His hands shot to my shoulders and before I could even scowl or sneer, he tossed me into the waiting arms of Felicks, like I was the weight of a pebble pifted into a lake.
“Still,” he added, all smirks gone, “some time in the dungeons will serve us both. You will learn your place, and I will decide your fate.” He looked away. “Get her out of my sight.”
Before I kill her.
He didn't have to add the last words, I could read them so easily in the clenched fists at his sides, and the shuddering tension radiating off of him that, after a beat, I knew to be his power. Power that begged to unleash on me.
I shut my mouth and let Felicks steal me away from the bedchamber, away from the Prince.
Tonight, I wouldn't die, but my future was not certain. And again, like nearly every time before it, I only had myself to blame.
16
Felicks wasn’t as rough as I expected. He nudged me over to the dewy stone corner in the dungeons. If Adrik had been the one to take me here, he would have thrown me down to the ground.
I turned my back on the guard and looked around.
A metal bucket was tucked beside a lump of damp, coarse blankets. Bars carried down the stone wall in lines, making doorless nooks.
It wasn't until rusty metal bars shot up from the ground that I felt trapped. I flinched at the noise and, with a cry, staggered around to face Felicks.
Now, bars separated us and I was finally caged in this cold, wet corner in the bowels of the palace.
Felicks left without a word.
Once the soft pad of his footfalls turned into a distant echo, a deep feeling of loneliness settled in my bones. If I thought I was isolated in my boudoir with only my lessons, the Prince, and Ava to break up my mundane weeks, I would be grateful to return to it, because just seconds into being cramped among these bars, I already felt alone. Really alone.
Luckily, I had things to keep me company. A phial of blood tucked between my breasts and parchment scrolls stuffed into my stockings.
Careful to avoid the smelly suspicious puddles on the slippery stone floor, I plodded over to the lump of blankets in the corner. Wearing a pinched look, I dropped onto the blanket pile and booted the bucket away from me. I knew what that was for and just the sight of it had be longing for my chamber pot already.
Mind, the whole of the dungeons stunk of waste. I was probably no safer on the blankets than on the bucket.
I shifted around to face the wall where moss was growing in patches, then made to fish out the phial from my bodice.
I stilled at the sound of crinkling that came from under the blanket.
Gingerly, I peeled back the corner of the blanket to reveal a folded piece of paper. Cleanest thing in the cell. So I knew it was a fresh letter—that, and my name was written in fresh ink across the blank side.
I slipped the letter out from the fold and peeled it open.
From being folded in half there was a line dented across the middle of the parchment. A divider. Above it, there was a sketch of a pretty woman coiled in chains.
I had to hold the letter up to understand the image. She was chained underwater. Her expressionless face looked dead. I thinned my lips and repressed a shudder. Painting or not, it was a suspiciously striking image. A bad omen if I ever saw one.
I recognised the water in the drawing. I would know it anywhere, and as I rinsed my gaze over the sketched grey lines, my skin prickled with familiar sensations of unease running through me.
It was the pond.
The Keeper’s pond.
I shuddered at the thought of drowning in those ghostly pools. Flinging it from my mind, I turned my gaze down.
Under the dented line, midnight blue ink lit up at me and coiled my stomach in ropes. Waves of nausea lifted through me, starting at my curling toes.
I was right to doubt whether I would survive this or not.
The letter pretty much confirmed the worst.
'The last pet of Prince Poison.
Hope you can swim better than she did.'
end of book 3
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AUTHOR NOTES
Hope you enjoyed the first half of the Gods and Monsters series!
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Gods and Monsters, Books 1-3: A Dark Gods Bully Romance (Gods and Monsters Box Set) Page 25