TWO
Drake
Sunflower in a tower.
That was the silly, sentimental way I had always thought of Amethyst.
The fact of the matter was, I had very little going on in my so-called life. I did work when it was forced upon me. I took my beatings. I fought the Change.
Aside from that, it was a hell of a lot of nothing.
So I noticed things.
I knew that one of the guards had a bad knee and hip and was doing everything in his power to not let the other guards, Declan, or Opal see that because he knew it would mean the loss of his job.
And because he was so good at hiding it, and such an old and loyal guard, he was given the front which was a really important post. It left the grounds all but unprotected because there was no way he could run anymore.
The man could barely walk when he wasn't being watched.
I also knew that Opal, bitch supreme she was, had a lover that I was pretty sure no one, let alone her husband, knew about.
And, well, I watched Amy. First, because she was just refreshing to watch. Even from a young age, she was so unlike her parents. There was a kindness there that, while she often tried to hide it, always shone through. She was good to the staff.
Hell, she was good to me.
Seeing as I had been a fucking prisoner since, well, I didn't even know how long, and shown nothing but mercilessness and pain, goodness was like a beam of sunlight in the depths of winter.
I didn't see her often, though, as her parents sent her off into the human realm every couple of months to slowly age her up, to make her useful to them.
I had been around the Winters, most especially Opal, enough to know what she would be used for when she was old and pretty enough.
Then, there was that too, you could say.
I was only a man.
It would be wrong to say that I didn't notice the way that coming back the last time, having aged from maybe eighteen to a ripe twenty-two, had made her become truly, breathtakingly gorgeous.
She was on the tall side like her parents, long-legged, elegantly boned, like her mother.
She also had the classic Winters look, just like her older brother and sister.
She was light-blonde, her hair kept long and shiny.
Her face was angular, but softer than Opal, Jasper, or Jade.
Her eyes were large, round, innocent-looking, and of course, green.
Then, well, there was the curve she took on as a grown woman. The understated, but intoxicating roundness to her hips, her ass, her chest, even her thighs.
She was fucking perfect.
And for some unknown reason, she was standing there bundled up like she was going to play in the snow the way she did as a kid in my half-dilapidated barn, fumbling around in her pocket.
It wasn't that I didn't want her there. If I were being honest, I would say that I had maybe had more than a few fantasies about her walking in and coming toward me and things... progressing.
But those fantasies usually involved thin, almost see-through nighties and nothing underneath as she ran her hands up my stomach, not full-on snow gear with her fluffy hands moving behind my back while declaring that she was running away and freeing me.
Of all the crazy things that she could have said.
"What are you doing?" I asked as I felt the chain shift slightly, making me hiss out my breath. It had been far too long since I started wearing the iron for the pain to be as raw and fresh as it used to, but it still burned.
"Just trying to..." she said, and there was more pulling on the chains along with the odd brush of her gloves on my bare skin.
"There!" she declared, sounding victorious and then I could feel the heavy chains lifting slightly.
"Um, these are too heavy for..." she started, and I realized what she had done; she had freed me.
The sweet, silly girl.
"Honey, I can't go," I said, turning to face her, her cheeks and the tip of her nose pink from the cold. "You'll get in troub..."
"I'll be long gone before they even find out," she said, shaking her head. "I'm not leaving you here. Don't be like the elephant tethered to the chair."
"The... what?" I asked, brows drawn together. What the fuck was an elephant?
The smile spread for a short second before she pressed her lips together to keep it in check.
"They're these huge, gentle giant creatures in the human realm.
They weigh tons. And humans can keep them captive by chaining them during most of their lives with heavy chains, but once they are programmed enough, they can just connect them to this tiny chair and the elephant is so submissive by then, that they don't even realize they could just run away. Don't be the elephant."
Put that way, yeah, I could see her point.
But I had spent so much of my life trying to keep her from getting in trouble for her kindness; I didn't want there to be any chance someone could find her and trace my freedom back to her.
I had seen what had been done to her brother Jasper when he betrayed the family.
His body had barely survived the beating and carving it took. I couldn't let her have a similar fate.
"What are you doing? Shrug off the chains so we can go. Oh, and um... do you even have any, ah, shirts?"
Fucking hell she was too goddamn cute for her own good.
"Amethyst," I said, lowering my head slightly. "You are the only child the Winters family has left that they have any chance of using to their advantage. They aren't going to let you go."
Her eyes went sad at what she knew was a likelihood, but damn if her chin didn't raise and her jaw didn't go tight in determination.
"The plan is to be so far gone by the time they find me missing that they can't find me.
Which is why you need to stop stalling, get out of those chains, slip into a shirt and shoes if you have them, and get a move on. "
I don't know if it was just the steadfast determination in her small, too soft body, or the bone-deep understanding that if she was running, then shit must have really taken a worse turn for her.
She knew she wasn't like Jasper and Jade.
She knew she was too sheltered to truly survive in The Green.
But whatever was going on was enough to send her out into it in the worst snowstorm in years.
I shrugged off the chains, hissing the entire time they fell from my skin, left raw and broken open in places.
I moved away from her, finding the jacket I was given for work assignments because it could slip right over the chains. I didn't have any shirts. But I did have shoes.
And that was about all I had in the world.
So I got them on, grabbed the makeshift bag I had made out of a discarded shirt one of the guards left around, and stuffed it full of the stash of food I had gathered all spring through fall, knowing that winter were the lean months, that it was always cold and my body burned more fuel than usual even though my rations stayed the same. I had been doing it for years.
"Alright," I said, stomach in a painful knot as I stood there, realizing for the first time that there was a chance for me to be free, to not be a prisoner, to make my own way in the world.
I had long, long since gotten over any hopes of that.
There had never even been a second where freedom was a possibility from the moment they strapped those chains on me so many seasons ago.
Honestly, it almost felt wrong to leave. As fucking sick as that was to even think for a second.
That was what years of imprisonment could do to a man.
That being said, there was no way in hell I was letting Amy out into The Green on her own.
I knew she had plans to get free. And I knew her plan was likely to do that alone.
But I had watched closely enough through the years to know that that girl in her silly human clothes in my barn with the sweet eyes and the perfect skin and the honey-smooth voice, yeah, she had never stepped a foot off her parents' property her entire life.
I, at least, had grown up in The Green. I knew what to watch out for.
I knew how to survive. Maybe most importantly, I knew how to take care of her until she got wherever she was going.
I wasn't going to let her take that journey alone, knowing some fates in The Green were likely much worse even than what her evil witch of a mother had planned for her.
I knew that.
She didn't.
I wasn't going to repay her lifelong kindness by heading right the fuck back to my family who likely thought I had been dead for years while fuck-knew what happened to her.
Not on my fucking watch.
"Let's go," I said, giving her a nod as I moved toward the barn door, stepping out, looking around.
"Most of the guards are stationed inside to make sure the Prince is safe."
The Prince.
Shit.
My head whipped over to look at her, reading the situation in a second, realizing just how bad it was for her.
Seeing the realization in my face, her gaze dropped to her feet, uncomfortable with me sharing that knowledge.
"It's just Noc on the front grounds today," she informed her shoes.
"And lucky for us, Noc can barely walk around anymore," I agreed, watching her head shoot up, brows drawn together. "Bad knees, especially in this weather. Knowing him, if he saw us, he would just pretend he didn't and then blame the other guards and say you must have escaped out the back or side."
"Not exactly untrue. I did escape out the side."
Of course she did. Because while she might have been sheltered and submissive most of the time, she had a good head on her shoulders. She paid attention. She had always known just how to play the guards.
"He just turned to look at the house," I informed her, not even hesitating as I reached down to grab her glove-clad hand, squeezing hard so she wouldn't slip through, and dragging her along as I fucking bolted from the barn toward the tree line.