Page 36 of What Lies Within Masks & Shadows

A wicked smirk crossed his face. “Is that not the sort of thing females worry about?”

“I could give a shit about what I’m wearing. I want answers.”

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he had done in the tavern. With his arms outstretched in front of him, he looked down at his bloody fingers now steepled, and she noticed the candle’s glow reflecting from four rings—three on his right, two black and one silver, one black on the other.

Ignoring her wandering gaze, he conceded, “Ask and I will answer.”

The blood on his hands should have stopped her, but she didn’t care. “Who are you? Why am I here?” She seethed.

Removing the hood, he kept his head lowered to the ground. The side of his mouth twisted into a grin as burned ash and smoke-colored hair fell in loose waves across his forehead. Blood that sheknewwasn’t his own speckled his face, accentuating the already healing wound across his nose.

“Well?” she barked, and his grin only widened, irritating her even more.

“I… am High Prince Garrik of Elysian. These faeries are my personal soldiers—my Dragons Legion.” Pausing, he lifted his head and stood. Then crossed the two steps to stop inches away from Alora. His shoulders were as high as her forehead. Freezing, bloodied, ringed fingers gripped her chin and lifted it, looking down into her eyes.

Her body froze.

“I was sent to find you for His Majesty, High King Magnelis.”

They stood in the quiet.

The only sounds around them, her racing heartbeat, the roaring in her ears, and the lonely candle crackling its flame as shadows flickered across the alluring face of Elysian’s darkest nightmares.

The Savage Prince.

He’d found her.

Sheer horror chilled her bones. Never a believer in such stories, not until she was in this very one. Knowing that there was little point in running—her fate was sealed the moment he entered the West Gate—she eased into the surrounding stillness.

Some stories foretold he was worse than his father. That there was no other match in time to his brutality; her skin would be burned and flayed from broken bones, piece by piece. Her powers, ripped from her body by the High King’s jealous hands. And when only pain and the memory of who she once was remained, her mind would irrevocably shatter until nothing remained but a shell to mold and manipulate.

It felt as if the stars had crashed down. And without her magic, still unreturned, she would be his—Magnelis’s pretty little plaything—until he reached his fill of her pain and anguish.

Alora’s eyes shot around the tent, searching for anything to cleave her fate from the High Prince’s ruthless hands.

There.

To her right, propped against a leather chest, the salvation of two swords rested. Like a caged beast ready for slaughter, she tore her chin from his grasp.

And lunged.

Pale hands connected with the leathered hilts, and twisting, Alora positioned both swords in front of her, feet steadied on a darkened pelt.

“I have no interest in you or your father’s orders,” she warned.

Body tense, Alora maneuvered into a ready-attack position that she’d learned from Rowlen. Though she desperately tried to control it, her hands trembled.

The High Prince tilted his head, holding a predatory grin as he rolled up his tunic sleeves. “We have been here before—or do you forget so easily?” He settled his boot on the chair and leaned forward, one forearm resting across his knee. “It is treason—anact of war—to draw on the High Prince. Drop the swords.” He cocked his head. “My patience draws thin.”

The words hit her like a wall of solid stone.‘My patience draws thin.’

Picturing a flooded Telldairan street. The reverberating crack of a spine. A heap of silver armor and purple fabric over a mound of warm, dead flesh.

Alora surveyed him now, finding his silver eyes lacking the endless oblivion she had glimpsed on that street. And the face that stared back at her was nothing of the monster that rattled the brickwork under her palms.

“You’re nothim,” she hissed. Whatever this was … whatever game he was playing. Her time hadn’t run out yet. “I saw whathelooked like in Telldaira. You’re not him.”

“Is that so?” A wolfish grin twisted up the side of his face. “If you wish to see the Savage Prince, allow me to indulge you.”

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