Page 86 of The Stolen Princess
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Myka
Myka opened her eyes. The soft glow of morning light filled the shack, and she lifted her exhausted body from the mattress. She didn’t know when she’d fallen asleep or how she’d gotten to the cot. She looked around the room. It was empty. A creep of red started up her face as she remembered crying herself to sleep in Drake’s lap and him carrying her to bed. She didn’t know why she was embarrassed. Drake had seenrock-bottom Mykaover and over again since he’d kidnapped her. But this time felt different. This time, he’d comforted her, and she’d let him. The memory of his arms wrapped around her and the safety of his body against hers warmed everything inside of her. That’s where the embarrassment came in. Myka had liked being held by Drake Vestry.
She wondered where he was and when he would come home. Not that Myka thought of the shack as their little home or them as some kind of couple because they weren’t. She was his prisoner.
She sat on the cot, leaning against the wall. Her knees were tucked up to her chest, her arms cradling around them with her head down. It was herI’ve given upposition, but her head popped up when the chains outside banged together, and the lock shifted. Drake opened the door, and her heart stumbled when he walked into the room. How could a person hate someone and be so excited to see them at the same time?
He shut the door and rested his back against the wood, staring at her hunched-over form. A piece of his hair swept down across his brow, and his face was covered in stubble, like he hadn’t bothered shaving.
“When you weren’t here this morning, I hoped that you were dead somewhere,” she said with a half-smile. That wasn’t true, but it seemed like a good way to break the awkwardness between them that she had built up in her mind. “But I can see now that I’m not that lucky.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” he said, smiling back at her.
“So,” she shrugged, “what’s the plan now?”
His smile dropped. “We want to respond to your father’s letter, but nobody can come to an agreement, so I think we’ll give it a day or two, try to let everyone figure it out.”
“You mean, figure out what to do with me now that my father doesn’t want me.”
Drake nodded. “Most likely, you’ll come back to Albion with me.”
Excitement and disappointment flowed through her. There was a part of her that wanted to stay with Drake, but Albion wasn’t her home. The thought of never seeing Rommel and Joett again broke her heart. And what about her father? He wasn’t dead yet, but he would be soon enough. Part of her wanted to be there with him when he died. He was still her father—all she had left.
“But we don’t have to worry about any of that right now,” Drake said.
Myka bit her lip. Shewasworried. Everything about her future felt uncertain.
“There’s something I want to show you,” he said, walking toward her.
“What?” She looked up at him.
“I want to take you somewhere,” he said it with a smile that made him look way too attractive for his own good—or for Myka’s.
“Why?”
“Because you look sad, and I want to cheer you up.”
He reached his hand out for hers, and Myka swallowed. He was just being polite. Helping her up as if she was an eighty-year-old woman with back problems. There was nothing about the situation that needed analyzing. She had back problems, or at least that was what she would tell herself tonight when she thought back to this outstretched hand moment.
Back problems.
She took Drake’s hand, and there went her heart, racing out of control. Slowly he pulled her up to a standing position. His fingers lingered longer than necessary before he let go. She’d have to analyze the meaning of that later—and the meaning of the look in his eyes. It wasn’t the usual look. It was a charged and confusing stare.
“Okay,” she said.
He led her out of the shack and started toward the woods, placing his hands in his pockets. Was Drake as freaked out by their hand touch as she was? He probably hadn’t even noticed or thought about it. His hands in his pockets were a mere coincidence.
“Before Desolation, this land used to be known as Wisconsin,” he said as they entered the deeper part of the woods.
Myka raised her eyebrows. “Thanks for the geography lesson. I am from Tolsten, you know.”
“I think I remember that about you.” Drake smiled, one of his heart-pumping smiles, making everything inside of her feel better.
“Anyway, when the first signs of Desolation started happening—the earthquakes, the crazy weather—a lot of people started thinking bigger, about how they could keep their families safe. There were a lot of threats in the news about nuclear war breaking out, so people started building shelters they could live in to survive the catastrophes.”
Myka stepped over a fallen tree branch. Her eyes stayed focused on the ground in front of her, but her mind raced with the stories of the past. “What kind of shelter could keep somebody safe from a nuclear attack?”
