𝔸 ℂ𝕠𝕦𝕣𝕥 𝕠𝕗 𝕃𝕠𝕧𝕖 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕎𝕣𝕒𝕥𝕙 (Book 2)

Hundred-Twenty-Six

    The guards moved again, going to cleave us in two even as they moved as one. Stepping in synchrony.

"No!" Rhys bellowed, throwing off two guards as they tried to rip him away from me by his arms. I could not move. I could only stare, holding the king's gaze as if he had put some sort of magic on my limbs.

Guards yanked Rhys back even as his hands reached out to grip me. I looked up. Meeting that violet gaze. That horror filled violet gaze full of such a fear I had never seen in them before. Pleading. Begging. Terrified.

    My mate. My mate.

    Mortal. The king planned to turn me mortal again. One lifetime. One human lifetime.

    The world came crashing down, crumbling around me in no more than a pile of rubble. Glass shards shattered with an iron first. Punched through and scattered across the ground as I tried to pick up the pieces.

    I could not breathe. A weight pressed on my chest and I found myself struggling to keep my heart beating in my chest. To keep my lungs rising.

    Hands grabbed at my arms and on reflex alone, my dagger was pulled from my sheath and embedded in a guards carotid artery. With a gargled sound, he fell to the floor while I yanked my knife from his flesh.

    Within a swift movement, I moved again.

    They wouldn't take me. I wouldn't let them. They couldn't.

    My second dagger found purchase in the other guards heart. They wouldn't put me into the damned bathtub. I would not let them.

    Another guard came. Another I cut down. Another guard tried. Another guard died.

    "Grab her," a new, calculated and cunning voice commanded. Stijin.

    And suddenly, as if wading through the walls themselves, figures stepped out from the edge of the room. Almost as though they had been hiding there the entire time.

Soldiers of the Flame came for me then. Trained assassins. Trained warriors.

    People of my own kind. Those I could not defend against.

    They came for me, swift as shadows incarnate. And there were too many to fight against. A dozen. It took a dozen of them to restrain me. And even so I thrashed in their grasp, fighting and clawing and scraping as I yelled and scraped. Trying to escape them.

    But they were like me. My kin. My kindred souls. They had been trained as brutally as I had.

    Only one did I recognize. The woman grasping my left arm painfully.

    Eira. The female who had grown up with the four of us. The one who had made our lives hell—claiming that because she was born as Fae she was better than the mortal recruits from the Flame.

    I'd wanted to kill her for years. And gods did the opportunity not look tempting now.

    Her black hair was cut at the middle of her back, her high cheekbones giving her away as Fae before the fine-tipped ears did. Her ice-blue eyes glinting as they always had—such a pale color it looked other worldly.

    Even her face sent me into a fit of rage.

    The rage that fueled my movements.

    I whirled, elbowing the person holding my other arm. Knocking them away effectively, as I aimed my knife toward her face, so swift she wouldn't have been able to catch it.

    But I was yanked back on my right arm again, drawing my knife away from its target. The sharp edge of the blade grazed her cheek, drawing a thin line of red as I was pulled away.