Page 49 of The Captive's Curse
I shoved up on an elbow, indignation and a sudden churning of nerves in the pit of my stomach giving me strength.
“What are you doing?” My voice rasped in my well-used throat. “You’re not finished!”
Enzo’s hands stilled, and then he slowly lifted his head, meeting my eyes with a blank, hard expression in his that had to be a pretense. Didn’t it?
“I’d have thought you’d have noticed when I finished,” he said. “And you got yours, too. I think we’re very much finished here.” Those words had a finality far beyond their contextual meaning. “Your escort’s waiting for you. Pack your things, andsomeone will come and carry your trunk down. This is farewell, Lord Cyril, because I have other matters to attend to.”
No. No, he couldn’t leave like this. Walk out of this room, walk away from me, leave me…leave me without any recourse when my curse took me again, which it would do in…about seven days. Fuck. Hardly urgent, except that it was! What if it happened sooner? Magic could be unpredictable!
As I gaped at him, my mind whirling, he shook his head and turned away.
“Wait! Enzo, stop,” I cried, swinging my legs off the bed and trying to stagger after him. My knees were all wobbly. “What will I do about my curse? I mean, I’m not allowed to—the other men here. And there’s a journey. What if I’m delayed?”
He paused, hand on the latch of the door, his shoulders and back rigid with tension. Enzo turned his head barely enough to glance at me, and a muscle ticked in his jaw.
My breath held, I waited, biting my lip…
“You have a week before your curse is going to affect you,” he said heavily. “You can seduce your escort on your arduous four-hour journey, if you must. Or anyone else you want. You’re not my captive anymore. And I don’t have any say in who fucks you. It’s not my concern.”
He yanked the door open and strode through, practically slamming it behind him.
His quick footsteps rang out and faded away within seconds.
The room blurred slightly, and I rubbed at my eyes, my fingers coming away damp. I wasn’t his captive anymore, and I ought to be rejoicing at my freedom.
Happy. I was happy, damn it, and desperately relieved to be going home, where I’d never need to see Enzo again.
Thank the gods for that. I’d never see Enzo again—unless Hans caught and hanged him.
And if my cheeks and neck were wet as I slowly packed my trunk and changed my trousers, then surely they were tears of joy.
Chapter Eighteen
“Great gods, Graf!” Bruno’s booming voice echoed off the rafters of Montefime’s entrance hall, and I winced, temples already throbbing.
It had rained the whole way, I was soaked to the skin and shivering, and Agnethe had kicked up enough mud to coat me from the chest down. Worse, none of my physical misery could distract me from wondering what Enzo might be doing at that exact moment—staying warm and dry, at the very least, the fucking asshole.
Lounging in his drafty hall eating scorched vegetables and delicious fresh bread and laughing at me with Leander, perhaps. Or in his study, shaking his head over the stain on the chaise and laughing at me for spending all over it.
Laughing at me, certainly. Or even worse, not thinking of me at all.
If I’d thought the ride that eventually led me to my captivity with Enzo had been horridly demoralizing, this one topped it. The prospect of a hot bath and a gallon of warm spiced wine—and perhaps, if I were lucky, a breath that went all the way down into my lungs without threatening to hitch into a sob—had kept me going. Barely.
But I’d no sooner set foot inside Montefime, letting out a heaving breath of relief as the great door behind me swung shut to mute the spitting rain and howling wind, than Hans andBruno had emerged from the library and ranged themselves in front of me like the world’s least welcoming committee.
Well, Hans had emerged. Bruno had exploded, flinging the door back against the wall, his face eggplant-purple and his eyes bulging out of his head.
Gods. Not that Bruno didn’t have his good points very, very occasionally, but you really couldn’t blame Rivina for overlooking him as a lover.
“What in the nineteen hells were you thinking, paying his ransom!” Bruno shouted, sparing me one hostile grimace before rounding on Hans, demonstrating yet another way in which Rivina had been right not to fall in love with him. “I told that bloody ruffian it was a matter of principle. That I’d never pay—”
“And you didn’t pay, I did!” Hans interrupted him, heedless of Bruno’s mounting fury. Did he have no self-preservation instincts at all? Bruno already hated him, first for winning Rivina’s hand, and then for betraying her with me. Was Hans too stupid to notice? “Montefime, be reasonable. We couldn’t let him rot there. What if they’d executed him to make an example?”
Ugh, Hans’s coaxing, let’s-all-get-along tone set my teeth on edge. It always had. Really, he hadn’t deserved my mouth.
Enzo hadn’t either.
My chest tightened painfully.
