Love, Lies, and Ley Lines (The Fast and the Fae #1)

Prologue. Nothing Like Fae Jail for Exploring Regrets

~ Prologue ~

Nothing Like Fae Jail for Exploring Regrets

Life can go to the seven hells faster than you can blink.

You can write that down. Maybe draw some kind of wisdom from it.

Cha wished she could claim to have learned a lesson from how quickly things had gone from excellent to sub-shitty in just a couple of days, but—let’s face it—she’d never been a quick study.

Besides which, her life had been far from that great to start.

The past just looked that way, all shiny in the rear-view mirror, in comparison to her current situation: stuck in an egg-shaped, bastard-daddy-of-pearl Moonstone fae jail, a short future of torture, inquisition, and execution ahead of her.

It should’ve been a simple job. She sighed, adjusting her battered body into an equally uncomfortable curve of the cell wall, wishing she had a silver coin for every smuggler who’d said the same—right before telling how it had all gone bad.

These were the criminal versions of fishing stories.

The job that got away. The easy coin that had been anything but.

Cha had listened to those tales, even paid for the ale of the sorry teller of them, and pretended to sympathize, all the while feeling smug that she’d never be so stupid, or careless, or short-sighted.

Or fall for the pretty, sweet-voiced bit of man-candy everyone could tell spelled trouble.

Right on schedule, as had happened every three minutes since she’d awakened in this opalescent prison, she thought of him.

Azul. Those indigo-blue eyes and hair, those lips, his scent like sun-ripened blueberries, that devastating kiss that had rocked her world and tossed her into an abyss of unrequited lust.

And they’d said it couldn’t happen to her.

Not the infamous Bandit, with a stud in every town, and more lined up to volunteer for the opportunity.

Falling hard for a guy, especially an unattainable one like the prince he claimed to be, just wasn’t Cha’s style.

She’d barely stubbed a toe over a pretty bit of candy in the past. Now she’d broken something deeper than the ribs that hurt with every breath.

Azul was gone, never to be seen again. Her partner, Dy, was hopefully gone, too, and safe. And Cha was alone in fae jail, just as her mother had often predicted during Cha’s admittedly troubled youth.

She should never have listened to Otto’s proposition…