Page 13 of Dare

Provoke him, I thought. Get him closer, I thought.

Hurt him first. Hurt the prince.

I whisked up saliva and spat. Fluid shot from my mouth and splattered the toe of his boot, halting the Royal in his tracks.

A beat passed. Then he edged backward.

Abreast of the bars, the prince glanced sideways at me without a shred of astonishment. My fingernails and knuckles readied themselves, but then he turned fully. As he did, his hand slid my way in a stupefying brush of movement.

Tenderness?

He made contact. I paused, the skin beneath my jaw yielding to the pads of his fingers, which rested lightly against my pulse.

It was calm, regal, and almost kind when he began to squeeze. I hardly noticed until my throat shrank in his grip, snippets of air struggling to get through. I grunted and flailed, trying to wrench myself away, but he only tightened his fingers. All the while, his expression didn’t change, inspecting me with a deep tilt of his head.

I rewarded him with a ferocious glare, because prey had to use their best glares against predators, in or out of this tower, in the hot or the cold, in Summer or Winter. But he merely waited as if he had all day, a purposeful sort of evil creeping to the surface, to the ice of his eyes.

I saw it. He wanted me to kneel.

The monster held on, the press of him urging me down. I resisted until my traitorous legs buckled. At which point, his fingers snapped open, releasing me to the ground, one of my knees smacking the stone and the other bending. I was quaking, kneeling, dammit.

The Summer guards cackled. The Winter knights did nothing of the sort.

Pyre spat blood while cradling his mutilated knuckles. “Anyone else from this block, then?”

By some miracle, the prince shook his head. Losing this round had at least spared my neighbors from being chosen.

Winter concentrated only on me, the tip of his boot fitting through the irons and wiping my spit across the fabric of my pants. Nudging my leg as if I were merely an insect, the prince addressed his entourage, murmuring two words he’d been waiting twelve months to say.

“This one,” he confirmed before walking away.

7

Jeryn

She had it coming. After the fucking chase she had put me through, the defiant little beast had asked to be brought to heel. It required a certain patience to hurt. Any longer and my grip on that tattooed throat would have suffocated her.

Indeed. Plenty of mayhem awaited her in Winter. When I got her alone and into a lab, I’d be free to exact full retribution.

Until then, my greeting had been a preview. And a necessity. Since the woman hadn’t kept her saliva to herself, I’d been obliged to retaliate. With a retinue and those pissant guards as witnesses, such defiance couldn’t have gone unpunished. Our audience had anticipated nothing short of aggression from me, and I could not be seen to play favorites.

Still. It had taken a certain amount of pressure to restrict her lungs while likewise avoiding impairment.

Pacing myself, I stalked down the tower’s coiling stairway, with the knights marching behind. Upon my descent, I flexed my fingers, my skin glazed in blood. Fucking imbecile. That warden should consider himself fortunate to still possess his hand after daring to touch my property. Acid sizzled on my tongue, yet I could not identify whether it had to do with the guard, the conditions in which the beast had been living, or her obstinance.

Outside the tower’s ground level, a colonnade stretched toward the Royal wing’s entrance. A servant waited, balancing a marble bowl. I doused my fingers in the vessel, tower scum leaching from my digits. Red water sloshed over the side and onto the tile floor.

A cloth materialized in my periphery. Wiping my hands and dispatching the textile to the servant, I strode down the walkway.

The saturated air grew thicker than a stew. Solstice, the First Knight, mopped her brow. “Curse this soggy country.”

The knights were miserable, drenched in the elements. Whereas Winter’s chill cut a clean, straight incision into its citizens, Summer’s heat punched them in the fucking face.

At the passage’s threshold, sentinels peeled open a set of double doors. I turned down my chin, brushing past them and stepping into the castle’s east wing.

The knights sighed, welcoming the mist that rained from the ceiling. One wall recess displayed an hourglass tracking the time, indoor waterfalls hissed with noise, and resident macaws stabbed their beaks into their breastbones. The retinue followed me through a hall floored in glass, with dragon fish submerged beneath our feet.

One of the knights snickered. “Some of the locals walk barefoot here. Their clothing is as skimpy as scarves too.”

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