Page 14 of The Captive's Curse
His eyes widened absurdly, his mouth dropping open. From behind him, Leander made a sound I couldn’t quite identify.
“I beg your pardon?” Enzo choked. “Last night you bent over and—were you—was I—fuck, I never should have kidnapped you.” Leander’s noises resolved into gurgles of laughter. Enzo let go of my shoulders, stepped back quickly, and scrubbed his hands over his face. “Shut the fuck up, Lee. Gods fucking damn it. No wonder they wouldn’t ransom you. You’re a fucking menace.”
Only biting my lip hard enough to draw blood kept in my gut-punched gasp.
No wonder they wouldn’t ransom you.
Through numb lips, I managed, “I’m a delight, thank you very much.”
“You really, really are,” Leander replied, still laughing, but when I glanced up sharply, hurt all over again, I found him smiling at me in a way I couldn’t mistake for anything but genuine, his eyes alight. “Good gods, but you truly are.”
You couldn’t execute someone you liked, could you? “Does that mean you’re not going to hang me after all?”
“What?” Enzo demanded sharply, as Leander said, “Of course not!”
“Oh,” I said weakly. “Well, good.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Enzo growled, “but no. You’re perfectly safe here. For however long it takes to get rid of you,” he added.
“Leander said you could let me go,” I ventured. “You might as well. I don’t have any money. And Bruno’s incredibly stubborn. He never changes his mind. It’s a matter of principle.”
Enzo’s jaw set, hard as a rock. “It’s a matter of principle to me, too,” he said. “I can’t let you go without getting the money. No one would ever pay us a ransom again. If I hanged you, that’d work, and no, don’t go all weak in the knees again, I’m not considering it. But I can’t let you go, although I have no bloody clue what I’m going to do with you. You’ll be safe here, like I said. But if anyone ever asks, you’d better tell them we kept you on bread and water and made you do hard labor.”
That took a moment to sink in, and when it did, I couldn’t fucking believe the nerve of him. “You,” I said, and stepped forward, shaking my finger at him, right under his stupid nose. “You! You abduct me, drag me up here dangling over a horse like a—a—side of venison, with my ass in the air, and then—”
“I was holding you upright against my shoulder,” Enzo put in, sounding harassed. “A side of venison? Are you out of your—”
“With my ass in the air!” I practically shouted. “Or maybe it wasn’t, but speaking of principles, the principle is the same!”
“No, it isn’t. Lord Cyr—”
“It is to me. It was undignified. And criminal, let’s not forget that part. You abduct me, drag me up here, give me a horrid little cell full of onions—”
“Is that where that smell was coming from?” Leander said. “I wondered.”
I turned on him and snarled, “Shutup, Leander,” in perfect unison with Enzo.
Silence fell as Enzo and I stared at each other in horror.
“You should kidnap people more often,” Leander said, his voice shaking with not-at-all suppressed glee.
“What,” Enzo said through his clenched teeth, his tone desert dry, “is your fucking point, Lord Cyril? And think before you speak. If you use more than twenty words to get to it, I will find every onion in Rabbion. And I will make you eat them forbreakfast, lunch, and dinner until someone pays your ransom. Or until you die of old age. Or I die of an aneurysm. Whatever comes first. You will sleep with onions. You will bathe in onion-infused water. I’ll have the kitchen maids make a special batch of onion-infused soap, especially for you.”
I opened my mouth, about to unleash another torrent of my entirely justified indignation.
But the dark light in Enzo’s eyes withered the words on my tongue. He hadn’t changed his posture, or even his expression. But the air around him seemed to crackle and throb with power, with the force of his will.
The frisson that skittered down my spine and raised the hair on the back of my neck wasn’t fear, precisely.
But I couldn’t disobey him. Not when he leveled me with that thunderous gaze, when he’d so clearly reached the very last, fraying end of his patience.
He wouldn’t hang me. He’d said so, and I believed him. And he probably wouldn’t really commission onion soap—he might be a highwayman, but he wasn’t a monster.
Whatwouldhe do, though? I had no idea.
The reckless, devil-may-care part of me that had longed to go off in search of adventure, that chafed against the dullness of my life thus far, wanted to find out.
Luckily, the rest of me retained some vestige of common sense.
