depths.
Breathing through apprehension tightening in my chest, I dragged my eyes up to his face, to those sharp as diamonds eyes framed by long, translucent eyelashes.
The iridescent waves of his hair cascaded down his broad shoulders.
The breeze, trapped between the palace’s glass walls, swayed his long tresses.
He was breathtakingly, unbelievably beautiful, like a mythical creature or a vision. But then, a corner of his mouth lifted in a smirk, giving his ethereal beauty a very human, cocky expression.
He was waiting for my reply. That didn’t mean he’d give any weight to it, but at least he seemed ready to hear me out.
“I don’t want to stay here,” I said loud and clear. “I was kidnapped, taken against my will. I demand to be released and provided with transportation back home. Um, no...” I contemplated for a moment, “To Los Angeles, please.”
Maybe the miracle could still happen, and I could make it in time for the hearing? Though the hearing, the airport, as well as all my life prior, somehow felt far away now, like a memory of a long vanished dream.
The smirk on the king’s face sharpened, gaining a lethal quality.
“How cute of you to think you can demand anything of me, little human,” he mused, toying with my misery.
“Prick,” I snapped, but only in my head for now, somehow finding the strength to remain diplomatic for the sake of my freedom.
“Leslo abducted me,” I insisted out loud. “As the ruler of this land, don’t you have laws that protect people’s fundamental right of freedom? He can’t own me.”
“And yet, he does,” the king said matter-of-factly.
“He took you. You belong to him now. Fortunately, I don’t have the displeasure of interacting with Ghata’s bracks often, but I know that if they take anything on the orders of their goddess, they don’t ever release it until they get what they want.
You have less control over your life now than a small fish in shark-infested waters.
I don’t know where or what Los Angeles is, but I can assure you, you’ll never see it again.
This is Nerifir, the land of fae. Our magic is often deadly to humans.
Your kind doesn’t belong here. At least human life is short.
Whatever the brack does with you, you won’t live long to suffer.
” He leaned closer and lowered his voice as if imparting a great secret to me, “You will not survive here.”
Maybe deep inside his handsome head, he genuinely believed he was helping me get a grasp on my new reality.
But to me, every word felt like a slap in the face, demeaning and patronizing, and the calm indifference with which he described my bleak future and untimely death made it infinitely worse.
He told me I’d suffer and die, yet he wouldn’t lift a finger to do anything about it.
A soft blow of breeze sent the fragrant, shimmering curtain of his luxurious hair across my face.
The anger inside me had finally boiled over. Defiance flamed through my chest. I shot my hand up, grabbing a handful of his silky, illustrious tresses and rotated my wrist, winding a coil of his hair around my arm.
He jerked his head back with a flash of pure panic in his eyes. It was brief, but I didn’t miss it. For a fraction of a moment, I managed to wipe that condescending indifference off his face and replace it with genuine fear.