Page 1 of Held

One

Briar was running out of time.

She looked around the dark tavern with a confident smirk, something she didn’t feel in the slightest. Appearances were important: she could hardly show the desperation that started kicking in after sunset, another constant reminder of how close she was to dying right here in this grimy tavern.

Unless she found a lover. If she could find someone to sleep with before midnight, she would be granted another day. Thanks to that gods-damned wizard who couldn’t take no for an answer and was very promptly killed for it, only to choke out his curse with his dying words.

That was months ago. There wasn’t a day that went by when Briar didn’t wish she had killed him faster. Sex was fun, to be sure. But she was getting deeply tired of finding someone new every night.

Briar checked that her pack was still next to her feet and gave the tavern another annoyed glance. Still, no one was interested—she’d already done the rounds, only to find a eunuch, an irritatingly loyal husband, and a man who assumed she wanted to pickpocket him. Which, to be fair, wasn’t entirelyoff the mark. She had been planning on stealing his coin purse afterward.

After months of traveling from town to town, she was almost at the point of no return. Right next to the town waited an endless stretch of forest that Briar had to travel through to meet Marigold, Briar’s only hope of lifting her curse. If she had come to the last small town, then she had to find some poor fool who was horny or stupid enough to follow her for weeks through a perilous forest in exchange for fucking her every night.

The tavern door creaked open. Briar looked up, her smile turning genuine as she noticed a new man. A tall, sturdy man with no companion. The perfect mark.

She waited for him to take a seat at the other end of the bar. Then she picked up her pack and walked over, making sure to make her hips swing as she went.

“Hello,” she said coolly as she dropped her back and slid into the stool next to him, right in front of the crackling fire. “What brings a man like you to a place like this?”

He turned to her. He was wearing a hood that covered most of his face, which was probably for the best. She’d slept with some truly ugly men since this curse took hold. Sometimes it was better not to see too much.

The man said nothing. He held up a hand, and the bartender slid a glass of moonshine in front of him without asking.

A local, Briar decided. And a working man, if his scarred hands and the weapons hanging off his belt were anything to go by. There was something familiar about him, but she couldn’t put her finger on what.

She leaned forward coyly as she toyed with her necklace: a white gemstone amulet that Marigold had given her during simpler times. Briar was never a sentimental woman, but she had allowed herself this one keepsake. She usually kept it tucked away—better to have nothing people could recognize you by.

“I only ask because I’m looking for a man like you,” she said, dragging her fingers seductively down the necklace chain. “My bed is awfully cold tonight.”

She usually warmed men up more beforehand. But the night was getting awfully long, and she could feel the curse creeping up her skin. It felt like fire, crackling and throwing sparks just like the fireplace they were sitting next to. The closer she got to midnight, the more painful it became.

Right now, it was a low simmer. Soon, it would roar into a wildfire.

She waited for the man to huff in amusement or get suspicious. Maybe ask if she was charging by the hour. Most did, if she came on this strongly.

But the man just took a sip of his drink and looked at her again.

“Salaros’s family will be glad to see the curse is still in full effect,” he said in a familiar voice that made her teeth clench and her blood freeze. “And after all that talk you had about undoing it.”

Briar sat back, forcing her grin to stay in place. She should have known—he smelled faintly of lipseed, a crucial ingredient in the hair oil he used so copiously.

“Renault,” she said chirpily, subtly scanning the tavern for exits. She had a knife in her pack, but that was it. Escape was her best bet. Escape, recoup, and find someone to accompany her through weeks’ worth of forest so she wouldn’t die on her first night un-fucked.

“What a nice surprise,” she continued, pulling her pack subtly closer with her feet. “Is it just you this time, or did you bring your band of merry bounty hunters?”

Renault laughed, pulling his hood away to reveal the boyish smile and wavy, lipseed-smelling hair that had enchanted her for about an hour at a party when she was six and twenty.The night had ended in a blur of blood and stolen gold, both of them laughing. She had been proud that her laugh had been believable, even when she cleaned the blood off her hands afterward.

It had been almost ten years since then. Renault’s path had diverted from hers, but they both revolved around money. Unfortunately for her, he had found tons of it by chasing down anyone with a bounty on their heads.

Like her. The warlock, Salaros, apparently had a very wealthy family across the sea. All the more reason to wish she’d never met the bastard. Not only did he ruin her life with this curse, but he also made her run from people like Renault and his band of hunters.

“I do enjoy our chats,” Renault said, his straight teeth shining in the dim tavern firelight. “Usually when I meet a mark, it’s all pleas or threats. Not you.”

“Not me,” Briar agreed. She eyed the fireplace next to them, keeping her smile as flirtatious as ever, even as the dread set in. This was not the time to let her guard down. She’d made it out of worse situations. Especially if he really was alone, like she suspected. Renault never liked to share his reward. She’d found that out the hard way.

She leaned in, watching him stiffen in preparation. It lasted barely a moment—he knew the importance of looking calm and confident as well as she did. But he also knew what she was capable of.

“Look,” she said, trailing her finger down her necklace chain. “Salaros deserved it. You would have done the same thing, Renault.”

---