The Hunted

by Bethany-Kris

  “Fair enough if she wanted it.”

  Corval nodded. “True enough. Perhaps I haven’t found her yet, then.”

  “Or you’re not looking at all.”

  The hunter would fetch an easy wife if he truly wanted one. Eryx didn’t need to be told to know that was the truth. He had wealth—a good lot of it. Respect. A place at the royal court because of his success on the sea.

  A line of women would jump at the man.

  Corval clearly had enough of the line of questioning when he raised a brow at the prince, done with pretenses, and asked, “Are you going to tell me what you want?”

  “What makes you think I want something?”

  “The fact that you showed up at my door, looking anything but a prince, with fire in your eyes. I saw you look like this once—right after we pulled you from that island. Remember that?”

  Eryx did.

  Better than the man understood.

  Dragging in a heavy breath, Eryx murmured, “Seems someone has decided to take my little mermaid away from me—I would like to get her back, but considering the circumstances, I may need help.”

  That quieted the hunter.

  But for a mere moment.

  “By whom?”

  That was the more difficult part of this equation.

  “The king,” Eryx replied.

  What had seemed like interest in Corval’s eyes—Eryx thought the man enjoyed a good challenge, which was why he first took the prince up on his original offer—disappeared in a blink. He shook his head and sat a little straighter in his chair when he folded his arms over his chest.

  “She’s a slave, Eryx,” the man said, “and that means she belongs to the crown if they so want her. I suggest you find another. Hell, I even know a man who trains them, if you need one soon. I will pass his name along.”

  His stomach rolled at the idea. The rage swelled again. It was the harder of the two to handle if he were being honest.

  “You were willing to defy the crown once for me—”

  “Plausible ignorance,” Corval interjected with a sardonic glint to his eye. “I could easily have said I assumed the hunts with you were for the crown, given who you are, and that you tricked me so I didn’t know otherwise. Might have saved me from getting my head cut off. A banishment, I could deal with. The other bit, not so much.”

  “And you think they would have taken the word of a hunter over that of a prince?”

  “A shunned prince, you mean.”

  Corval certainly knew where to hit so that it would hurt. Eryx might have appreciated that on another day, but on this evening … it only served to anger him more.

  Standing from his chair and waving at the doorway to the dining room where they sat to converse, Corval said, “If the king has claimed a slave, then there isn’t anything one can do. I can’t—and won’t—help you. I cannot be more involved in this mess than I already am, my lord. I think—possibly—there is more here than you’re telling me, and I can’t risk doing business with a man who holds secrets. You’re a prince. A royal with the only claim after your father to the Bloodhurst throne. And what, you’ll risk it all for a creature with a beautiful face? Find another. I hope you understand why I have to ask you to leave.”

  “She is not just—”

  “Do you know what will happen to her, should she not obey? Or if you cause issues for the royal house because of a slave?”

  Eryx swallowed hard but stayed quiet.

  Corval didn’t seem to mind because he continued on without missing a beat, saying, “The same thing that they did to the one we believed to be her sister—she’ll be taken to a whorehouse in the west village and taught her fucking place, under whichever men pay for her time until all she knows is how to please, Eryx.”

  His heart ached.

  Because he knew it was true.

  Still, Eryx didn’t show it.

  “And if she’s my mate?” he asked the hunter. “What am I to do then?”

  He didn’t need to explain more to Corval. After all, it had been the hunter who explained to Eryx the dangers of a male being separated from his other half. How they would sooner kill him than risk giving him any opportunity to get his mate returned to his side.

  Well, now it was Eryx.

  He was the mate without.

  And Corval was looking him right in the face.

  Corval tipped his chin up, eyeing Eryx with a bit more wariness than before. “That’s not possible. You’re a—”

  “Oh, but it is,” Eryx returned as he pulled the scarf from his throat so the gills flaring at his neck with each heavy breath would be easily seen. He stood from the table, his gaze locked with the widening stare of the hunter as he came closer with purposeful, rage-fueled steps. “See, I am far more like her than I am any of you.”

  “Prince—”

  “You did give me something I might possibly be able to use, and for that, I’ll make this quick. Easy, even.”

  The sister, that was.

  He could find her now.

  What he would do with her was another matter, and one he would deal with once he retrieved the mermaid.

  As for Corval …

  Eryx used the knife on the table that Corval had been using to carve a little mermaid from a stick of wood. He drove it straight through the other man’s throat. Corval bled out on his table.

  He made sure the man kept his eyes on the half-merman while he gurgled and choked on his blood. Eryx wanted the hunter to know why this had happened as it had—he wanted no question as to why he’d taken the man’s life. Perhaps, he should have felt some remorse or guilt for the murder, seeing as how Corval had been the one who’d brought Arelle to him. But no. The hunts had become an inevitable part of their lives and ways on Atlas.

  That didn’t make them right. Neither was the man dying in front of him.

  All he thought about was his mate and where she needed to be. Where she wasn’t. With him.

  “Did you think it would be the seas that killed you?” Eryx asked.

  Corval didn’t answer.

  He couldn’t.

  Eryx nodded and smiled thinly. “Seems the tables have turned, Corval.”

  The hunter became the prey.

  “As they should,” Eryx added, “and as my mate might say, our kind is owed this.”

  The prince left when Corval stopped gurgling.

  • • •

  Arelle

  The first thing Arelle learned about the royal court of Bloodhurst?

  She was on display.

  At all times. Even if she thought no one was looking. Someone always was.

  At times, she might be treated like delicate art. Expected to be perfectly still and quiet, as though she were an unmovable statue, in the corner of the room while the king ate sweets and drank wine with his favorite people.

  Other times, she would be expected to dance. In the court square. While it rained. And everyone looked on through the safety of a windowsill.

  They even came to watch the merwomen of the harem through a wall made of bars that overlooked the pool where they all preferred to spend their time.

  Always naked. Or practically.

  Collars at their throats.

  She was a thing.

  A prized possession.

  An object to move at someone else’s will.

  Kisa had been wrong when she’d said Arelle would only be called upon when she was considered safe. Well, partially. Arelle was never left alone with the king—a guard was always nearby to make sure she stayed in line. He did, however, call on her quite often to do whatever he pleased.

  Except for fucking her, it seemed.

  That wasn’t safe yet.

  “Were you more interesting to look at or talk to when you were with my son?” the king asked. “Or are you just that good of a lay that your lack of conversation makes up for it?”

  Arelle turned her head slowly to meet the man’s gaze, her brow raising at his blatant question and the implicatio
n behind it. “Are you asking me if he fucked me, or if I liked it?”

  The few people that were close enough to the king and his new favorite slave, who he had yet to get a night with, quieted instantly. A guard took one step forward, closer to the circle of pillows where Misael apparently liked to spend his evenings watching the court attempt to entertain him with many different things in the grand room made of marble carvings and high archways.

  The king raised a single hand, stopping the guard from coming any closer. Never once did he move his gaze from Arelle.

  “Both,” he settled on saying.

  “Then yes,” she returned before smirking when she added, “and yes for the other, too.”

  “Bold, mermaid.”

  Arelle lifted one dainty, naked shoulder. She’d not even bothered with the sheer robe they’d demanded she wear—she was bare for them to see, anyway. What even was the point? If they wanted to watch her walk around naked like a show to scandalize their minds, well, she could absolutely play along with that.

  The king reached forward to snag one of her red curls between his fingers, and out of instinct alone, Arelle moved away. He gave her a look. She merely stared right back.

  “You will learn to behave,” he told her. “You do well, but you can do better.”

  “He thought the same. Until he learned to love me.”

  Eryx had never said it.

  She didn’t need Eryx’s own words to know that was true.

  Misael’s eyes darkened with merely a spark of rage. A bit of disbelief colored his expression, too. She welcomed his challenge because he likely thought she would be the same as every other mermaid here.

  Afraid.

  Compliant.

  His.

  She was none of those things.

  Arelle turned back to the rest of the room but only because a man approached the king from his left, and that allowed her a reprieve from his attention … or punishment. She wasn’t sure which one it would be.

  Here, one trusted nothing.

  The second thing she learned.

  “What?” Misael snapped at the man who stopped next to the king’s seat on the pillows.

  “Word has come from the west, sire. Seems there’s been a fire … and then an attack.”

  “Why on earth would that concern me?”

  “The fire happened in the row of the west village, sire. The attack was on a whorehouse in that row. A slave was taken.”

  That quieted the king.

  But only for a moment.

  “Which slave?” he asked carefully.

  “The one who called herself Poe.” The man cleared his throat, his gaze darting to Arelle and then back to the king before he said quieter, “There’s more, sire. It seems there’s those who say they saw the man who started the fire and attack—they spotted the prince, my lord.”

  Arelle felt the eyes turn on her, but she continued watching the room with a smile. In her heart, she could hear him again.

  Eryx, that was.

  I’m coming.

  How, she didn’t know.

  When, it didn’t matter.

  He was coming for her.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Eryx

  OVER THE FLAMES licking toward the roof of the makeshift shelter, Eryx watched the mermaid stare into the black nothingness of the forest around them. It didn’t matter what he did, whether it was actively attempting to engage her in a conversation or even just adding more driftwood he’d found to the fire, she wasn’t speaking.

  In fact, she refused to even look at him.

  At first, Eryx hadn’t minded. He wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do with the mermaid he’d stolen from the whorehouse where Corval had said she would be, but one part of his plan at a time. It was all about patience, he was sure.

  Now, though, as she was safe in the camp he’d created away from the storms and anyone who might see them, he wanted to fill the silence with anything but the thoughts in his mind that threatened to send him running crazy if he fed into it, and the dread that had his heart racing with thundering beats.

  “I won’t fuck you.”

  Her first sentence since the moment he’d taken her from the whorehouse days earlier. It’d taken him a while to get a horse that would travel in the storms after they’d killed all of his at the stable estate. And then, by the time he’d arrived at the west village to begin the process of removing the mermaid from her current prison, well … it had all taken too much time.

  Or, that’s how it felt.

  Eryx cleared his throat. “I don’t plan to fuck you. Apologies if that was your first assumption for why I took you.”

  He saw the roll of her eyes, and the pull of her lips turning them down into a frown. “You would be the first. Seems their favorite thing is to break a mermaid at the whorehouse by having a constant line of men waiting. And when you don’t shut up, they invite a second one in to make sure your mouth is—”

  “What is your name?” he asked because as of now, he couldn’t do anything to help her pain in that regard except not be another name on her list of who had raped her. “Poe, yes?”

  He knew she’d heard him, if only because a small knot formed between her brows, although she still didn’t turn her stare away from the dense forest.

  “Arelle told me—my mother, she killed the one. Coral, I think. And then you killed—”

  Poe turned burning violet eyes on Eryx and quieted him from the intensity he found there. “She begged to die. Imagine … I dare you to even consider what it would have been like for that mermaid to go back to a colony with her fin destroyed by your people, having been a whore to landwalkers for only the Gods know how long. And that is before we consider the collar on her throat so she couldn’t breathe. Disgusting. I did her a favor. You should thank me.”

  He was struck at the bright contrast between the way Arelle had treated the murder of his mother, and how this woman did. One had almost soothed him in that she hadn’t suffered. This one, however, had him struggling to stay on the other side of the fire so that he didn’t rip her smooth throat into pieces.

  He couldn’t kill her.

  Right now, he needed her.

  She may help his cause.

  “You thought that was a favor?” he asked in a murmur. “To take her from me?”

  “I have a child,” Poe returned, “and I love her. I love her enough that if my death brought her clarity or success, I would be the first to feed my blood to the ocean. I’m not sure what your mother’s death has done for you, but I am sure she would have done the same had she needed to. But having a child does not negate the need you have in your own heart because you are an individual. I did not say it was a favor to you. If she asked for the death, was it not right for her?”

  Eryx’s jaw ached from clenching so hard. He wanted to argue, but he knew it was better to let it go. Or, as much as he could.

  “You know,” Poe said, sighing as she turned to stare into the forest again instead of Eyrx, “we believe that’s why we can hear the calls of our mates. All that magic—when we die, we go to the sea. We can’t take what changes us with us when we go, and so we give it back. It’s also why in water, the blood changes. Stickier. Not potent. Because the sea is us, and we are it.”

  “Is that why the matings always happen on land?”

  Her gaze cut to him again. “And what would you know about—”

  “I’m mated. Someone took her from me. I would like to get her back.”

  Poe stared hard at him, waiting for him to fill in the blank, clearly. Eryx figured it was better for her to do it on her own. The longer he stared at her, however, the more easily he could find the similarities between her and Arelle in her features. From the shape of her lips, the color of their eyes—though all full-blooded mermaids from the Blu Sea had those violet eyes—to the shade of her hair, and even the way she regarded him in her annoyance.

  It bothered him.

  She looked just enough like his mate to make him
pause. It was not enough to quell the rage or rawness in his heart.

  “My sister?” Poe asked quietly.

  Eryx shrugged. “Seems I’m stuck with her, considering how this works, and so I best get her back, no?”

  That urged a smirk from the woman across the fire. Oddly, despite the hatred he felt in his heart for Poe because of what she had done to his mother, he still thought that hint of a smile was a battle won for him here.

  Then, it quickly faded away.

  “I don’t hear him anymore,” she eventually said, her words nothing more than a whisper. “My mate, I mean.”

  Eryx’s brow furrowed. “Is he—”

  “If he were dead, I would be, too.” The bright burning in her stare faded; what replaced it could only be described as agony. That was where Eryx found his understanding with the mermaid. He found familiarity in her pain because he shared the same. “Or that’s how it’s supposed to be. So, where is he? Why doesn’t he call for me?”

  “Perhaps he can’t.”

  Poe scoffed hard. “That’s impossible. It’s not how the bond works. He can always call—the same way I do for him. He never answers back. If he’s not dead, then he might as well be.”

  “Except he isn’t, if you’re still alive.”

  Then, Eryx had another thought.

  Because as he assumed, the longer time he spent with this woman and the more their conversation went on, the better he knew exactly how to use her to his own gain.

  Here she was, the rightful heir to the Blu Sea. Hadn’t they said with her assumed dead, it was the only reason why Arelle would take the throne after the current king? Eryx refused to even consider his own claim to it through his mother—if her journal entries and the way she signed them with Queen every time were to be trusted—because that wouldn’t help him at the moment. He didn’t have time to learn the sea, prove his place, and take it back.

  How would he even go about doing that?

  No, he had to get to Arelle first.

  Make them safe.

  And only then might he come back for the sea.

  But Poe?

  What would her people do for her—the lost heir?