Page 89 of The Prince's Captive

She was getting sick of this. He thought he could order her around?

She might be his prisoner. She wasn’t his soldier.

Marcella started to reach for the bowl and the tension in his shoulders eased—until she flipped the bowl into the air and sent the food in it scattering into the dirt.

Gavril came to a stop as the grapes rolled right up to his feet. He stood an arm’s length away from her, and his jaw clenched. He looked away for a moment, and Marcella braced herself for the consequences of her defiance.

Then he just laughed.

Not the way he’d laughed before with Aimilia. The way he’d laughed on the road.

He kicked the food out of the way and dropped to the bench beside her still laughing at her. He muttered something in his tongue, “I do not know when—was yours—every day since—become more yours—tried and failed—to not—your curses will—pass—Asentai is with you—your petitions work—find the will to live to give me agony, that is enough.”

“If you want to taunt me, Your Highness, it will be more effective in my tongue than yours,” Marcella snapped.

He looked over at her and shook his head, something strange in his eyes that she hadn’t seen since she’d proclaimed her curses over him. He said in her tongue, “You waste food.”

She was almost completely certain what he’d said in his language wasn’t about wasting food, but maybe her translation skills were completely off and she was wrong about everything she’d ever heard. She just looked at where Aimilia had gone and said, “You waste your time sitting here. Your girl ran off sobbing yet you sit here with your prisoner.”

Gavril tilted his head. “My… girl? You—Ah… But… you are encouraging me to go after her? You want me miserable. You should be happy.”

He had a point.

“If you ran off after her, you wouldn’t be nagging me about eating. But I am happy. I just don’t want you around me either. Besides, if you run after her, you’d probably just make things with her worse.”

That sounded reasonable enough. She most certainly didn’t want him running off after Aimilia tofixtheir relationship. And it had to be because he was right about what she wanted. She wanted him to lose everything he loved and never attain his desires. Aimilia was the first thing she wanted him to lose.

He shook his head. “I’d leave you be if you would have just eaten,contumax puella. And… yes, that is likely. To make things worse.”

“Precisely. Go. Go after your girl. The best that can happen is you make her hate you,” Marcella said with a decisive nod.

Gavril’s lips twitched, and he didn’t move. He seemed to carefully consider the words in her language. “Go after my girl? If I did, what would be the worst to you?”

“I want you in agony.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “The worst to me would be for you to fix whatever the issue is. For as long as I am alive and in agony here, so too I want you to be.”

“Believe me, Marcella,” he said, his tongue lolling over her name slowly and deliberately in his accent in the same strange way he always said her name, crawling down her spine. “For as long as you are in agony, so too I will be.”

She waited for his proclamation to bring her some satisfaction, but all she felt was hollow. Numb. Muffled.

Like a void heart did every day of their miserable lives.

She just felt empty.

Chapter28

GAVRIL

If Gavril had doubts about whether or not Asentai was listening to Marcella’s prayers, he didn’t now.

She was getting exactly what she wanted.

“Quod me nutrit iuror me destruit.”

“What nourishes me vows to destroy me.”

He was miserable.

But she was alive.

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