Page 2 of The Captive's Curse
The artist had gotten the eyes wrong, though. Dark and uncompromising, yes, but they held a subtle gleam that would’ve taken a much cleverer pencil to capture. His jet-black hair was shorter now than it had been in the picture, too.
But it was definitely the highwayman whose stranglehold on the foothills leading into the mountain pass had driven all the local authorities to frothing rage over the last couple of years.
And he’d killed me.
Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes. My throat worked, and at last I drew in enough breath to speak.
“Tell my mother to burn my lute with my body,” I rasped. “With my death, my lute should lie mute, as it were. I don’t want anyone else to play her.”
He stared at me, eyebrows slowly rising, rain beginning to drip down off his nose and trickle over his cheekbones. The bastard didn’t even seem to notice or care. Oh, my back was so cold, and—wait, would I be able to feel that if it were broken? With my luck, probably yes.
“Burn your—a mute lute? You must be joking. I hope you’re joking. And you’re not dying. I assume you mean you don’t want anyone else to play your instrument, not play your mother? That was a bit ambiguous.”
Indignation choked me nearly as much as the lingering effects of flying off a horse to my inevitable death.
“Ambig—is this really the moment for a grammar lesson?” I demanded. “How dare you mock my last words!”
That mediocre artist had made him striking, eye-catching, harsh-featured and intimidating. Frowning and in person, he was even more so. But when that frown melted into a wicked, crooked grin, his eyes glinting with laughter, he became…well, I couldn’t really feel much below the waist. There was a definite flutter, though.
“Last words?” he repeated. “Are your last-last words about me mocking you, or do you want to try for a third round about the lute again, only with a real rhyme instead of a near-rhyme? To really get it right. How about a moot lute, or is that simply too stupid?”
“Oh,” I gasped, and my heart pounded, everything going blurry again. “You’re a real son of a bitch, you know that?”
My surroundings started to fade into a gray mist, leaving nothing but that white, offensive grin.
“You wouldn’t be the first to make those your last words to me,” he said. “But don’t worry. You’re going to be fine. Held for ransom, but absolutely fine.”
I desperately tried to summon up the strength to tell him to fuck off, or ideally to turn him into a strange, half-formed goat.
Instead, I passed out, dying in the icy mud and rain, my fine wool and velvet cloak no doubt completely ruined.
The bastard turned out to be right about one thing, at least. I didn’t die.
It was worse than that: I woke up in a lumpy bed covered in a scratchy blanket, in a dark and gloomy room that desperately needed better ventilation in the chimney. The miserable smolder in the fireplace produced more smoke than warmth.
And a housemaid would’ve been nice. The soot-stained ceiling bore the torn webs of a thousand spiders of days of yore. Probably their modern descendants, too, and I squinted, trying to see if anything was about to land on my face.
I turned my head. Oh, gods above. This place needed a wholebevyof housemaids. And kitchen maids, because were those…I’d been put in a bedroom with crates of onions.
Onions!
My feet had hit the floor before I even thought to wonder if my legs would ever work again, or if I’d have to drag myself along, an object of pity to all.
My bare feet. That stopped me, and I looked down. Bare legs, long and slim and lightly dusted with golden hair. Pale thighs. And between them, beneath the hem of the rough homespun shirt that had rucked up around my waist, my bare cock and balls were nestled, unimpressively soft in the cold.
Someone—my kidnapper?—had undressed me and ogled my naked body.
And then, rather than recognizing that a delicate and beautiful creature like me needed a soft bed in a warm room that didn’treek of fucking onions, he’d dumped me here, wearing a shirt I’d have been ashamed to hand off to a starving peasant. (If I’d ever encountered one, anyway. My brother Bruno might be a pig in the body of an orangutan, but at least he made sure no one on his lands ever went hungry.)
Generally speaking, I got better responses than this to men ogling my naked body. Wide-eyed admiration and stammered poetry. Jewelry. Proposals of marriage. Offers of sex, at the very least.
No one seemed to be lying in wait with jewels, poetry, or a nice thick cock.
And no clothes, either, besides this horrendous shirt.
Only onions.
For lack of any other option, I tugged the moth-eaten wool blanket off the bed and wrapped it around my hips, letting it hang down to my calves like a skirt, and edged my way around the crates to the door.
