“Time? For what?”
You know what the beauty of being human in Faerie is? They really do think we’re as stupid as dirt.
Either that, or he plays along. Toying with me like a cat with a mouse.
Yup. Definitely in trouble.
“Veron is very wealthy. Very powerful. So long as you belonged to him, I couldn’t take what was mine. Now… now I don’t have to wait anymore. Come to me. Open yourself up to me. I promise, you’ll enjoy it more if you do.”
Oh my God. He’s not messing around.
He’s… he’s really going to force me to touch him. Touch him—and maybe more.
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened to me. When I was fresh out of high school, going to art school at night while Jimmy worked his ass off at his father’s garage, I had this neighbor. Cameron. He was a few years older than me and, I don’t know, I guess I could tell that something wasn’t right. He was too friendly. Too helpful. But he only came around when Jim was at work.
It was like he knew Jim’s schedule. Like he knew when he wasn’t around—and when I was by myself.
It was a Saturday morning. I had work at the store, but I forgot my keys. I had to run back for them, and, because my luck’s always been shitty, I missed the train. Cameron offered me a ride.
Uh… he didn’t mean with his car.
I got lucky. Jim had slept in; his dad had given him a rare weekend off. He heard me scream when Cameron tried pulling me into his apartment and he scared the asshole off. My boyfriend was—is—strong as hell. He was an all-star baseball player throughout high school and he was good enough to play college ball if he decided to go to school instead of learning his dad’s trade.
He beat the shit out of Cameron, then made sure I carried Mace with me after that. The sad thing was that I already had a can tucked in my purse. I’d grown up in the city and I thought I knew all about keeping safe.
I guess I just never thought the real danger would come from right next door.
Just like I thought Dusk might look, but he would never actually take.
Jim’s not here to save me this time. No one is.
Okay.
Okay.
I don’t know how just yet, but I’m going to do it. I’m going to have to save myself.
I go with the most obvious ploy first. I decide to remind him why he can’t. “But… permission.”
“You’ll give it to me.” He’s as cocky as he is arrogant. He licks his lips as he advances, enjoying my fear. “And then, when I own your soul, you’ll give me everything you have.”
“I won’t.” I’m sure of that. Look. He got rid of the gloves. He can’t hurt me if he can’t touch me, and he can’t touch me unless he wants to get hurt. “You can’t—”
He pauses. Grins. “You like Posey. Be a shame if something happened to her.”
My heart stops for a beat before it pounds in triple-time.
“You put me there on purpose,” I accuse him. My voice is a whisper.
How did I not see that before?
“Captain Helix thought it might be a good idea. I didn’t persuade him otherwise. I did say that, after a few days, I might have to move you again. Succubus magic… what if the other guards couldn’t resist you? What if you couldn’t resist them? I brought you back where the only one who could touch you is me.”
Because Rys could care less. I’m just a human.
“Why?” I ask again. I’m not even really trying to buy time right now. I just need to know. “Why me? Posey—” I stop. I don’t want to throw her under the bus. She might enjoy sleeping with all of the guards, but I’d never throw Dusk at her to keep him away from me.
I don’t have to.
Our mind is in the same place. Dusk lowers his bare hand, cupping the obvious erection pushing against his uniform pants.
Welp. There went any hope that he wanted to, I don’t know, just touch my face or something.
“Posey is a succubus,” he tells me, as if I wasn’t aware of that already. “My cock, Seelie cock, even the lower races… it’s all the same to her. She’s wet. She’s willing. She’s good for a visit after a long shift, but a human...” He groans. “I’ve been waiting a long time for someone like you. Untouched. Unclaimed…” His mirror-like eyes snap to me. “But not for long. Behave, Elle. Give in to me.”
Behave again?
Hell no.
“Go away—”
“Listen to me. I can’t use the traitor to control you. It only works to keep him in line. I could care less about him… but you. I’ve waited long enough. Come to me, Elle, or your friend will pay for it. Touch me, and you’ll feel nothing but pleasure. Leave me to find Posey and, I promise you, there will only be pain.”
With the shadow thickening beyond the bars, I know I’m running out of time. Once I’m behind his curtain, I’m stuck here with Dusk until he frees me. Rys is gone. He might’ve saved me, but no one else will interfere. I’ve seen it happen with Posey. The shadows or the flames are like scrunchies wrapped around a doorknob: the universal sign for KEEP OUT.
It doesn’t matter that I don’t want his touch. He wants mine.
“What about Veron?” I’m grasping at straws. “You said that you had to stay away because of him. What changed?”
“You refused him. I witnessed it myself. He gave up his claim which means that, finally, I can take you for my own.”
Wait—
So that’s why he left me alone for as long as he did?
“You can’t do this. I refused him. I’m refusing you, too. Leave me alone.”
“I won’t share you, if that’s what you’re afraid of. The power you’ll give me, plus the pleasure…” Dusk’s eyelids flutter, an expression of bliss overtaking him as he imagines what it’ll be like. God, I want to hurl. “I’ll take you for mine. You’ll move cells again, of course, so it’ll be easier for me to come to you. You’ll see that there are benefits to belonging to me. Believe me, Elle. Now let me touch you.”
He sounds like Veron. And that squashes some of my terror as anger replaces it.
I’ve always been a people pleaser, willing to do what I’m told. I have a hard time saying no; I usually dance around a question and hope people forget that I’ve been asked it. But whoa if you piss me off...
My hands curl into tight fists at my side. I tilt my head back, glaring up at Dusk. I’m not avoiding his lecherous gaze anymore. Nope. I meet his stare dead on.
“I’m not a pet.”
He laughs. The bastard actually laughs.
“Of course you are. You’re not my mate, but that doesn’t mean I won’t keep you at my feet where you belong. You’re human. It’s more than you should expect. Not all of us are human lovers like the traitor. You should be grateful that I’m even willing to brand you at all.”
Being angry helps. There’s no time to be scared, letting the what-if’s and what-is-he-doing’s cloud my mind. I’m actually thinking clearly for the first time and, at the mention of my cellmate, I suddenly remember what he gave me the other day.
And how I purposely tucked it under the cot for safe-keeping.
“Rys…” His name escapes me, a soft murmur.
Oops.
Dusk doesn’t like that. With a scoff, he tells me coldly, “He can’t protect you now. And by the time he returns, you’ll be mine. Now, come, human.” He softens his tone, trying to convince me to agree. Yeah. Fat chance. “Let me touch you and, I vow, you’ll enjoy it. Make me take it and...”
His unsaid threat lingers in the too-small space between us.
I swallow, side-stepping Dusk as he reaches for me.
His scowl burns brightly. It’s dark in here, thanks to his shadows, and I watch as his skin starts to glow, too.
Uh-oh. That can’t be a good sign.
“One way or another, I will have you.”
He really thinks so, doesn’t he?
He might. He’s bigger than me, stronger than me, and he has all the power.
But there’s one thing that I have that he doesn’t. Two, really, if you count the element of surprise.
I move quicker than I ever thought I could. Throwing myself to the floor, I snap my hand under the bed, grabbing the small, metal lantern that Rys gave me. The charmed flame flickers inside, a tiny ember, and I really hope this fucking works because it’s the only chance I have.
I roll out from under the bed, cradling the lantern against my chest, protecting it. Once I’m on my belly again, I pop up on my knees, flick the front of the lantern open, and aim it directly at Dusk.
“Yeah? Take this!”
8
I’ll never forget the way he screams.
It all happens so quickly. Right after I aim the open lantern at Dusk, the fire stream out so quickly, there’s no way to stop it. It’s like the little metal box turned into a flamethrower or something. The tiny fireball blossoms and blooms into something massive.
Within seconds, Dusk’s entire form is engulfed in flames. The strange thing is, I don’t feel any heat. I’m on the floor, my back pressed against the cot, and I see the fire. I feel nothing, though.
Dusk’s blistering screams of agony tell me that he does.
I scramble off of the floor. My momentary paralysis wears off and I join in on the screaming. I can’t help it. I shout for help, hoping that someone in another wing can hear me. The cell is locked. Even if it wasn’t, the doors leading to the next part of the prison are.
We’re trapped in here together.
I yank off my leather jacket. It’s the only thing I can think to do. Rushing toward Dusk, I try to beat the flames out.
It doesn’t work.
It’s almost like I’m fanning them, instead. Even as the leather beats down on them, the fire bounces back, glowing hotter, burning brighter. In the middle of it, Dusk hunches over, trying to break out of the circle of flames. He can’t. Something is keeping him inside of it.
He doesn’t go down. How is he still standing? The fact that he’s being burned alive is so much worse, especially when I know that I did it. But how was I supposed to know that a tiny flame like that would turn into this?
I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t.
Beneath the terror of his screams—and mine, too—I hear the same high-pitched trill of an alarm that sounded the day Siúcra went on lockdown. I don’t know how the prison knows that something is wrong, but it does, and I’m so damn glad when both sides of the wing open, Seelie and Unseelie guards pouring toward my cell.
Dusk’s shadowy curtain is gone. As soon as the fire hit him, he lost control of it and it vanished. That’s a good thing. The guards immediately can see what’s happening and they separate: Unseelie hanging back while the handful of Seelie guards run forward.
Since my leather jacket isn’t doing anything to help, I ball it up and throw it across the cell. I drop to the ground, covering my head as I throw my body against the wall nearest to me right as the guards rush the cell.
They put the fire out. Because it’s a Seelie power, it takes three different Light Fae to corral the flames before they can extinguish them completely. As soon as the last flicker dies, Dusk drops to the floor.
His face looks like putty. His hair has been burned to his scalp, a few stray fringes still red with embers along the edge. The fire burned his clothes right off, destroying all of his pale flesh. He’s covered in ash.
And he’s still alive.
As the Unseelie guards trade places with the Seelie, wrapping him in a cocoon of shadows to stabilize him, I hear one of the guards shout that he’s calling for the healer. Another says to prepare a portal.
I begin to tremble in relief.
It didn’t kill him. I didn’t kill him.
He survived the fire, but based on the damage it did to him, he probably wished he hadn’t. The glimpse I caught of Dusk will haunt me for the rest of my life.
The promise of retribution is clear. Every guard who throws angry looks my way warns me that I might not really have that much of a long one left.
I expect immediate retaliation. I’m a prisoner who just set a guard on fire. It doesn’t matter that it was self-defense. I’m human. Dusk is fae.
I’m dead.
To my surprise, no one lays a hand on me. And I know it probably has everything to do with the fact that they don’t want to be burned next—not even from the faerie fire, but because that’s what happens when a human doesn’t give permission—but as soon as they whisk Dusk away to the healers, two Seelie guards stay behind to watch me while the rest leave my wing.
I don’t recognize them. They look at me with murder in their eyes, but they stay on the other side of the cell bars. I don’t even care. I curl up in a ball in the corner, too shaken to get up and sit on my cot.
We’re waiting for something. I don’t know what, but it all makes sense when the doors whoosh open again much later and another two Seelie come striding toward my cell.
One of them is Vale. The other?
Captain Helix.
Yeah. I’m dead dead.
With a slash of his hand, Helix springs my cell open. There’s a scorch mark in the middle of the floor, a perfect ring where the fire kept Dusk its prisoner. It’s the only remainder of the blaze that I set loose from Rys’s lantern. Even the tiny metal cage is gone.
Helix’s gaze could bore holes into the stone floor where he takes in the scorch mark. He blows air through his nose before lifting his head, his golden eyes zeroing straight on me next.
“Explain yourself, human.”
How?
“It was an accident—” I try.
“It was faerie fire,” he says, interrupting me with a harsh huff. “Where did you get faerie fire from?”
I don’t want to get Rys in trouble. I’m sure they expect he has something to do with it, but unless I snitch, they don’t know for sure.
I shake my head.
Helix narrows his gaze, then spins away from me. He pulls out his sword, clanging the diamond blade against the crystal that surrounds the iron bars of my cell. Sparks fly and I wince at the ringing sound it leaves in its wake.
“See this?” Helix says, hitting the bar again with the flat of his sword. Clang. “Iron. It’s built into the walls. The bars. The floor. No one should be able to conjure faerie fire in this prison, especially not a human. I will ask you one last time. Where did you get the faerie fire from?”
I open my mouth. Exhale. Shake my head.
I can’t.
“You don’t want to talk? Fine.” He turns to Vale and the other two Seelie guards. “Leave her to the shadows. Maybe that will loosen her tongue.”
The guards don’t bother with the whole march down the aisle at swordpoint spectacle. I don’t even get the dignity of being cuffed.
Nope.
Because Helix had been warned that it was the human prisoner who attacked the Unseelie guard, he came prepared. Every one of the guards is wearing diamaint gloves. At the captain’s command, the two unfamiliar guards pick me up. One has my arms, one has my legs, and the uncut gems dig into my flesh as they tighten their hold.
I kick out wildly, thrashing as they drag me out of the cell. That only lasts as long as the one gripping my feet allows it. He twists my ankle, the jerk so rough that I’m lucky he didn’t snap it, then he squeezes it to make his warning clear.
I go limp after that because what else can I do?
My position has me staring up at the ceiling. I can’t see where they’re taking me, though something called “the shadows” doesn’t sound so great. The jeers from the other prisoners as I’m being paraded past them are drowned out by the pulse in my brain as I relive Dusk’s pained scream over and over again.
I only know that we’ve left the main straits of the prison when the ceiling changes. It’s the back halls again, the dark walls with the torches and the strange wooden doors. Am I going to the same room where I met Veron this morning?
I don’t think so. The walk seems to go on even longer, t
hough maybe that’s because my arms are on fire and my ankle is throbbing.
And then I hear the guard at my head command, “Open the door.”
I try to angle my neck up to get a better look at where they’ve taken me. It’s a dead-end; the wooden door is the last one along this hall. The guard at my feet drops one of my legs, letting it dangle like free weight.
He grabs the crystal knob with his diamaint glove, yanking it open and propping it with his hip. Then he lifts my leg up again, nodding over my head at the other guard. “On three.”
What?
“One.”
They’re… they’re not setting me on my feet.
“Two.”
Oh, hell no.
“Please, don’t, no—”
“Three.”
A scream rips out of my throat as I go flying.
I don’t know how long I’m falling for. While realistically it was two maybe three seconds, it feels like an eternity as I sink like a stone. It’s pitch-black, I can’t see which way I’m falling, and it’s only pure luck that I land on my side, taking the brunt of it on my shoulder and my hip instead of banging my head on the packed dirt floor.
Oh, and that I don’t land on Rys.
He’s in here, too. The small amount of light from over my head—the door that led to this place—reveals that he was standing with his back up against the furthest confines of the hole.
Pain reverberates through my body and I grit my teeth in a bid to kill my scream.
God damn that hurts.
Once Rys gets over his obvious surprise, he crouches low, reaching for me, stopping when only a few inches separate his hands from my shoulder. He’s careful not to touch me and, for the first time since I’ve learned that skin to skin contact means something different when touch magic is involved, I find myself regretting the distance.
Shaky and afraid, I could totally use the comfort right now.
The door slams shut above us. It goes completely dark.
Not wanting to face what’s happening to me, I shutter my eyes before swallowing my moan.
A burst of light flashes from behind my closed eyelids, painting the insides orange. My eyes spring open, then immediately close again when I’m blinded by the flames that burst into existence at Rys's back.
Trapped Page 8
