Total pages in book: 141
Estimated words: 132138 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 661(@200wpm)___ 529(@250wpm)___ 440(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132138 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 661(@200wpm)___ 529(@250wpm)___ 440(@300wpm)
“Your Highness, you must tell me where the knife is.”
Urgency flavors his command. He’s so close, his skin hidden under layers of clothes. Shim. I’ve seen him without his clothes. And Lach. So beautiful. I need flesh against mine. It’s all I want now. Shim is close. I can see him. He’s holding me.
“Shim. Kiss me.”
“Damn it, Bronwyn.” There’s a shuffling as he looks down at me. His eyes shift to dark blue. There he is. But his words make little sense. “I need to know where the knife is. It’s the only proof. I can’t save you, but I have a job to do. If I can’t save you, I have to find someone else. That knife is proof. Please. You owe the kingdom.”
Kingdom? What kingdom? Why does he care about the kingdom? I hurt. I ache. I can’t even breathe. “Kiss me.” Why won’t he kiss me? Lach likes to play vampire games, but Shim is always so quick with kisses. I need both. Where is Lachlan?
My body shakes. Niall won’t leave me be. “The knife. Where is the knife?”
He keeps talking about the knife. He urges me. Tells me they’re coming. The words don’t make sense.
“The tower. In the tower.” That’s where I hid the knife. The knife was my father’s. The knife killed me, blood tumbling from my body until nothingness swallowed me up and then fire brought me back. A phoenix. I was a phoenix, born anew.
They gave me wings.
“Where in the tower?” Niall asks the question with obvious impatience. “I’m out of time. They’re coming back. I’ll have to find it myself. I am sorry for this, Your Highness. I wish you good luck in your journey.”
And I’m back on the floor. Alone. Abandoned. A cramp hits me. I need to touch myself, but I can’t make my damn arms work. A journey. I’m taking a journey.
Into death.
Rough hands pull me up, dragging me when my feet don’t work. Tears stream now. The world is a chaotic mess, and I can’t feel them. They’re always there, somewhere in the back of my mind. I no longer care that they’re an expression of what’s wrong with me. They are the best part of my pathetic life, and I can’t feel them. Real or not, I want them here.
“Lachlan.” Someone is screaming his name. “Shim.”
I smell the fire. So close now. My head snaps back. Someone slapped me. Blood. I taste it even as another seizure hits. The agony is unimaginable, a body that cries out for solace and will get not an ounce.
Rope bites into my wrists, the only thing holding me up.
The guards laugh. Call me trash. Better off ashes. That’s all I am to these men. Nothing. I mean nothing. My dreams and madness mean less than nothing. They will lash me to a pole and burn me then sweep up my ashes. It will be as though I never existed.
Bronwyn Finn died so long ago, and now this girl, this woman I became, will be gone, too. Ashes burned in the fire, sent to the wind. The ache in my gut…pussy. It’s in my pussy. There is no way to deny it now. The ache in my pussy supersedes all other pain. What a horrible way to die—all my sweetness dissolved and I’m left with only a raw ache as the sum of all my years.
Lachlan. Shim. I call to them. I don’t know if I cry out loud or if it’s only in my head.
I feel the heat of the fire and pray I will see them soon.
Chapter Fifteen
Lachlan
The phooka stops at the edge of the forest, his mighty hooves kicking up dirt. Beyond the copse of trees, there’s a small village. Bron’s village. We rode all night, never letting up. I’m not even close to tired, as though something as inconsequential as fatigue can’t touch me now.
But fear can.
I dismount from the phooka’s enormous back, my boots thudding against the forest floor. Something is wrong. I can feel it. Or rather not feel it.
I don’t have the same connection to Bron that my twin has, but since I arrived on this plane, I can feel her like a whisper in the back of my head. Now the noise is gone, as though someone turned it off. It happened a few minutes before, but it scares the crap out of me, as my vampire cousins would say.
“Something’s gone wrong.” Shim stands beside me, one hand on our steed.
Our ridiculously obnoxious steed who talks way too much for a horse. “Aren’t you the smart one, Shim? The king is slaughtering Fae and you’re only now figuring out that there’s something wrong.”
I roll my eyes. “Shut up, phoo.”
Shim ignores the phooka utterly. “A couple of minutes back, I lost touch with Bron.”
“Could she be sleeping?” I can’t imagine it. She has to be terrified. We don’t know what happened after they called her a witch and she lost consciousness. But the humming in the back of my head was there, an oddly comfortable sensation. I feel bereft without it.