TWO #2
There was a strange pulling sensation when I reached the end of what had always been my chain length, like my body was rebelling against me going any further.
Like the elephant beast in her story. But unlike her human realm creature, I wasn't a fucking gentle anything.
I wasn't going to stay captive when I was given a chance to be my own man again.
"Hey!" came the half-hearted, almost hesitant bark of Noc just as my foot crossed over a border that was just a couple hundred yards away from me for years, but might as well have been an entire realm away.
But I didn't stop, not even knowing that the body attached to that voice had brought me to submission more times than I cared to admit with a boot to my ribs, cracking them for the hundredth time, with a cane to the plates on my back, sending a pain through my body that there were no words to describe.
He, along with all the guards, had been my tormentors, had been my judge and jury and near-executioners.
Just a simple "draca" from them would usually freeze me on the spot.
But I wasn't their whipping boy anymore.
And I had someone other than myself to save.
Not even decades of training at their hands could stop me from getting Amethyst away from the fate she would suffer at the Prince's hands.
Because there was only one prince in The Green anymore.
The Winters were, technically, Light.
The only prince was Dark.
Not only was he Dark, but he was the offspring of one of the most vile, heartless, cruel Dark kings anyone had known in too many lifetimes to count.
Any child of his, quite frankly, had no fucking right to put his Dark, bloody hands on someone like Amy.
The things he would do to her...
I shook my head, clearing it of those disgusting thoughts as I kept dragging her, past endless twisted, leafless trees, knowing she wasn't going to be able to run for long, but understanding that I couldn't be gentle with her.
Not right then. If I had to pick her up and carry her until we were in a better location to stop and rest, that was what I would do.
Having spent so much time locked in her home or in the human realm, she didn't understand just how massive The Green was. She had likely been thinking that she could get into the woods and within a day, be back into the human realm.
And maybe that would be true of some parts of The Green, but it wasn't true about the area around her family's land. It was going to be a long, cold, brutal couple of days.
That was something I planned to explain to her once we were far enough away to be able to stop for even a minute to catch breath.
It wasn't until I felt the burn in my own lungs that I was able to think clearly through the panic of getting her out of there, quit my racing thoughts enough, get my head out of my ass enough, to hear the frantic, labored breathing coming from Amethyst that sounded almost like whimpering.
I stopped mid-stride, having to reach out to grab her to stop her momentum forward, my hand dropping hers so both could land on her shoulders.
Her cheeks and nose weren't the same charming, sweet, cool-kissed pink they had been back in my barn.
All her porcelain pale skin was suddenly almost alarmingly red.
Underneath whatever absurd layers of clothes she had on which made her very slight body almost as wide as my own, her chest was rising and falling too fast; the puffs of white air coming out of her nose and mouth were too frequent.
How the hell long had I been dragging her? Completely unaware of her inability to keep up?
My hand reached up, my finger pressing into her soft lips, pushing them closed. "In and out through the nose, slow and steady," I told her when her brows knitted at the strange gesture.
Of course she would be out of shape. She spent almost every moment of her day inside the Winters compound. She had no time to even enjoy the goddamn sunshine, let alone get any exercise.
Her breathing quickly slowed; her chest rose and fell more evenly; the redness became a cool-flushed pink again.
"Better?" I asked, finger still pressing into her lips, making her response a nod instead of words. "Sorry, I just knew we had to get as far as possible before we stopped." My hand fell and she gave a small, almost wobbly smile.
"Sorry I'm such a pathetic fellow jailbreaker," she said, shaking her head a little self-deprecatingly. "I guess I understand why the humans are always talking about cardio."
"Cardio?" I repeated, brows knitted.
"Yeah, so they aren't the first to go during the zombie apocalypse."
"What the hell is a zombie?"
To that, there was a short, utterly still moment before her smile spread far enough to make her eyes crinkle as she let out a laugh that was jingling and musical, a sound that somehow managed to make an unfamiliar smile tug at my own unpracticed lips just hearing it.
"What?" I asked when she shook her head at me.
"It's just strange to live half my life in The Green and the other half in the human realm.
Both cultures are so different. Every time I came back to the compound, I would talk about things that, to me, were normal because I had been around humans for so long, but to everyone else, it was like speaking in tongues. "
The compound.
Not home.
That wasn't lost on me.
"And no one wanted you to tell them about the human realm?"
She snorted at that, looking down at her feet, and shaking her head a bit sadly. "The Winters? Opal and Declan Winters, the holier than thou Light fae with Dark connections? They think humans are sub-species."
"Well, I've never seen one, but I doubt that's the case. What the hell is a zombie?"
To that, her head snapped back up, her smile warm, obviously delighted in my interest in the things she had to teach me. "They're humans who have died then been reanimated, but they are brainless and soulless things that only think about eating."
I felt my smirk tip up as a brow rose, having a feeling I knew where this was going. "And what do they eat?"