Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
ROSAMUND
“Rosie. Sit down.” Mina drags me to my seat behind the table and shoves me into it. “Stay here. I’ll grab you some water.”
“Wine.” I grip her wrist. “Or aquavit. Something strong.”
“Of course.” Her eyes hold sympathy, and although I love my cousins, I don’t want to see it. I don’t want any more pity.
Which means I have to steel myself and face this new twist in my path with as much dignity as I can muster.
I can’t think straight. The urge to flee the great hall, to hide away in my room, or even escape the manor altogether and run to the forest is tensing my every muscle. I said I wasn’t going to run and hide from my fate anymore, but which God’s sick idea of a joke is this?
I will simply… refuse. Refuse a bodyguard. Refuse a werewolf. Nobody can make me accept this madness. That’s it. If I must have a bodyguard, I’ll choose another. A human.
Mina pushes a goblet into my hand, and I bring it to my lips. The alcohol is pungent, strong, and I gulp it down so fast it burns my throat and my insides.
I’m burning like a candle. Melting. Slipping away. The voices, laughter, shouts and the other sounds around me blur into a deafening din.
Coughing, I put the goblet down and attempt to collect myself, haul my broken pieces back together.
The cage is still in the middle of our hall, and I make myself look. The din crumbles into individual sounds again, and they cascade over me like raindrops. Slowly, the words clear up, and then I wish they hadn’t.
“Hey, Frost Princess, won’t you come meet your new bodyguard?” someone shouts, followed by raucous laughter. “I’m sure you’re dying to meet him!”
Dying. Yeah, it feels like I am.
And while I’m withering inside, I’m this evening’s entertainment. Laughing stock. My stepfather has spent a lot of the coin my mother left him on this hunt and this banquet, just to humiliate me. Hurt me. Break me.
Somehow, the more crushed I feel, the angrier I get. Getting up on wobbly legs, I start toward the cage.
“Rosie.” Orlen seizes my arm. “Where are you going?”
I shake him off and walk closer. The guests are taunting the wolfman, both men and women, prodding him with sticks and knives, daring each other to touch him before they jerk away, breathlessly laughing. The entire hall is in the thrall of having a new pet to torment, a new thrill to experience.
The wolfman is snarling like an animal, throwing himself against the bars. Yeah, it’s not every day you get a dark fae, fresh off the mountain, thrown into such esteemed, noble company.
Noble. Very funny. We’re a bunch of savages, after all.
I find myself walking closer, fascinated by the creature.
He’s starred in my nightmares for more than a decade now, face hazy but the shape is always the same, dark fur, sharp teeth, wicked claws, wolf ears.
A hulking, menacing presence, promising terror and pain, his claws raking over my flesh, until the pain in my old scars wakes me up screaming.
I wonder if he was there when I was taken. If he’d been one of my captors. One of my tormentors.
Another step forward, and another. People point at me, snickering. Others speak in hushed whispers. The mockers. The compassionate. The neutral parties, only waiting to see how tonight’s show will play out.
After twenty years walking this earth, going from tragedy to tragedy, enduring my stepsister’s and stepmother’s bullying every day, I’ve learned to school my features and keep going. I want to think I’m strong. I have to be. Even if today feels like I’m breaking all over again.
The small crowd parts as I approach the cage. A few men are late to notice me and keep jabbing at the wolfman, screeching with merriment.
Then they also notice the sudden silence and step back.
The wolfman snarls, baring huge fangs and long, sharp teeth.
He’s huge. An alpha, for sure. And he’s half-transformed, I realize, and indeed he has a tail, bushy and…
not black. The wolf ears poking out of his hair aren’t black, either, and the hair…
It’s a muted silver gray with a white streak falling into amber eyes.
No, he wasn’t among my abductors. I’d have remembered those colorings.
And it doesn’t matter. His kind is cruel and violent, their magic distorting not only their bodies but also their minds, ever since King Rouen of the Fae went mad and sent a ripple through fae magic all those centuries ago.
More than a third of his people turned into trees, the other third into dark fae, including shifters, and the rest were left with a bare minimum of magic.
Dark fae magic is twisted and savage. They’re barely more than beasts, and this one is no better.
Saliva drips from his open mouth, and his eyes are fiery pits of rage.
His claws are black and curved. He’s crouched on the floor of the cage, his torn clothes revealing a powerful body, hairy thighs striated with tendons and muscles, and bulging pecs in his chest.
His gaze finds me the way a predator’s gaze locates a small prey, and a tremor goes through me at the flat hatred there. Just like an animal, I think, blindly enraged with its captors. With everyone standing in its way.
“Want to pet your bodyguard, girl?” a voice calls out, and I’m pretty sure it belongs to Lord Sinen. Hard to miss that arrogant tone. “Check his reaction time?”
“Good dog,” another voice says. “Woof.”
“She’ll lose her hand!” a third one shouts, and laughter ensues.
Every eye is on me, feasting on my discomfort.
On the insult, the complete disregard of my utter panic and the weight of memory.
There are people here who were present when I was taken, and still here when I returned a broken thing.
They have watched me grow despite the wounds, find my voice despite the screams tearing me out of dreams where I relive the past. They should be proud of me.
Yet, here they are, mocking me, gazing at me with cruel eyes, hoping to see me fail and fail again.
Well, I won’t. I’ve already lost my faith in others. This is nothing new.
I make myself take a breath and gaze at the dark fae.
He’s still looking at me, no change in his expression or stance.
His matted silver-gray hair hangs around his angular face, blood liberally coating his cheeks and chin.
His wolf ears twitch, and something glints in one.
A silver hoop. The other ear is bloodied and ripped. Probably more hoops that were torn out.
“She likes animals, it would seem,” a woman chirps and shrieks with laughter. “Want a pet, dear? Are you into bestiality, perhaps?”
I recoil at that and glance around for the woman, but the crowd suddenly feels suffocating, closing in on me, with gleeful eyes and sneers.
I’ve tried, but I can’t take any more of this, not tonight.
Turning on my heel, I run from the great hall and its monsters.