8
Flare
I wanted my clothes back. Right fucking now!
The next eventide, sometime close to midnight, the dungeon bustled with activity. My skin beaded with sweat as some brute poked me with strange devices—pronged things and smooth things and scratchy things. One of Winter’s knights held a torch aloft for him, and a fellow soldier—that woman with a half-moon countenance—stopped me from tearing into the physician. The manacles took care of the rest, the irons shackling my wrists.
The physician picked through my cropped waves, then checked my mouth and ears and eyes. Also, my neck where the symbols were painted. The Summer Crown had tattooed black sunbursts onto every prisoner, to catalog and keep us from getting far in an escape. If the markings encircled the ankles, it meant the captive was a so-called “simpleton.” Around the wrists meant they were mad but harmless like my tower mates.
A painted neck meant the prisoner was a feral kind of mad, dangerous and liable to maim. The villain prince must know this, so that couldn’t be the reason he kept asking about my collar.
The physician patted down my bare tits and stomach. When he shoved my thighs apart, I lunged toward him, but the chains and the female soldier kept a firm grip on me. Although I’d never been shy, I drew the line at being examined like a specimen. Giving my dignity as much consideration as he would to a rodent, the physician checked the crease between my legs, the torch flame following his movements and illuminating my cunt for the world to see.
Bile fizzled on my tongue. What was the man checking for? A magic trick? Did he suspect I was hiding a rabbit down there? Since when was having a pussy this important?
They couldn’t intend for me to become a breeding experiment. This continent wanted fewer of us, not more. Summer had made sure we couldn’t breed, though maybe Winter had invented nefarious ways to work around that.
Oddly, Pyre wasn’t there to enjoy the show. Instead, two other guards stood nearby, the pair betting for a duel—a showdown between Winter and my naked self. One of them flaunted a sheathed dagger at his hip, the hilt’s scarlet gems causing recognition to fester in my gut. The Summer troops had confiscated Poet’s weapon after catching me. I’d been agonizing over what had happened to it.
A dispassionate grunt cut off my fury. The physician stood and wiped his hands. “Nothing but filth.”
Curse this man. Curse him to the afterlife!
They upended a pail and splashed water over my head. I went rigid, my muscles tensing, because it was water.
Clean. Water.
Before I could shut my eyes in bliss, a pair of hands toweled me down, robbing me of the sensation. A sob coiled in my throat, the longing so great my hands soared to my face, where a few droplets remained. Suds frothed on my cheeks but popped the instant my fingers located them.
“Giving her the Royal treatment?” a Summer warden jeered from the sideline.
“His Highness wants them healthy and unsullied for transport,” the physician explained. “The last thing we need is an infestation.”
The villain prince. Hatred simmered through my blood.
My captors unchained and thrust me into a filmy chemise with straps as thin as weeds and a short hem barely covering my ass. The troops saw fit to honor Summer’s culture of nudity beneath our clothing, but at least the garment was freshly washed and devoid of holes.
A Summer soldier joined the action and wrestled me back into a set of restraints. This time, the bindings weren’t attached to the grille, nor were they irons. Awareness struck me, the material familiar. Briefly, I’d forgotten Summer’s tradition of using ropes to bind their captives during transport, a practice Winter was honoring.
I hissed, declaring war as the knights fastened the cords around my ankles and snagged my wrists in front of me. The brittle restraints scratched and proved hearty. Divine Seasons, I recognized the feel of them. I knew these types of knots.
The female warrior from Winter prodded my hip with the point of a crossbow bolt. Punctuating the movement, she urged me toward the cell door. “Let’s go.”
Yet before she could nudge for a second time, an idea sparked. My eyes skirted to a tiny whelk on the floor—the one I’d used to write Summer’s song. Feigning clumsiness, I stumbled forward and landed on my knees, then swiped the whelk from the ground. Using a deft sleight of hand, I wedged the object into the slender gap between the ropes and my wrists.
The hounds peeled me from the ground and shoved me through the door, away from the ciphered map in the ceiling. I tore my head over my shoulder, gazing toward the lyrics and their hidden image before the company yanked me from the cell block.
I made it rough for them, made them toil to get me moving, my limbs flailing like the fins of a netted fish, my teeth seeking purchase on a row of knuckles. In the end, it took every soldier on duty to drag me down the corridor.
The stairwell’s fathomless pit spiraled like a conch into an abyss. My breathing grew shallow, and I ground my heels into the floor.
The white-haired knight shook me in place. “Be still, fool!”
“Or we’ll take it out on your tower friends,” a Summer warden gloated.
Hellfire. I went willingly, but for good measure, I shrugged his furry fucking hand from my elbow. He’d always been a wooly one, his skin germinating with shaggy thickets of hair, including his neck and back, to the point where he might be flammable. If only I’d gotten the chance to find out.
We hustled down the stairs, the stone uneven beneath the sandals they’d jammed onto my feet. A draft rushed up the corridor, surfing through my hair and making the tips dance. The ropes chafed me raw as I hobbled down the shaft, the air changing from tepid to muggy. Light bloomed at the passage’s end, and that light became a gate, a giant mouth waiting to cough me out.
I reared back, my heart clattering. Frustrated, the knights hauled me forward as the gate croaked open to reveal an enclosed quad banked in torches and lined with columns.
We spilled over the threshold. Or rather, I spilled across the stone floor. The trained knights remained upright while I toppled forward and smacked the tiles. My wrists and knees smarted, but that wasn’t what caused the jolt through my limbs.
It was a pair of steel-edged boots. Crossed at the ankles, they clung to a set of limbs fitted in obsidian pants.
My gaze climbed high, ascending to a set of narrow hips, to the shirt gripping every defined contour of a masculine chest, to the corrupt face angling down at me. The monster’s dark silhouette leaned casually against a wall with his arms folded. Shadows clutched his frame, blotting out half of his features while the other half loomed into view.
“Stand,” the prince murmured.
As usual, the command sounded polished yet lethal. Except if I hadn’t made it clear by now, this monster would have to work harder with me.
I stayed put, hoping he’d abandon the wall and give my canines the opening they needed. But damn him, the prince was ten steps ahead. Having predicted my intention, he pushed off the wall, then squatted at a distance instead of coming nearer.
No fur coat tonight. In the deep V of his shirt, his pendant swung like a severed head, the vial backdropped against a smooth plate of muscles. Limbs spread, the prince rested his forearms on his thighs, those evil hands dangling off his knees.
The posture brought the Royal’s digits into stark relief. Blood stained his fingers like paint, the color reaching to his knuckles. Whatever he’d been up to today, he hadn’t bothered to rinse off the evidence.
Twin pupils pierced through me. Tipping his patrician nose, my captor bore down with cold elegance. “Get. Up.”
Before I could decide the most satisfying way to defy this order, the prince’s eyelids hooded. Unsurprised by my refusal, he tossed the troops a flat look, clicked his head toward me, and stood.
The female knight looped her arms beneath mine and hauled me off the floor. While the prince resumed his position at the wall, a clunking noise resounded from above. Chains plummeted from the ceiling like slugs. A single manacle clamped around my wrists, layering over the rope cords.
Plucking a chalice from the concrete table, the prince watched. His lips touched the vessel and sipped. Above the rim, the shards of his eyes observed as the links hoisted my arms overhead.
High.
So high they elongated my body, forcing me to balance on my toes. The hem of my chemise lifted, barely covering the private bits, my lack of drawers about to become public knowledge yet again.
I mashed my lips together, raised my chin, and skewered him with a glare. Instead of perversion or lechery, the prince absorbed my grimace with indifference. All the same, his mouth gripped the chalice’s rim with more force. He drank deeper, his throat pumping in tandem to my pulse.
Imagining the liquid slipping across his tongue, I squirmed. My resistance pulled the chain taut.
The prince’s attention seized on the movement—the jutting of my hips. His crimson digits flexed around the chalice’s stem. Swallowing with precision, he lowered the vessel as the knights bowed and backed out of the room.
The gate shut with a wincing noise. Then silence engulfed the quad.
Yet nothing happened. He simply waited, and the longer he did this, the greater my impulse to keep moving. That had to be what he was after. This man wanted to see me unhinged, intimidated, under his thumb.
I went still, uninterested in gratifying him, much less boosting the chemise another inch. One more twitch, and the patch of hair between my thighs would peek from the material. As it was, a current of air brushed across my breasts, the effect toughening my nipples through the fabric.
By the Seasons’ grace, the whelk I’d swiped at least remained tucked between my wrists and the cords.
Our gazes crossed like murder weapons. Minutes passed. Or maybe it was seconds.
The prince’s eyes faltered like a mistake, the pupils dropping to my lips. On reflex, my mouth parted. The reaction worked like an enticement—or an insult.
Shoving himself from the wall, the prince stalked my way. Long hair poured down his back, the color trapped between blue and slate, the mane tethered into a ponytail at the nape. Pacing himself like a wolf, he eviscerated the space between us while unsheathing his scalpel knife.
I tensed. My senses ran amok with fear, loathing, and something else. A strange emotion buzzed like a hornet in my navel. The instant his shadow touched my skin, the effect intensified, the threat causing my naked thighs to lock.
I held my ground as he braced the knife’s tip atop my lower lip. With visible deliberation, the prince grazed the tender flesh, tracing the edges of my mouth until they trembled.
Not out of fright. No, the reaction came from someplace I couldn’t name, from a horrible sort of restlessness, which increased with every skate of his weapon.
The prince spoke to my mouth. “You had a voice once.”
My lips snapped shut, blocking the weapon. He hadn’t bothered to examine me, so how on earth did he know that?
Taking my suspicious expression for a yes, the Royal angled his blade from my lips. “I’m a doctor,” he said, by way of explanation.
Prince of Winter, genius of The Dark Seasons. Yet that couldn’t be it. Not when he hadn’t so much as peeked down my throat. There had to be more, another detail about my voice that gave this way. Something he wouldn’t share.
Irises like glass reflected my features. What else did this fiend grasp about me?
The question must have sat on my face, because he saw through that too. “Sand drifters,” he acknowledged. “Nomadic seafarers with notable traits, including sand encrusting their fingernails.”
Seasons curse him. He’d noticed this.
“More than any group in Rhys and Giselle’s court, such drifters live apart from the greater populace, camping in the outer reaches of Summer where few people venture.” Winter cocked his head. “Where it’s easy to vanish. To spend one’s days drawing in the sand, perhaps.”
Heat scorched me from head to toe. In addition to recognizing the sand in my nails, he remembered my sketch in Autumn’s dungeon. Considering the battle I’d waged when he ordered the dirt pile swept clean, he must have reckoned it meant something to me.
That aside, it was still a marvel. To recognize any version of sentimentality or passion, this monster would need to possess a beating heart.
“I take it, there is more to your culture. But that is immaterial,” the prince continued. “Ultimately, they’re treasure seekers with mouths to feed and pockets to fill. That makes sand drifters susceptible to financial rewards, more so when the order comes from a Royal and the fugitive is a born fool. I suspect you will comprehend the rest.”
Yes, I already had. Renewed treachery squashed my insides.
My glower drew him closer when I’d hoped it would do the opposite. His shirt chafed my bodice, inciting a maelstrom of spiteful tingles across my skin.
“Tell me,” he intoned. “How did you lose your voice?”
So he knew the effect but not the cause. Again, I got the strange feeling there was more to this, some detail he wasn’t saying about my lack of voice.
Regardless, I contemplated spitting in his face, but he distracted me from that impulse. “I have learned the culprit behind your tattoo. Next, I would know more.”
I glimpsed those crimson-stained fingers again. Sometime between his appearance in the tower and now, the prince had found out who marked me, a gruesome hunch invading my mind about whose blood coated his digits. After how this Royal had treated Pyre in the tower, I couldn’t put it past Winter to react less violently about the tattoo.
What did he do to the guard? I shuddered at the possibilities. His actions shouldn’t make sense. The last thing this villain would do was punish someone for harming me. Then again, he’d stressed enough times that I was his property, and rulers didn’t take kindly to their alleged possessions being vandalized. That had to be it.
I sealed my lips shut. Winter might know broad details about my life, but he didn’t know the depths of them, and he never would.
My pain belonged to me. My losses were my own.
This shark had no right to them and wasn’t asking because he cared to understand. Incapable of seeing me as human, I meant nothing to him. But I wouldn’t become his next experiment.
When I denied him a reply, the prince lowered his timbre. “If I make an observation, you will respond.” He angled his blade toward my windpipe. “Or I shall force it from you.” The tip kissed the place where my voice should have been. “Nod or shake your head. Mouth the words. I don’t give a fuck which. But you will obey.”
My joints burned from the position, and my lips burned, and my throat burned, and everything burned in his proximity. The effects compiled on my tongue. He would keep me like this for a century if I didn’t respond. But if I had to give him an answer, I would make it count.
The word fired from my mouth. “No.”
A blast of sound to my ears. A silent one to him.
Still, it was an easy retort for this man to decipher, simply by reading my lips. Two letters, which ignited two conflicting reactions across his face—amazement and resentment.
Those eyes thinned with aggravation, then glittered with inspiration. “In addition to you, I have procured an assortment of mad parasites from Rhys. Why? Because the more disposable ones I add to Winter’s pile, the more opportunities for testing, to treat the kingdom’s real citizens. Perhaps I should have selected your tower mates while I was at it, instead of deciding against them after you spat on me. Quite clever to divert my attention, however temporary.”
I barred my ivories. “I won’t let you take them.”
He arched a superior eyebrow. “So you’re protective.”
Instantly, we paused. With a few exceptions, it was rare for people to read my lips this effortlessly, and no one had ever caught on this fast. The prince appeared thunderstruck as well, yet it seemed like more than that. My reply struck this monster like a blow to the head, his features jerking as if the word had slammed into him.
As if he’d heard me.
But that couldn’t be. Only I had the ability to hear myself, so I must be imagining that part. Either way, him being a scientist and a physician had likely contributed to understanding me.
And shit. By comprehending my words, he’d also stoked my defenses and exposed a vulnerability.
I snapped out of it. “I care for people. You wouldn’t understand.”
He recovered from the moment too, the dark blue streaks under his lower lashes crinkling. “On the contrary. I care for the right people.”
Our breathing clashed, fuming with animosity.
“As accidents of the natural world, living plagues such as fools are meant for labor and research,” he said. “Or—if incompetent, untamable, or unfeasible to test—they’re discarded and used as decoys for hunting. Rather commonplace.”
The ruler feigned contemplation. “If I don’t bargain for your ilk, you’ll have peace of mind. But if I do, you’ll have company on the journey to Winter, which carries its own risks. Trapping allies in one place can lead to mutiny. Besides, it pleases me to see you alone. Defenseless. Isolated. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
I must be seeking an early grave. That explained this destructive urge to provoke him.
I replied, “Not that it lasted.”
“True,” the prince allowed. “But Poet and Briar are no longer around to unleash you.”
“Why?” I seethed, unable to stop myself.
For the hundredth time, why me? Why single me out? Why hunt me across two nations?
Those chilling eyes flickered. “Because you broke something that meant a great deal to me.”
Glancing at his tarnished vial, I scoffed. “This world took my freedom, yet a Royal can’t handle a small crack in a piece of jewelry.” The chain jangled as I got in his face. “Who’s the weak one?”
The question chewed through his facade. Like a veil dissolving, some type of fragility rose to the surface. Although I placed him at mid-twenties, he appeared younger for an instant, the candid look there and gone before I could dive in.
The fleeting reaction drilled a hollow into me. Of all people, I understood the value of sacred keepsakes. Also, it seemed as though he was referring to more than the pendant.
But what else could I have broken that mattered to this man? And when?
The decorative chains ornamenting his boots clattered like bones, while my own chain trembled. With my body stretched, the lone manacle choked my wrists. My breasts inflated against his pecs, the span of his limbs inching my thighs apart.
Air sliced through his teeth. “You tread on thin ice.”
“You’re playing with fire,” I threw back.
“Winter does not play.” His warning cut to the quick. “It probes.”
The temperature of this feud changed. My body fastened like a deadbolt. If he meant what I thought, I would attack until blood covered more than his fingers.
The prince registered my defensive stance with interest, realization glittering in his irises. “Ah. You think I would fuck you without your consent.” He looked repelled. “That is the barbarian’s way.” Then he leaned in—so far in, too far in—and let the contradiction graze my mouth the way his weapon had. “Winter would violate you differently.”
I kept vigilant, as much as possible with my arms braced to the ceiling.
“I’m not a kind man, so I wouldn’t fuck that way. But providing I could stomach the task, my objective would be an alternative form of abuse,” the prince explained. “First, I would make certain you wanted it.”
Whereas his tone had been cold and slippery, now it leaked steam into an already-sweltering environment. A new type of heresy snaked across my knees and made a slow, infuriating track to my inner thighs.
As if I were a specimen, the point of his blade etched my heart. “All too willing, you would smother yourself against me, at which point I would subjugate you with patience.”
The weapon scorched a path down my bodice, along the swell of one breast, and skidded over an erect nipple. “Thoroughly. Methodically,” he muttered as the stud lifted into a rough peek.
Next, he slid the knife to my ribcage, running from left to right along each bracket. “Instead of my cock, I’d open your pussy with the hilt of my knife until you gushed like a tap, wet and quivering.”
Something repulsive happened. My traitorous body morphed into someone else’s—a woman I didn’t recognize. Heat rose to the surface, so that pearls of sweat drizzled between my tits.
What dark magic was this? What form of Winter experiment?
The weapon sloped over my stomach and down to my navel. Scanning his descent, the prince murmured, “Then I would ply your soaked cunt with the handle, lashing in and out until hidden noises cracked from your lips like a vulgar little secret.”
Because that would mean I desired him.
“Or like a cure.”
Because that would mean I owed him.
For a moment, he lingered on my stomach. His brows furrowed, noticing something that darkened his features.
Moving on, he sketched my hipbone. “I would make sure you craved what you hated.”
What I hated. No other emotion could better describe my feelings. Yet despite this hostility reaching a fever pitch, a molten rush flooded my bloodstream. For that, I hated myself more.
“I would make you betray yourself,” the prince emphasized. “I would draw sounds from you like blood from a flesh wound.”
When the scalpel knife caressed the inner ledge of my thigh, the pulse in my veins throbbed. The violent sensation pumped heat to the nexus, my pussy tightening of its own accord. To my disgust, a terrible impulse tugged my hips in an unholy direction, toward the one man who would never deserve it.
The knife climbed to the hem of my chemise, which fluttered like butterfly wings. My nemesis halted. I seethed but didn’t move, since doing so would nudge the blade into my flesh.
Then he skated the knife under my skirt. Merely a centimeter, but that was plenty. My head fogged as the tip halted a scant distance from the hair covering my slit, which pounded like a muscle.
This had to be some form of manipulation or glamour. Visions of the prince’s hilt fucking me laid siege to my thoughts. In response, my limbs shook like a dam about to break.
Somehow, the prince registered this effect. Like an oversight, those hellish eyes vaulted to mine, revolted fervor streaking through his pupils. He was enjoying this, and he detested this.
“That is how I would fuck you.” And finally, the prince burrowed in, both of us shaking, hating. Then his voice sank to a terrible whisper. “And that’s how I would become your greatest regret.”
Whatever he’d been doing to me, it had transformed from hypothetical to literal. Rage kindled, combusting to the forefront and scalding every other shameless, faithless sensation in its wake. I might be shackled, but that was nothing new. Years of being confined had taught me ways to fight back.
His broad frame radiated over me as we traded bitter looks. But instead of shrinking away, I curled forward like a venomous creature and struck. With deliberate motions, I called his bluff. I rubbed every inch of my body against his, from my limbs, to my cunt, to the nipples poking through my chemise.
That did it. As if I’d pulled a trigger, the prince stiffened, his weapon arrested beneath my skirt. Relishing his confounded expression, I seized that moment and brushed my clit over the hilt. And then again.
And again. Cautious not to rub against the blade, I slid my crease back and forth along the handle while leveling him with a death glare—goading him, daring him. The maneuver issued a challenge to reach deeper, offering him permission to test me, to funnel that knife higher and see where it got him.
Try and intimidate me. Try and tame your captive. Try it hard.
And risk losing. Because who said I would regret a thing, especially if it led this man to act, to make so much of an effort, as he’d already done a dozen times. The sinuous move made it graphically clear. If I could get him to search the continent for me, to get this near to what he abhorred, to smother his fancy weapon all over my chained body, then I could manipulate him back.
In fact, I could get him to do other things. Like set me loose.
Then I’d be free to respond with all the vigor he anticipated, except my teeth would be the least of his problems. Because anything that had teeth also possessed claws and fists.
My performance worked more than I’d foreseen. The prince’s hold on the weapon faltered, the reaction barely perceptible. His pupils fattened, and his eyelids turned down to half-mast, then sparkled with contempt. I saw the moment he recognized the slip, what he’d allowed to show through.
I let my thoughts burn across my face. Your move, Highness.
The villain prince thought he knew me, knew people like me, but it was all surface. Those crystalline eyes had been forged from a layer of ice, glacial and shallow. That’s how he saw this world, whereas flames reached deeper.
Ice might reflect fire. But fire melted it.