Chapter 2
TWO
The firmness of the winter fae’s cold grip leaves the nape of my neck—and I sag, a slight bob to my head.
With the pressure released from my spine, aches spring along my shoulders. The urge to roll them back and stretch out my neck tenses me. But I don’t dare chance it, any movement that’ll return his attention to me.
Folded over on the black ice, I keep myself small. Even my breaths are controlled, shallow.
But it’s all pointless.
I pose no threat to him, just as most people are no threat to the dark fae, but it makes no difference to them.
They still slaughter us.
And now I am left to the mercy of this one as he slowly comes around to my front.
The toes of his soft, leather boots halt on the black road, right at the border of my vision, an inch or two from my splayed, gloved hands.
My eyes widen—
And I stiffen.
I wait, wait for him to do something, for him to deliver the kill strike, the blow to my back that will punch his fist through my ribs and shove my heart right out of my body.
The seconds trickle by.
And I just stare at the toes of soft, leather boots.
“Woman.”
My insides frost.
I blink my wide eyes, once, twice.
“Tess-nee.”
My lashes glitter with the tears that cling to them, and my sight blurs between blinks.
The breath that shudders from me is a grated wisp of mist in my face.
Bee’s words are tangled strings in my head, woven and muddled around my brain. I try to cling onto them, to remember what she told me, remember the promise of almost safety—
But the frosty growl of his voice speaking my name has me clutched too tight in an invisible fist, a grip of pure, tense horror.
My chest trembles with the shuddering breaths.
Slowly, I lift my gaze higher, up the fitted leather of his trousers, like tar running over boulders.
Even in the dusky light, it’s clear that he’s packed with sheer muscle.
The tears fall from my lashes and trail down my raw cheeks.
I blink, wet, on the glisten of weapons fastened to him, short knives holstered to his thighs, a waist-belt of daggers and knives of all kinds, some a chalky black substance I don’t recognise.
My mouth wobbles.
The crinkle of my gloves comes as I fist my hands on my lap, as if to better steel myself.
I don’t want to look at him.
I don’t want him to summon my gaze to his with the mere growl of my name, barbed and foreign, and I don’t want to be here at his boots.
The ice is trickling through my insides.
A fear I’ve never felt before, too cold to fight, too rigid to speed my heartbeat, I feel stuck in a moment of time, trapped in a mist, and the echo of his implied command is static in the air.
He said my name, but it was a command.
It was a look at me.
My breaths grow ragged, harsher and harsher the higher I lift my gaze.
The warrior stands over me, waiting.
His belt melts into more leather, more tar streaming over boulders; a chest that’s chiselled from solid ice and stone.
The abrupt end of his leathers at his clavicle meets a marble-like complexion—and I look up at him from beneath wet lashes.
The breath utters from me.
The light rinses over one side of his face, unnatural in its smooth texture, not a pore or a fucking blemish on him, and it’s utterly inhuman.
The pallor of his hair is a touch warmer than the coldness of his complexion.
But it’s his eyes that strike down at me, swords drawn, a frosty green that trembles my spine.
There’s no hint of alliance in the way he’s looking down at me. No scrap of warmth or understanding, no friendliness—
But there is loathing.
Rage.
Like currents moving beneath his hard flesh, the rush of waters pushing against a marble cave. He is tensed against it, this rage pulsing in him, his hands clenching into fists at his sides.
A crack in his marble mask—his upper lip curls, just a bit, fleeting, and he growls his command, “Stand.”
That growl in his voice, that undercurrent of rage, it’s unusual, not like a beast’s snarl, but distant somehow. Cold. The faraway whistling of a sharp wind through mountains.
It tingles down my bones, all the way to my curling toes.
I drop my gaze to his boots, then slide it across to the inhaler that lies just a touch away from him, motionless on the black ice.
I don’t even think before I reach out for it, I just do. But before the gloved barrier of my fingertips can touch it, the winter fae has moved, faster than any of the fae I have ever seen.
This one moves in a way that shudders ice through the air, a mist, a freezing breeze that wisps around me.
And in that moment, less than a heartbeat, a fraction of a second, his boot is pressing down on my hand.
A hollow cry ripples out from me.
I freeze, eyes wide and latched onto his foot flattened on my splayed hand.
“I said,” he snarls the words, slick with frost, “stand.”
The pathetic squeak of my whimper is cut off.
He snatches me, a hand grabbing me by the scruff of the neck.
I’m hoisted off the road.
The bite of the air lashes at my wet cheeks as I’m hauled some stumbling steps—until the black ice goes still beneath the toes of my boots, and I blink on the wash of light in front of me.
I stare at the streams of blood falling down from the net.
Tension bolts me in place, a rigidness like nothing I’ve ever felt, and all I can do is watch the rainfall of crimson blood.
The warrior slides his cold hand from the scruff of my jacket to my nape—then, fingers digging into the underside of my jaw, he forces my face upwards…
Until I’m staring at Emily.
Her body.
Her corpse.
His work.
He makes me look at the shredded flesh, the torn face, the mangled scream frozen in winter.
It isn’t lost on me.
This is a warning.
A threat.
He doesn’t have to say it.
He doesn’t have to spell it out.
I get exactly what he’s telling me.
Obey—or end up like her.
My mouth wobbles as, slowly, my eyelids sink shut. The burn of the torchlight sears into my eyelids, even closed over, but the sight of her bloody pretzel body is shut out for the briefest moment.
The fae rattles me, hard, and his hand shifts from my neck to fist in my hair.
A scream claws out of me.
My hands throw back to the strength of his wrist, but it doesn’t stop him.
He tugs my head back, strands pulling from my scalp. The tone of his command is dark, “Look.”
My lashes flutter over tears, but I do as he says, I lift my gaze—and I look at Emily.
Like before the winter fae shot her at close range with buckshot, her limbs were bent and twisted, and she was pretzeled in the net.
But now, her kneecap is blasted open.
The gun that lies across her chest must’ve gone off in the panic, because half of her fucking brains are out of her skull.
Every other shuddered breath, my eyes glaze again, a refill of fresh tears, before I blink and she clears once more.
Each time she does, it’s somehow worse.
Her jaw hangs aside, tipped into the slick black net, almost like it’s mangled.
There are holes all over her face, a cheek that is torn and shredded, an eyeball that looks like it erupted from the inside.
My breaths have turned so ragged that they are groans now, guttural and laced with the rising nausea.
My lips shudder with the sobs starting to grate through me, and it’s only now that his hand slips out of my hair.
I stagger with the release, stumbling right into the hood of the car.
My hands slap down, hard, and the waning strength of my arms barely holds me up as I fight off the nausea stirring and stirring in my stomach.
The retch that jolts through me is violent, and my legs waver beneath me. A second one strikes, this one burning with bile, before I sink onto the hood—and just flop.
The icy metal presses against my cheek, but I hardly feel it through the thudding in my head, the aches smearing my back, the tightness of my lungs… And I wonder, faintly, if I can survive this.
My mind is already unravelling.
I stare, now, at the rainfall of blood, watching it slow down, turn into drops and strings, but I don’t move.
I don’t think I can.
Not until the clatter of plastic and metal comes from behind me and, slowly, I struggle to turn myself around.
My backpack scrapes over the hood of the car as I turn to the fae warrior.
He’s crouched, picking through the fallen items from my pockets that litter the road. He flicks aside a lighter, gum, a packet of antihistamines before he reaches for the inhaler.
He drags it over the ice towards him, then lifts it—and studies it for a moment.
My lashes are lowering with the fatigue kneading into me, the gradual softening of my muscles.
Something’s wrong.
I should be alert. Tense. Rigid against the hood.
But I’m sinking, down and down, until my butt thuds to the road, and I’m a ragdoll tossed aside.
The warrior turns a look on me as he slips the inhaler into the crevice of his sleeve.
My frown is fleeting.
He rises up, and up, and all the way to his full height, and I crane my neck to look up at him. The grill of the car presses into my scalp.
It doesn’t stop him from turning on me.
No matter how limp I am, how small I make myself, or now, how little of a threat I pose, he advances like he’s about to gut me.
My backpack presses against my spine, digging into the bones with a sharpness that should wince me.
But I just grunt as the fae snatches me by the wrist, then hauls me to my feet.
I stagger into him, but not before he’s already turned on his heels, and stormed to the hairless, grey steed waiting at the edge of darkness.
He grabs the steed by the reins, then steers us both into the blackout.
Stars dance around us the whole way—or maybe that’s just me.