The Hunted

by Bethany-Kris

  Until now.

  Maybe that was why she found the space so fascinating. From the sitting room, situated between the bedchambers and the private bathing room to the ornately carved four-poster bed that dominated the space, it all felt comforting to her. Candles, piled high on a corner shelf, flickered, giving the space a bit of light. The shutters had been pulled on every window, but she thought that was more to keep the water out from the pounding rain hitting thin glass than the storm itself.

  Large rugs made of black furs kept the stone floors warm and soft to walk across, while the drapes hanging from the closed windows matched the color of the spreads on the bed. Black. A color the prince clearly preferred considering everything from his private spaces to his daily dress put it front row and center.

  A book lay open on a chair trimmed with gold in the sitting room. She had just bent over to pick it up, curious to see the language she’d learned to speak as a child in the written word. Not that she would be able to read or understand it this way, but it still created a sense of wonderment for her all the same.

  “Do you read at all?”

  Eryx’s question came from somewhere behind Arelle—toward the bedchamber. She flicked over a page in the leather-bound book, unable to understand the writing on the cover.

  “I was never taught—not an important piece of my education as a third princess.”

  His dry chuckle followed his next question. “Ah, well, do you care to learn?”

  She peeked over her shoulder to find him leaning against the wall next to a portrait painting of the sea. “And who would teach me—you?”

  “Do you think I couldn’t?”

  “I think a prince wouldn’t have much time, actually.”

  “I had enough time to do all of this, and if you haven’t noticed, my duties to the crown and people are … nonexistent at the moment.”

  She hadn’t really thought about it. Now that he mentioned it, however, he had a point. He rarely left whichever estate he was using, didn’t often take meetings or visitors, and rarely talked of the realm or the crown.

  Eryx smirked a bit. “I wasn’t following the rules an heir should, you see, and so I’ve been sent away to consider my behavior and how it should change when I am called to return to my rightful place.”

  Oh.

  Well …

  “That explains quite a bit,” she noted.

  “It’s been … enjoyable.”

  She grinned.

  He returned it.

  Arelle went back to the book in her hands, asking, “But would you teach me?”

  “I will, but not tonight.”

  She placed the book back on the chair. “Not tonight, then.”

  Continuing her search through his private chambers, she was amused at how he stayed back and let her pry without saying a word or stepping in to stop her. He never even hinted that he might. The one time he left her alone was to answer the knock on the door to take the bedclothes from the servant who brought them from her rooms down the hall. She didn’t even get a peek at the woman before the door was closed and Eryx deposited the items to the table.

  Still wearing the gown Eryx had fucked her in earlier, Arelle didn’t care to redress. She hated their clothing anyway. Restrictive and meant to cover all the beautiful parts of a body, she really didn’t see the purpose of the clothes at all, except for the wealthy to show their riches in expensive fabrics and bright colors. Anyone with a lower status wore simple grays, whites, and black in materials that itched and barely served any function in the first place.

  Besides, she didn’t mind being wet.

  “Am I staying in here?” she asked.

  Eryx picked up the goblet from the table and eyed her where she stood in the passageway to the bedchambers. “I think you should.”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s … all?”

  “Shouldn’t it be?” she returned.

  “I’m not sure. I don’t understand how any of this works.”

  “Easily. Of course, if you let it.”

  Eryx let out a heavy sigh before emptying whatever ale remained in his goblet. It clinked on the face of the table when he finished with it, and then he said, “The obsession started before the night on the island.”

  She gave him a look, deciding it was probably better to let him talk at the moment.

  “My mother was the only person in this realm who I cared for, and that night in the orchard … after everything, you just came out of the water and stared at me,” he murmured, his finger tracing the rim of the goblet while his gaze locked onto something else sitting on the table. She was more interested in staring at him than finding out what held his attention when she knew it was only so that he wouldn’t have to look at her while he spoke. “It felt as though you were taunting me, then—enjoying my pain. With her gone, I had nothing. My crown and name, they’d meant little when she’d been alive and they mean less with her dead. And there you were, knowing what you had done to her, watching me while I was bleeding inside … it started then. This need I have to do to you what you did to me, I mean.”

  He took a moment, a breath and then another. He watched the flickering flames from the pile of melting candles create shadows on the wall. Then, quieter, he said, “It seems unfair that you did this to me now. I don’t get a choice at all in how I feel or what I want because of this thing we have.”

  “Wrong,” she murmured.

  Eryx lifted his head and met her gaze. “Oh, you don’t think so?”

  “You consented to the bond, but that doesn’t make you love me. The thrall between mates is everything else—love is what we get to choose. You can hate me for the rest of our life, but it won’t break the bond.”

  He cleared his throat. “Right … is it really all that different?”

  “What?”

  “Love and hate. Both are possessive. Obsessive. Dangerous. Selfish, even. One kept me moving for years—the other got me to this point.”

  “They are different, Eryx.”

  “How so?”

  “One is devotion to another soul. The other is devotion to your own.”

  He swallowed before he nodded once. “Fair enough. I have something for you.”

  If he wanted to change the subject, he was free to do it. Besides, they had forever to discuss the rest, and tonight didn’t need to be the night when they ripped it all open.

  When he asked—and was truly ready—she would tell him anything he wanted to know.

  Passing by her in the passageway, he headed into the bedchambers. She turned to watch him go but didn’t move from her place. She was surprised to find him press against something on the small table next to the bed, which made a drawer pop open. She hadn’t noticed that when she’d been snooping earlier.

  Then, he pulled out something she didn’t recognize at first. It flattened against his hand, the ends curving a bit. Two inches wide, the leather was a buttery brown with an engraved design flaked with gold. The metal clasp at one end and the holes in the other told her exactly what the item was.

  A collar.

  It wasn’t so much what it was that bothered her but rather, the metal spikes on both ends that glinted under the flickering candles when he came to stand in front of her.

  “The spikes,” he explained, “will fit into your gills and fill them in such a way that they will not be able to open. You will change when the sea water enters your lungs, but you will not be able to breathe. It should discourage you from heading into the water—a prevention method, if you will.”

  Horror filled her the longer she stared at the item. A memory flashed through her mind—one of his mother and the metal collar that had been around her throat. She hadn’t been able to breathe before Poe had killed her. It was a terrifying thought that they could be in their natural form, and yet, unable to breathe as they should.

  “On Atlas, it is the law that your kind wear a collar,” Eryx said, his hands grabbing both ends as he held the leather wide like he was offeri
ng it to her. “You’ll need to wear it until a permanent one is made. This took longer to arrive because of the season, and because I needed it made quietly.”

  “Permanent?”

  “Those cannot be removed once placed.”

  “Like your mother’s.”

  A harsh sound escaped him.

  Arelle let out a shaky breath. “Do you expect a fight?”

  “Maybe. I have a feeling you don’t need the collar to begin with, and I’m not particularly fond of them myself, but I’d rather not draw attention to myself or you at the moment.”

  She smirked, her gaze lifting to meet his. “Put it on me, then. It’s the law.”

  “Not even a little fight?”

  His dark smile had her shivering.

  “No.”

  “Why?” he asked, fitting the collar around her throat at the same time. The spikes were uncomfortable at first as they fit into her gills; their flared bases did exactly as he said they would. “You fight everything else.”

  “The purpose of this is to kill me if I run away, yes?”

  “If you go in the water.”

  Arelle nodded. “But see, you can’t kill me now. No matter how much you hate me for what you think I did—and you do still hate me. No matter what you want to do to me … you’ll never be able to kill me.”

  His fingers stilled at the back of her neck as he fit the one end through the metal clasp of the other.

  “Not unless you want to die, too,” she added with a little shrug, “because that’s the bond, and you needn’t love me for it to be, remember? I may want to please you because of it, but you still need me to do so, Eryx.”

  Forever a give and take.

  He didn’t have to like it for it to be.

  It already was.

  The collar didn’t scare her.

  Neither did the man.

  Eryx’s hand found the center of her throat, then, and something wicked flashed in his eyes as he gave her a rueful smile that promised fun would soon be coming for her. His fingers flexed at the spikes in her gills, making her drag in a hard breath at the sensation it caused. He dragged her from the passageway to the large bed with a yank of his arm.

  She didn’t mind following.

  Her back hit the bed, and he hovered above her with that hand still tight to her throat.

  “Then, please me,” he said huskily.

  She could do that.

  That was the easy part.

  • • •

  “Your breakfast is waiting to be served, my lord.”

  Arelle blinked awake at the new voice. Sitting up in the bed, she found the curtains had been pulled around the bed to give her some sense of privacy. Not that she ever cared about that. The way these landwalkers lived, with their constant sense of shame about their most natural functions like nudity never failed to annoy her.

  Through the sheer piece of fabric toward Eryx’s side of the bed where he must have exited but not pulled the second curtain quite far enough, she watched the female servant hold out a waistcoat. Eryx slipped his arms through the item before she walked around him to button up the front. She was careful not to touch him directly, but only his clothing. Never did she lift her eyes to meet his gaze. The black velvet of the waistcoat buttoned up the front with large silver clasps from the navel straight up the column of his throat. She’d noticed that—how he always kept his throat hidden.

  He glanced Arelle’s way.

  And found her awake.

  “And the weather?” he asked.

  “Still as horrible as yesterday, Prince.”

  He grunted under his breath. “I’m learning to like it, actually.”

  “Can’t understand why.”

  “I didn’t ask if you liked it, did I?”

  “Sorry. Anything else?”

  “Send Mara up for her to dress Arelle. And promise Arelle won’t fight today about needing to wear a gown and whatever else she puts on her.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “You may leave.”

  While the servant found her way out of the private chambers, Arelle sat up in the bed and pulled the sheets higher with her to pool them around her waist. Eryx continued his trek through the space, picking up things here and there that he’d set down the night before. He didn’t, however, speak to her.

  Arelle wasn’t sure if that was intentional, or not.

  “I don’t fight Mara, but if the woman might speak to me, then she would understand—”

  “They’re taught not to speak to slaves unless told otherwise, Arelle.”

  Swallowing that was difficult.

  “Is it true your mother was allowed different freedoms than other slaves because of your love for her? She was privileged, even?”

  Eryx opened his mouth to speak.

  Arelle beat him to the punch, saying, “I hear talk. Some walls are very thin.”

  He glowered at the wall; a scowl settled deep.

  “Do you only ignore the wrong of your people when it suits you, Prince?”

  Eryx pulled in a sharp breath. “I have—I do. Often.”

  His admittance of ignorance surprised her. The privileged rarely admitted their fault—only their victimhood.

  She had a mind to ask if he ever planned to change. Arelle decided against it—he would be who he was meant to be; change like that came from within.

  He passed her a look from the side, adding quickly, “They will get better now with you, however.”

  “Because I’m in your bed?”

  “Call it what it is, darling.”

  She continued watching him ready for the day. He flipped through a stack of papers the servant must have dropped off for him earlier, because they hadn’t been on the table the night before. He then pulled back all the curtains on the bed, but they didn’t speak.

  Arelle hated the silence.

  She blurted out one more truth she figured he needed to know. “She asked to die.”

  Those blue eyes of his nailed into her. At the foot of the bed, he stilled, with his hands curving around the carved footboard that showcased two swans in an embrace. “Who?”

  “Your mother. She asked to die in the water—to be taken to the sea. One of my sisters tried to help her, the other attacked. That was how she died.”

  Eryx tilted his head up, staring down at her until all her fidgeting stopped, and she was helpless but to wait until he spoke again. “Would you have done it?”

  “Done what?”

  “Killed her. She asked to die, you said. Would you have done it?”

  “She may have walked on land for all your life—that’s how you knew it, but she was my kind. And ours have suffered enough. I won’t make even one suffer more.”

  A tremor worked its way through his jaw.

  His hands flexed on the bed.

  Then, without another word to her, Eryx turned and left the bedchamber. The silence echoed when she heard the door to the room creak open before it slammed shut.

  He’d thought he’d known the truth. She bet it was hard for a man like him to learn he actually knew nothing at all.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Eryx

  SEVEN.

  Seven nights the little mermaid had spent in his bed with that collar on her throat and naked for him—waiting for him. She let him fuck her until his mind stopped running; woke him up in the middle of the night with her lips around his cock; she hid beneath the sheets in the bed every morning with the sweetest smiles.

  The only good thing about landwalkers are the blankets you have, she’d told him once. It bothered him more that he wondered if she might actually be right.

  The bigger problem he now faced was the fact that he’d allowed that woman a space in his bed for seven entire nights. Oh, and he was no closer to figuring out what, exactly, he wanted to do with her than he had been before. He certainly wanted to hurt her. To take the breath right from her lungs and watch her eyes as her heart stopped beating because of him.

  And yet he co
uldn’t.

  Wanting and doing were two different things.

  It hadn’t helped his situation that when she’d said it wasn’t her who killed his mother that he’d had no choice but to believe her. He’d learned she was incapable of lying to him because he couldn’t fucking lie to her, either.

  A strange thing, this mating.

  It messed up everything.

  And now, Eryx had no idea what he was to do next. Not with himself, her, or anything else about his life. Everything was different. Nothing could be the same.

  That irked him.

  A lot.

  The laughing that accompanied clapping drew Eryx’s attention back to the center of the room from where he sat near the entry to the corridor. There, he found a handful of the estate’s staff still standing in the semi-circle that encased a dancing Arelle. The man who headed the servants had been playing an instrument that’d drawn Arelle’s attention.

  And just like that, she’d made a friend.

  Then, another.

  And another.

  Nearly all of the servants in the house greeted her now. They took time to make sure she had what she wanted or needed, no matter the time or night. Part of it, he knew, was because of him. The rest, however, was all on her.

  She made friends.

  Too easily, maybe.

  She could walk amongst them, behave like them when she wanted, and it was just enough to trick them all into thinking she could be just like them, too. He’d been right when he’d said things would change for her with the servants in the house, but he’d been wrong to assume he would be the catalyst to it happening.

  Eryx wasn’t sure what he hated more. Her, for being who she was and for doing what she did. Or himself because he liked her, when he wished he could still feel that same loathing he used to every time he looked at her beautiful face.

  He’d not planned for this. What would happen now? Did he even have a choice in what he did with her? That was the real question.

  Eryx was dragged from his thoughts when the singing started. His attention flew back to the woman in the middle of the room, her cream-colored gown spinning wildly like the curls flowing down her back as a song he didn’t know—but he swore his heart did—spilled from her painted red lips. She’d taken to letting Mara paint some of her features when she felt like it. The red on her lips was the one he enjoyed the most.