Page 22 of What Fury Brings
Sanos stared at her. Did she actually expect him to cooperate?
“I know your goddess has made you unnaturally strong and ugly,” he said.
She snorted. “Is that why your breath hitches when I draw closer to you?”
His glare returned. He should know better than to call her unattractive. Not only was it entirely untrue, he’d proven just how attractive he found her when they first met.
I need your skin against mine.
He would not live those words down.
“This will be easier for us both if you make the most of our time together on the road before we reach my country.”
“Things will be easier foryouif you release me now, before my father knows where I’ve gone.”
She laughed. “I have met your father four times on the battlefield now. I’m not worried.”
Sanos’s eyes widened. “You’rethe Amarran general?” The one who had shamed his father? The one who had stoked his ire and drove him to beat Sanos and Canus relentlessly?
“Yes.”
She came closer, and he flinched backward. The move made her narrow her eyes. “I will not harm you, Andrastus. I don’t know what you’ve heard about me or my people, but I am not cruel. I do not use my strength to harm others. I have taken you because I must in order to win my throne, but this is an arrangement that can be mutually beneficial. You are a second-born prince, set to inherit nothing. Now you will be a husband and sire. You have risen in station. You needn’t work or want for anything. I will care for you.
“I hear you like literature. I have recently restocked our library with books by Brutish writers and poets. There’s a theater in Zinaeya whereyou can attend plays, operas, and more. I would see you happy and thriving.”
If only Sanos liked any of those things. Sanos preferred hunting and movement. He liked parties and drinking. He read for enlightenment, not for pleasure. And he detested poetry.
But he had to pretend to be Andrastus…
Fuck that. Anger seemed to be the best approach.
“You think you can bribe me into doing what you want?” he asked.
“It’s not bribery. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement.”
“And what would you be getting out of this arrangement?”
“Certainly not your pleasing personality.”
“You kidnapped me.”
She grinned. “I did, didn’t I? Couldn’t have planned the whole thing any better.”
Amarra’s tits, she thought he was complimenting her.
“You will have much to prove when we arrive in Amarra,” she said. “Physically, I think we can say the court will be impressed by you, but your manners need some work.”
Was she fucking serious?
“Men are to be seen but not heard unless expressly told otherwise,” she continued. “You are free to speak to me whenever you wish when we are alone. However, in front of the courtiers, you need to behave.”
“And just how are you going to make me do that?”
She leaned farther into the blankets on the cart, propping herself up on two elbows. The crisp breeze in the Brutish air blew the loose strands of hair back from her face. “Women in my kingdom have been kidnapping and breaking men for nearly five hundred years. It is an art form that is taught to the nobility. While I don’t particularly care for most of the methods, I will do what I must to ingrain some manners in you.”
“Breaking men?” he questioned. He wasn’t overly concerned.There was nothing this woman could do to him that hadn’t already been done. Except, he remembered, any nighttime plans she might have.
He refused to think about it.
