Page 98 of King of the Unsightly

So I pushed the guards again. “Are you a demon?” I reached out a hand and caressed the closest guard’s shoulder. “Because I can feel how hot you are from here.”

The guard stumbled forward, shuddered from my touch, and gave me the most disgusted face I had ever seen in my life.

I tried to hold in my laughter as I clasped my hands over my mouth.

My sanity left me a couple thousand marks-on-the-wall ago.

It also didn’t help that the only pickup lines I could think of were ones from my T-shirt collection. Maybe Lucien needed me to use new material since he had seen me wear those shirts countless times in the past.

I glanced at the guards and noticed they both sported similar expressions of anguish.

Was I hallucinating? Why did I feel like the guards saw me as some creepy old witch from a fairy tale who came to poison a princess, and they saw themselves as the damsels?

It was almost laughable how much they abhorred my presence. I mean, weren’t they some witch’s minions? Yet, they were more terrified of me than I was of them, like they knew something I didn’t.

It made me curious.

I could hear the guards’ hushed squabbling, but their whispers were so loud I could make out every word spilling out of their mouths.

“Switch me places.”

“No way.”

“Come on.”

“No.”

“Then make her stop. She’s been at it for weeks.”

“How do you expect me to do that? Kill her? She would disembowel us if we so much as touch her.”

“Ugh.”

I turned away, not caring to listen to their useless bickering, and looked back at Lucien in the cell next to me.

He didn’t even budge.

I grunted, half tempted to rip my hair out in defeat. “Oh, come on. You definitely would have laughed at it before.” I so badly wanted to see his dimpled smile again instead of this barely walking corpse.

“How can you be so optimistic at a time like this?” Lucien asked as his light eyes fell onto me, and my jaw dropped.

I ran to the other side of the cell.

My eyes widened with anticipation. “You finally spoke.” My voice came out high-pitched and squeaky and I cleared my throat. “I had been talking to myself so much I thought I was going crazy.” I squeezed his hand through the metal bars. Lucien was back. I fought back happy tears and took a deep breath. “And you think me catcalling the guards is me being optimistic?” I lowered a brow.

“No, it’s you refusing to feel anything and trying to use humor as a defense mechanism,” Lucien muttered; his gravelly voice was solemn, but his face stayed emotionless.

I opened and closed my mouth.

He wasn’t wrong.

I brushed my fingers through my tangled hair and watched his expression darken as he tightened his square jaw.

We held eye contact, and I decided to ignore his previous remark. “Are you okay?” I positioned my hand on his forehead.

Lucien felt unusually hot.

“I will be when we get out of here.” He pried my hand off him, and a sudden tinge of pain cemented itself within me.

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