Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 88010 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 440(@200wpm)___ 352(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88010 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 440(@200wpm)___ 352(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Hope rises in place of the shame I was carrying for daring to ask.
“You’ll do it? Really? He’ll fucking kill you.”
“Not this time,” he says with a reckless grin that makes my hope lift and nervous butterflies start dancing in my stomach. “This time I’m coming with you. You’re not the only one who is done with sitting here, being at the mercy of a king who does not care for anything besides maintaining tradition, separation, and his own rule.”
“We have to do it now. They will come looking for me when I don’t go back to class after the meal break, and then Ornix will probably come and look for me and whip me again, and fuck that.”
“I’m not ready just yet,” he says. “This time, I need to prepare properly so I don’t end up in his fucking dungeon again. You might have to go back to the class until I can prepare properly. And you might need to think about what you’re going to do this time. Because I won’t be the only one he comes for. He will hunt you down, and there is now a dungeon cell with smaller bars that will fit you perfectly.”
“There is not.”
“There is. Go look for yourself. He saw how you walked in and out of my cell and he had adjustments made. Why would he do that unless he intended to confine a human? There’s only one human in this entire realm.”
“That’s not true.”
“Go look. Then get ready to run properly this time, because he knows we’re getting closer to end game. He knows he’s on the verge of losing control somehow. That’s why he spanked your ass publicly. He’s trying to make a point to you and to everyone else. It’s too little, too late.”
I am sore and hurt, and so is Nox, just in a different way.
“Are you a prisoner here too?”
“My mother was brought here as a prisoner, bred as a prisoner, and she died giving birth to me. They act like a human is a loved mate. She is nothing more than a vessel for seed that will likely destroy her when it emerges. My father went mad with grief. It’s a long story, but it all amounts to the same thing in the end. This place tells the same story over and over again. Steal a human, mate her, breed a royal heir with human blood—because human blood is powerful in its own right, not that they’d ever admit that. You deserve to be free. Ornix does not deserve to hoard the power that this realm holds.”
Next, I go down to the dungeons. Skipping class is going to get me in trouble, maybe, but I want to see what Nox was talking about. If there’s really a dungeon down here with my name on it, I want to know.
I pass guards, who barely pay attention to me. They’ll report to Ornix later and tell him I was down here. Nothing about this visit is secret and I know it will lead to trouble, but I’m planning on escaping so who cares.
At first, everything seems like it did before. I wonder if Equinox was lying to me, if he’s hatching some plan. I remember him hiding the true seal, or trying to. I’m sure he has some agenda only he knows about.
Then I see it. The part of the dungeon that had to be rebuilt because the last time I was here I was summoning bread and portals like a mad messiah who didn’t read the prompt properly.
There it is. The cell with the bars spaced closely enough together that I can’t slip through them. There’s more, too. A bed inside, smaller than most dragon beds and covered in pink linens. Some of my personal things are already there, brought from the boxes I stored at Tempest’s house.
A cold chill runs through me. Equinox was right. Ornix has been preparing to keep me captive here. He must have given the order to put this together, to amend the spacing of the bars, to put the plushie toys I’d deny owning if he hadn’t obviously found them in my things, behind bars, on the bed. He’s fucking jailed my toys.
I hear guards snapping to attention. That’s how I know he is behind me.
I turn slowly.
“What is this, Ornix?”
His eyes gleam unrepentantly. “This is where bad girls go, humans who do not listen to their mates. Like when they are supposed to be in class, and yet they sneak out and down to the dungeons for reasons I cannot begin to imagine.”
A tremor runs through me. I know that I am in the kind of trouble I cannot easily come back from, but he has behaved so strangely, so entirely darkly that I almost feel as though I have a leg to stand on.