Chapter 6
Six
I’m not sure if it’s the knock at the door or Cage getting out of bed that wakes me up a little while later.
I roll over and watch him walk to the door.
I push up onto my elbow and try to listen as Cage speaks to someone on the other side.
Their voices are low, but I can hear the tone of Cage and Kale’s voices, the way Cage grumbles out a question before closing the door again.
But instead of getting back into bed, he reaches for his pants and pulls them on.
“What's going on?” I ask, sitting up.
“Most likely nothing. There was a slight disturbance at the portal. I’m just going to make sure all is well.” Leaning down, he presses a kiss to my forehead with enough affection that my heart aches. His hands slide away from me, and I watch him leave before falling back onto the bed.
This is…not happening the way I thought it would.
And in fact, I’m not even sure I know what I thought this would be like.
I guess I thought we would consummate the relationship and then maybe meet every once in a while after.
I imagined that he would basically ignore me.
That he would treat me the way he does all of his other subjects.
But I wasn’t expecting the mating ceremony to be so explosive. And I wasn’t expecting to miss him when he went back to his own quarters. And I wasn’t prepared for him to come to me in the middle of the night.
What the hell am I to this fire monster?
Something shifts somewhere in the darkness of the hallway that leads deeper into my quarters, and I hold very still.
If I was back on Earth, I would assume it was an ice maker or an electric air freshener or something.
But they don’t have those things here. In the silence, I hear the slide of something, like a shoe on the stone floor.
I shoot up in bed, holding the covers to my body as I stare into the dark. I can’t see anything now that Cage isn’t here with his bright solis. I strain my eyes, trying to make out the shapes of the hall that leads to the bathing room.
Something moves in the dark.
Throwing the covers off myself, I run for the door. But I’m not fast enough. Something hits me on the back of the head, and then darkness fills every crevice of my awareness.
I wake in the dark, but this dark is different.
Where there’s something warm and comforting about the darkness of the High Mountain, the cave I wake in is cold.
My head pounds as I lift it from the chilled stone and look around.
I can’t see anything, and when I try to sit up, I realize my hands are bound together with rope.
I gasp and tug at the ropes, but they just dig harder into my skin.
As my eyes adjust, I can see that the rope around my hands is attached to a metal ring on the cave wall.
I pull at it, but it’s embedded so deep into the rock that I have a better chance of pulling my arms out of their sockets than pulling the ring out of the stone.
Looking around, I find that I’m in an empty cave. It’s relatively small, and across the way from me, there’s a dark hallway leading to some other dark part of the cave. And that’s it. Just an empty cave with a metal ring on the wall. Totally normal.
I want to call out, but I can’t bring myself to open my mouth. What the hell is happening? Who was in my room? How did they even get in there? At least they covered me. I look at my body. Of course, it’s with my bathrobe, but that’s better than being abducted completely naked.
I tug at the rope again, twisting it to try and get my hand out of it, but it’s so tight around my wrists that after a few minutes of maneuvering, I start to panic.
I can feel tears rising in my throat, my situation finally really setting in.
Someone kidnapped me. And Cage doesn’t know where I am.
I’m in a cave somewhere, but I don’t know where or how long I was unconscious.
Annaleigh once told me that there are other mountain ranges outside of Isiriel that are inhabited by other fire monsters.
What if I was kidnapped by one of them? What if they’re not as nice as the males in Isiriel?
Setting my bare feet against the cave wall, I pull at the rope, but the ring still doesn’t budge.
“You’re wasting your time.”
I scream, spinning around and pushing my back up against the wall. There’s a man standing in the middle of the cave, holding a flashlight. Not a fire monster. A human.
“What do you want with me?” I ask immediately.
If he’s going to try to assault me, I kind of want to know now so that I can face the situation head-on.
The man comes closer, until eventually, he takes a seat in front of me, a few feet away.
He’s small, scrawny, or maybe I’ve just been spending too much time with giant fire monsters.
He’s sweaty and dirty, dark stubble on his chin and his head shaved down low.
His face isn’t familiar. I rarely pay attention to everyone in Isiriel, even from behind my booth at the market, so maybe I’ve seen this guy before and just don’t remember.
He sets the flashlight on the ground between us and folds his hands in his lap.
“I know why King Cage married you. He thinks that he can marry a human and suddenly all of us will just accept him as king, right? Well, that creature is no king of mine. Isiriel deserves a democracy, and the rebellion is going to make sure it happens.”
“This is his home,” I snap at him. “If you don’t like it, why don’t you just leave?”
He chuckles. “And go where? Have you been outside of Isiriel? It’s nothing but wasteland for miles. This is where civilization is.”
I set my head back against the rock behind me. “Seems pretty cut and dry to me.”
“What’s cut and dry is what’s happening here,” he says, but I don’t look at him. I look up at the stalactites hanging above us. “By now, the king knows you’re gone. We’ve made it very clear to him that if he wants you back, he’ll agree to a fair election for the throne.”
I look straight at him. “You’re an idiot,” I sneer.
“And you’re a disgusting slut for fucking a monster.”
I throw my head back and laugh. “This is clear jealousy. You’re mad that you’re not man enough to stand beside one of the Isiriel males. Mad that they’re stealing your women and satisfying them like you never could.”
The impact comes quickly. He doesn’t even bother to hit me with his own hand. He swipes the flashlight hard against my cheekbone. The pain slices through me, and my head throbs. For a minute, my vision is white, and then the world comes back into focus. I blink down at the stone floor.
“Sickening whore,” the man hisses at me and stands. “Your husband can give us what we want, or you’ll die. Better hope he’s smarter than you are.”
I grit my teeth until he’s gone, taking the only light with him, and then I start to cry. My cheek hurts, and the back of my head, where he knocked me out earlier, throbs. I settle my face against the cold stone, and it’s a relief.
Wherever Cage is, I hope he’s safe. I don’t know how easy it is to kill an Isiriel male. They have flesh and bones just like the humans do, but they’re bigger and stronger and are basically walking infernos. He’s safe. I have to believe he’s safe, or I’ll lose my shit.
I don’t know what to do. I work slowly at the ropes on my wrists. I read somewhere that rope stretches over time. Maybe if I just keep tugging at this stupid thing, I’ll eventually be able to stretch it enough to slip my hands out.
My stomach starts to roil from the pain in my head, and I lean over and vomit on the ground. The world is spinning. To get to it to stop, I lay down on the ground and focus on breathing to battle the nausea.
What am I supposed to do now? There’s nothing in this cave but the ring I’m attached to, so it’s not like I’m going to be able to strategically use something sharp to get myself free.
I stretch out a hand and run it along the wall.
It’s smooth. No sharp edges on which to create fiction and break ropes.
I sigh. I really should have seen this coming. I didn’t know there was an active rebellion against Cage—he may not even know that himself—but I should have at least known that it would be dangerous to get married to a king. Aren’t a king’s loved ones always a target?
Loved ones. I’m not about to delude myself into thinking I mean more to Cage than I do. His whole my love spouting was just sex talk. The guy was a virgin twenty-four hours ago, so he would probably call any person who made him come his love.
My eyes grow heavy, the pain in my head inescapable, and eventually, I fall asleep.
I jerk awake, staring into the dark. It takes me a second to realize that what woke me up is a cold, wet cloth being held to my swollen cheekbone. Turning my head, I catch sight of a flame, and my heart jumps.
“Cage,” I gasp, trying to push myself up into a sitting position. I’m somehow even dizzier than I was before, and in the confusing shadow, I try to make out Cage’s face, but my mind can’t seem to form a complete picture in the dark.
“I’m sorry, no,” a woman’s voice says, and I jerk away from the hand touching my face. It’s not the comforting warmth of Cage. Instead, as I’m able to finally get my head to stop spinning, I see the shape of a woman’s face. I scramble away from her, until my back hits the cave wall.
“Hey, hey,” she says, and now that I’m looking right at her, I see the fire that she’s started on the floor in the center of the room and the hand that she still has reached out toward me with the cloth on it.
On the floor in front of her is a bowl of water.
She’s a human, young but clearly still older than me. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
I scoff. “Yeah, sure. You just kidnapped me and are holding me hostage. Oh, and your friend hit me. But for sure, now the abuse will end.”
Her hand falls by her side. “I apologize for him. He’s angry. We all are.”
“Right. Angry that you couldn’t come to this realm and take over.”
She dips the cloth in the water and tries to bring it to my face again, but I shift away from her. “It’s a little more complicated than that,” she says quietly.
“I don’t care how complicated it is.”
She nods, setting the cloth in the bowl. “Listen, I don’t think—”
A roar erupts from somewhere in the cave, cutting her off.
She immediately scrambles to her feet, and I start to tug at the ropes on my wrists.
Some very concerning sounds are coming from down the hall, in the part of the cave that I can’t see.
Someone screams, and I stop moving, stop breathing.
The woman who woke me has pressed herself against the wall, as far from the opening to the hallway as she can get.
I watch her watch the mouth of the cave.
And then that roar sounds again. I turn toward the opening in the cave just in time to see the entire hallway light up with fire.
The woman and I both gasp as the flame floods into the room like there’s been an explosion.
I duck my head, but the flames blow in and then immediately die back down, leaving nothing but smoke and darkness in their wake.
The cave is suddenly so hot that I start to sweat. I yank at the ropes and listen as the woman starts to whimper in fear. If I’m being honest, part of me enjoys it. The bruise on my cheek throbs.
“Alice!” Cage’s shout is so loud that it feels like the entire cave shudders.
I tug recklessly at the bindings, like now that he’s here, I’m no longer tied to the wall. “Cage! I’m back here!”
As soon as he comes around the corner, long horns spiraling up toward the ceiling and eyes burning so high that they almost completely engulf his face, Cage turns toward me.
He seems to find me with his whole body, and then he runs to me.
His arms surround me, holding me tight to his chest. I can feel a tremor moving through him, and the heat of his solis burning up the air around us.
“My love,” he says into my ear, and then the flames of his eyes die down to small enough embers that he can lean forward and kiss me. His hands come up to hold my face, and I wince.
He jerks back from me, his eyes immediately flaming high again. “What’s wrong, my love?” In the dark, he tilts my face up until he can see it clearly. The flames erupt so high that the heat of them is almost unbearable. “They hurt you.”
I don’t deny it.
“They are dead now for what they’ve done to you.”
From somewhere in the depths of the room, the woman—who I completely forgot about—whimpers again.
Cage stiffens and turns toward her. I can see him directing his anger already.
The other people have already been punished for taking me.
But now he’s seen the bruises and there’s someone around he can take it out on. Fresh meat, as it were.
He takes a step toward her, but I hold on tight to his arm. “Cage, no.”
He turns to me, and I see the way the anger sparks higher. “They hurt you,” he says in a growl between his teeth.
“She didn’t,” I tell him, nodding toward the woman. “She was trying to help me.” Sort of.
For a long moment, he doesn’t move, and then he turns back to her. “I want you to send a message to the rebellion. They’ll have one chance to leave my kingdom. Tonight, at dusk. Whoever doesn’t take that chance will face consequences.”
The woman, pressed completely to the wall of the cave, nods. “I’ll tell them.”
“Go. Now.”
She runs across the room and down the hallway. I hear her scream, and I can only imagine that she just ran into another fire monster—probably Kale—on her way out of the cave.
Cage easily breaks the rope tying me to the wall. He takes a moment to free me from the knots and then he lifts me into his arms, and I’m thankful. Now that all the excitement is over, I’m very aware of the throbbing in my head, the way that the room doesn’t quite come into focus.
“My head,” I say, as Cage walks me from the cave.
“Rest now, my love,” he says. “I will make you good as new.”
I press my face into his chest as we descend into the darkness of the cave, and let my eyes fall closed.