Page 41 of The Prince's Captive

She cursed her faithful heart that still had hope in a miracle and opened her mouth.

“And what are you going to ask of me in return?”

His thumb brushed over her skin softly as he said, “Nothing but answer to one question.”

She was right. There was a condition. Marcella stiffened. “I’m not giving you any of my people’s secrets.”

He shook his head and he had the strangest, saddest smile she’d ever seen before. “What’s your name?”

This was most definitely all part of his continuing scheme to get her to lower her guard and give him valuable information…

And yet she found herself opening her mouth anyway. “Marcella.”

He tilted his head and looked her over all anew. He spoke slowly, softly, and absolutely butchering it in his thick accent, “Marcella.”

Instead of pronouncing it with a ‘sel,’ he’d said it with a ‘ch’ sound, and his tongue rolled over the ‘l’s. She hated it.

He then shifted his hand, and Marcella choked on her breath as he pulled the edge of her peplos away from her skin. With his other hand he lifted the leather tie until the metal piece fell beneath it as he adjusted her peplos until the necklace couldn’t be seen. Once he was satisfied, he rested both hands beside the leather ties, between her neck and shoulders.

Then he spoke in his tongue again, but she couldn’t piece together the meaning of the words. “Pulchra nomen, contumax puella—mea sponsa, mea spes.”

She may not have a clue what any of those words meant, but she knew she didn’t like the way he was deliberately speaking to her when he knew she wouldn’t know the meaning. She ripped herself out of his grip, the cold metal biting into her skin at her heart.

His eyes then landed on the bruises forming on her neck. He gestured with his hand and switched back to her tongue. “May I?”

“No.”

His face showed no surprise at her short answer. He just waved his hand over the rune under them and the bubble of silence burst, and she could now hear the goings-on of the camp again. He pushed himself to his feet and held a hand out to her. “Tomorrow, maybe?”

Marcella didn’t move to take it. She also didn’t move to take off the necklace. “No.”

He shook his head and bent down, taking her by the biceps and pulling her up to her feet. “Tonight, rest.”

Marcella just glowered at him as he started escorting her through the camp to her tent. All the men stopped pretending like they hadn’t been watching them and just outright watched them. Whispers followed them, but she couldn’t make any of them out, and the second Gavril directed his glare toward them, they stopped.

Like usual, he lifted the flap for her and delivered her inside. Once she was inside, she could hear him settling down in front of her tent like he always did.

How foolish she’d been. If he truly wanted to let her go, he would have just left the exit to her tent unguarded and she would be long gone. She reached under her collar with her good hand, grabbed the little metal piece, and ripped the necklace off. She threw it to the tent floor. Believing him was a mistake.

He was Inimicus. He could not be trusted.

As she lay there, staring at the darkness and clutching her sprained wrist to her chest, she heard the faint sound of something scratching on metal as she tried to sleep. The longer it went on and her humiliation at falling for his lies festered, the more her annoyance grew as well. Usually everything was silent.

How did he expect her to rest for these long days ahead with that noise going on?

She crawled toward the flap and peered out of it just enough to see Gavril was sitting up, an open notebook on one leg and a light rune set on the ground beside him, freeing his two hands. He had another little metal piece in one hand and a tiny etching tool in the other.

She couldn’t make out the writing in the book. She’d mostly learnt to hear and speak the very little of his language she did know. The runes they used to cast and write were completely foreign to her.

He didn’t even look up from the rune he was etching into the metal as he said, “Mea sponsa,” and then in her tongue, “rest. Long day ahead.”

She was tempted to take the chains connecting her wrists and wrap them around his neck like she had the heretic on the first day. Oh, they would most certainly kill her, but if she was blessed, she might be able to choke him to death first. She could at least take a commander down with her.

“Don’t even think about it,contumax puella. Rest. Tomorrow. You can hate me tomorrow.”

Marcella slunk back into the tent and dropped onto her bedroll. With a sprained wrist, she wouldn’t have been able to manage it anyway.

Maybe she would have been better off if she’d just let the silenced Inimicus kill her.

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