Page 51 of The Demon Crown

But maybe she hadn’t been kidnapped. Maybe she had been running all this time, waiting for him to find her. Though it was an unlikely thought, he still sprinted to the front door without calling for his guards. Without calling for anyone.

If she was injured in another man’s arms, Greed would kill him.

With a single jerk, he flung open the doors. He’d already prepared himself for a wall of men and women, armed to the teeth, ready to battle with him. He was looking forward to the blood he’d splatter across the sands, feeding the very desert itself.

He hadn’t expected to just see her. Varya. His little thief and treasure, weaving where she stood.

Alone. She looked so small as she stared up at him with those wide blue eyes. Well, one of them. The other had swollen shut. There were so many bruises over her lovely face that he almost didn’t recognize her. Her arms were tied behind her back, every breath was labored, and her clothing was beyond ripped and torn.

His heart wrenched, and he felt his eyes burn with tears at the sight of her. “Varya?” he whispered, as though a loud noise might scare her away.

“I didn’t know where else to go.”

She staggered forward, and that was all he had been waiting for. Greed opened his arms and gently caught her long before she hit the ground. He cushioned her head against his chest and swung her up into his arms as though she weighed nothing. Light as a feather in his arms, she curled toward him. Trusting him.

He’d never felt this heat in his chest before, but he knew that he never wanted to let this feeling go.

Spinning, he raced into his home once again. Calling out for his guards, he shouted, “Ivo! Morag! Get a healer now!”

His two guards appeared as if summoned by magic, one of them racing out of the gardens and the other appearing high over his head at the edge of one of the glass domes. Morag darted down the stairs toward them, while Ivo leapt from one platform to another, quickly making his way down until they both met him at the entrance to the healing dome.

The healers were... somewhere. He didn’t know where they spent most of their day, but he knew they’d come at his call. No one denied him anything in this castle, and he refused to lose her.

Varya had gone limp in his arms, and he could only hope that she’d passed out. Considering the amount of injuries all over her body, he didn’t want her awake. That amount of pain was too much for even a demon like him. Let alone someone so fragile.

He looked down at her slack features, at the bruises that turned her lovely skin shades of purple and red, and he found his arms shaking with rage. He would kill them all for touching her. For touching what was his. He would rip their tongues out of their mouths and serve them to her on a golden platter. If she wished for him to paint her with their blood, he would. If she wanted their eyes in a goblet and their heads on pikes, he would gladly tear them to pieces.

“Greed?” Ivo quietly said, his voice pitched low and worried. “Is this her?”

He couldn’t answer for fear of what he would say.

Instead, it was Morag who replied. “Yes, that’s the woman I saw with him the first time. Hard to recognize her in this state, but...”

She stopped the moment she saw the anger in his eyes. She toed a line, and she knew it. No one would say another word about Varya’s injuries until the healers were in the room. She needed their silence, help, and attention. Not their judgement on how ruined her body was.

And it was ruined. He could hardly look at her without a lump forming in his throat and that damned heat burning in his eyes again.

This room for healing was one of the prettiest in his home. Tall windows let in the sunlight that fractured off the warm terracotta walls and floor. Plants decorated the corners, and low beds with cream-colored sheets were placed three to each wall. Not many, but there weren’t many people to heal in this castle. The entire room smelled like lavender and chamomile. Shelves on each wall contained items needed to heal. Thread, needles, jars of green healing plants and pastes that would encourage the body to mend itself.

“Greed?” Ivo said again as Morag sprinted out of the room to find the healers. “We need to release her hands.”

“Her hands?” he rasped, and then set her down on the bed. “What do you mean, her hands?”

Then he saw them. Her arms were tied behind her back. He’d thought she was just holding them strangely. He hadn’t thought they were still tied up. Rage made his vision skew. He knew he was already getting too close to changing into his battle form, incapable of stopping himself as he wondered about all the nightmares that she’d endured and what they had done to her.

They’d tied up his treasure. They’d beaten her and who knows what else. Greed would chew on their bones and anchor their souls to this realm so he could kill them again and again. He would rip out their spines. He would shred their bodies to the last sinew and then stitch it all back together so he could rip it apart again.

Ivo moved behind her, his features carefully arranged into a semblance of calm. “I will remove them.”

“I’ll do it,” Greed snarled, his voice a little too deep and a little too rough.

He reached behind her and sliced through the cord with a single claw. Her free arm fell forward, the wrong way. All limp and stretched while her shoulder looked too bulbous. Swollen underneath her leather armor.

Greed swallowed hard as his eyes trailed down that limp arm to her swollen fingers. Wrong. This was all wrong. He wasn’t supposed to get a broken treasure back when she was meant to be alive and well and golden.

He was supposed to decorate her with jewels. Hand feed her and pour wine through those plush lips until she whispered sweet nothings to him and instead, he’d been given this broken doll. Someone else had played with her too hard, and he feared she’d never be the same.

A woman rushed into the room with Morag right behind her. He vaguely remembered this healer had been the woman to put his tail back into place. Her ivory curls billowed around her head, perhaps showing her age, although he hadn’t ever paid enough attention to humans to know if that was correct. She wore a white coat around her silk clothing, almost as though she’d still been asleep when Morag had retrieved her.

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