Page 20 of Wolf Caged
I scowled at the darkness before me. “So haughty. I expected as much—from a king.”
He chuckled, but it was a deadly, hollow sound. “We shall see how long that tongue remains sharp when you realise where you are and what I am.”
Not who.What.
He was of a species he believed I should fear then.
I tried not to let it shake me, but it was hard. This male had bought me. Paid handsomely for me. Playing a game with all the other bidders, letting them think they had won before he had casually thrown in excess of a hundred million dollars down on the table. For my virginity. And now I was in a cell at his mercy.
Not that he seemed to have much of that particular quality.
“Do you know of the faerie?” A direct question, laced with a hint of amusement that said he thought I didn’t and was as uneducated as he expected.
I was too busy wrestling with how ominous that question was to snap at him, found myself stilling and holding the blanket closer to keep out the sudden chill as I peered into the shadows where he stood.
Shadows that seemed unnatural the more I looked at them.
I glanced left and right, and it was lighter in both directions, the torches still flickering brightly to warm the cold space.
It was only dark where he was.
“A little,” I murmured and looked back at the gathered shadows, my pulse picking up as the full gravity of my situation hit me.
“Tell me what you know.” A gentle prompt, but that amusement was still there, lending a cruel edge to his bass voice.
“That there’s good and bad fae—and this is their world, isn’t it? I’m in the faerie realm.” Not my world. What that female had said came back to me and dread sank through me. I was in the land of the fae, as far from my home as I could get, and even if I did escape this dungeon and whatever building it belonged to, I had no way of getting back to my pack.
Unlike the fae, I couldn’t teleport or use magic.
I was trapped here.
“Perhaps not so stupid after all.” There was almost a grin in those words. “And tell me…” He moved, voice a low rumble as he stepped closer and the shadows fell away, revealing him at last. “Which do you think I am?”
I couldn’t breathe.
He was darkness made flesh. A warrior from another time in black armour and with an onyx spiked crown curving across his forehead. Shadows streaked across his eyes, below pitch-dark eyebrows, making his silver irises as bright and sharp as moonlight ringed with night. The twin braids he wore tucked behind pointed ears tipped with silver metal and adorned with rings fell to one side as he canted his head, studying me.
Not me. My reaction.
Apparently, my shock was satisfactory, because his lips, a shade darker than his pale skin, curved at the corners.
But it wasn’t fear that had me reeling.
No male should be beautiful, not when they wore an air of cruelty and darkness like those words had been made for him, but he wasbreathtaking.
Otherworldly.
Beautiful.
Every feature was perfection, from his chiselled jaw to his striking molten silver eyes, to his glossy black hair that reached his nape and had been pulled back into a half ponytail.
I struggled to find my voice, to muster some witty and scathing retort as he towered over me, elegance incarnate in his fine armour that hugged a body I felt sure would also be perfection.
His smirk widened.
Because he thought fear had me stunned into silence, not some sort of misplaced awe that bordered on a dangerous attraction that had my pulse quickening at just the sight of him.
I shut it down, because this was probably a trick, a lie. Fae could use glamours and magic, altering their appearance as they pleased. That was what the story books had taught me.
