Page 45 of The Captive's Curse
The Calatrians hadn’t managed to kill the Surbini prince.
But I might.
I tried to imagine attempting to explain myself to Bruno, my mother, and the queen, not necessarily in that order—whichever got to me first would make mincemeat of me. If that towering, hard-faced captain of the prince’s guard didn’t kill me within seconds of my failure, of course.
“I can’t,” I puffed, tugging pointlessly on my arm, Enzo yanking me along regardless. Damn it, he had to listen! “Enzo, I can’t! I won’t. I won’t touch the prince, and that’s final, and you can’t make me! If you want to hold him and his retinue to ransom, you can do it without my help—what are you doing!”
If he hadn’t shoved his hand behind my head, I’d have gotten a concussion as he spun me and pinned me up against the wall. His other hand on my shoulder kept me completely immobile.
Well, almost completely immobile. My hips arched up to meet him with no volition of mine, hard cock leading the way. Some stupid part of my brain had begun to associate an angry, glittering-eyed Enzo with imminent pleasure, and I had to dig my teeth into my lower lip to keep in a moan.
“Do you ever think about anything else?” he hissed, low enough not to be heard by the servants bustling past behind him. “We have a prince of Surbino here, in this castle, my responsibility. He may be dying. Whether he dies or not, this was an act of war, and I’m not sure at all who would go to war with whom. Fucking hell, Cyril. I’m not holding them prisoner, we risked our lives to rescue them. And the fact that you’d—you’d rather score points off me than do the right thing!”
Every word hit me square in the chest, brutal in their impact. My arousal vanished as if I’d been dunked in a tub of ice water.
So he did think I was a slut. And worse than that: a selfish, thoughtless, cowardly, petty slut.
Fuck him. And so much for his protestations about not thinking dawn mages were sex-crazed whores.
My spine stiffened, and I glared him right in the eyes—although having to tip my head back into the warm cradle of his palm, his fingers buried in my hair, ruined the effect just a touch. His touch. His strong, perfect touch…
Damn it.
“I’m at least as worried about the prince dying here on our watch as you are,” I ground out. “Have you considered that I’d be the one blamed if he died while I tried to magic him? And! No, shut up, Enzo, fuck you. You act like it’s some unreasonably insulting assumption that you might ransom them, when—excuse me? Why am I here in this castle? Hmm?”
Brick-red crept over his cheeks and up to his hairline, and his lips compressed until they were nothing more than a flat line. His body vibrated with tension, his fingers digging into me, rigid as claws.
And then he abruptly let me go, taking a step back, running his hands over his face and then dropping them down to his sides, not quite clenched into fists.
“All right, I can’t make you help him,” he said at last, heavily. The cold, hard look in his eyes chilled me down to my marrow. “But you will examine him. At the very least, you’ll give your opinion as best you can, because there’s no one else here able to do even that. After that I’ll take responsibility. And then it won’t be your precious fault if he dies.”
“It’s not about whose fault it is,” I stammered. Gods, the way he was looking at me…butDo you ever think about anything elsestill rang in my ears, too, and made me want to do nothing less in this world than try to justify myself to him. “Gerta would be—”
“And she’s not here,” he snapped. “Don’t waste your breath, Lord Cyril. Itisabout whose fault it is. You said soyourself not thirty seconds ago.” He put out his arm, directing me in a way that might’ve been courteous if it hadn’t been an icily formal demand. “If you please.”
I did not please. But the moment to humiliate myself by admitting how useless I truly would be in a sickroom had passed, if it had ever existed at all. Now it would only sound like an excuse for cowardice. Enzo wouldn’t believe me.
Spine straight and chin lifted, though my stomach had twisted into a miserable knot, I strode past him to the prince’s bedchamber.
Chapter Seventeen
Even to my untrained senses, the cause of the prince’s deathlike pallor and deep unconsciousness was obvious enough, thank the gods.
“He’s worn out. I don’t think he has any internal physical injuries we can’t see, but magically he’s exhausted. He’s alive, though,” I said, my voice a little too thin to hold much authority.
But anyone would’ve been nervous with the audience I had for my unimpressive magical performance. Andreas, the captain of the prince’s guard, had taken up a position across the bed from me, perched on the edge of it with one of Prince Nikola’s hands clutched tightly in both of his own. His tight-jawed, silent, barely suppressed panic had me horrendously on edge. I hoped the prince knew how gods-damned lucky he was, despite his misadventures and the fact that he bore the same cursed dawn magic that I did.
What I wouldn’t have given for a man who worshipped me the way Andreas clearly did his prince…although being on this side of his blatant adoration didn’t thrill me. Anyone who might represent a threat would be given short shrift.
Enzo didn’t help at all, leaning against a bedpost in my peripheral vision with his arms crossed over his chest and a scowl on his face. He ought to be protecting me from Andreas’s potential fury instead of glaring a hole in the side of my head while I tried my best.
Asshole.
“He ought to wake up on his own,” I added. “He’ll be very hungry and thirsty, and he maybe shouldn’t do any magic for a few days.” My curiosity—and honestly, my morbid desire to know how a dawn mage had fucked himself up this thoroughly—won out over my tact. “How did he drain himself down to nothing like this, anyway?”
Andreas glanced up at me, eyes as bleak as the wintry landscape out the window. “He gave everything he had to save my fucking worthless life,” he said.
Oh, gods. I probably shouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole. But the agony and despair in his voice struck a chord in my chest, resonating as if he’d reached in and plucked all my harmonic strings.
