“Get her out of there!” she demanded, throwing everything she could get her hands on. Hairbrushes, vases, cufflink dishes. Not a single item hit him. “Save her like you promised you would!”
“I made no such promises,” he said, and a wild grin took his lips.
“We made a deal!” Callie was all out of things to throw.
“What were your words that night, Callie?”
He took a step toward her, one so purposeful that she slinked back into the desk.
“Did you mention your friend? No, your words were only for yourself. I’ll do anything,” he crooned the words at her, twisting the blade already plunged into her heart. “Just make it stop.”
Her mouth dried up and her legs buckled. Callie sank onto the stool, her face so stunned that she looked as though he had just struck her.
“You bargained for your own freedom,” he said, towering over her. “And that is what I granted you.”
Callie blinked away the tears and looked down at her bloody hands. When had she cut herself? She couldn’t remember. And the only pain she felt was in her chest.
“Then do it for me,” she said quietly, her fight suffocating. “You might not love me, you might not care about me, but please…if you care anything about what sort of marriage we have, you’ll give me this. After all you’ve taken, you owe me.”
No weakness passed over his face. He looked every bit the prince who won and the paladin who triumphed.
“Your temperament is part of what drew me to you,” he said. “It does little to vanquish what I feel for you. We made vows, and we both must abide by them.”
“I made no vows.” Callie shoved her hands into her hair and kept her head bowed. “I was tricked.”
“You made your vows when you agreed to my bargain. I waited in the court for you to break. I watched you for nights upon days, and when you couldn’t stand another dance, I offered you a way out. Since the night I met you, Callie, I knew you would be my wife. The blame for your poor bargaining skills should not reside with me, but with you. Only you failed your friend, no one else.”
She had nothing to say in answer. Blood stuck to her hair, slipping out from her cut hand, and she watched a drop fall to her skirt.
Then, she pushed up from the stool and crawled onto the bed. She slumped, defeated.
His words twisted in knots around her, trapping her in a cage within a cage. To hide from herself and the truth of what he said, she buried her face in a feathery pillow and curled up.
The bed dipped as he came up behind her, but she didn’t move. She couldn’t move. The fight had died.
“We do not need love to be happy, human.” He lowered his lips to her shoulder, breathing his words over her skin, as if to caress her. “We need respect, care, and lust. I have all three for you, and I hope that in time you will feel the same.”
He drew away from the bed.
Callie stayed curled up, thoughts on Meghan’s eternal dance—a thought that made her ill when Rain spoke again.
“For us, time does not end. I am confident that in years to come, when we are beyond our marital challenges, we will be happy together.”
Callie said nothing, and he left without another word to return to the court.
The Prince’s Prisoner
∞Part Three∞
15
Weeks turned into months, but time moved differently in the fae realm. Two petals lay withered at the stem of the rose and doubled the sickened twist inside of her.
Callie couldn’t guess how long she’d been gone from her world, and wondered if anyone still looked for her. The village people wouldn’t search for her. The villagers wouldn’t look—now that she was in the fae realm, she read the signs, and knew that all of them back at that village feared the fae folk. They wouldn’t look for her, but maybe her family would.
It depended on how time moved in the human world...
What could be a few months to Callie could have been years to them on the other side. And then, she thought of Meghan. Trapped in torture. And how it must have felt like forever already.
Callie found Rain in the wash-pond, lounged against the narrow ledge, a goblet of sour wine loose in his grip. He looked up at her, his gaze lazy and shadowed with long lashes, golden flecks dancing with touches of rose.
Callie knew that look. She knew the lust in it.
Since the night of the court, she hadn’t let him touch her. Not once.
And he had tried.
Rain had nuzzled against her in the night, danced his fingertips down her neck as she read, ghosted kisses over her collarbone when she tried to change clothes. But she’d bit, slapped and kicked him away each time.
Callie inched closer to the pond, until her toes were dangerously close to dipping in. “How can I save her?”
Rain’s eyes darkened.
His frustration grew at the topic brought up every day.
But she wasn’t afraid—not with the flecks of rose in his eyes and the hungry way he drank in her sheer dress, or rather, the silhouette beneath the sheer dress.
“I’ll do whatever you want.”
A bold, dangerous promise. One that got her into this mess to begin with. But one of the last moves she could make.
Rain sighed and lolled his head back slightly, but not far enough that he couldn’t see her anymore. His gaze was locked on tight.
Black hair stuck to his temples, and he brought the rim of the silver goblet to his pink-stained lips.
Callie waited for him to speak. But the servant—the male one she remembered from when he brought her the library book—bustled in and lowered a silver platter beside Rain.
The platter held bottles of the sour wine he liked so much, and some cups of fruit that would float on the pond if he chose to put them in.
The servant didn’t seem to be going anywhere. He took his place at the wall and bowed his head.
Callie looked back at Rain.
“Tell me what to do,” she pleaded. “Tell me, and I’ll do it.”
He was silent for a moment, and took a long, thoughtful look at her as he sipped from the goblet. The wine roughened his accent, and she shivered when he pulled the goblet from his lips and said, “Take off your dress and join me, human.”
Her hands reached for her straps, and she slid one from her shoulder before she paused, her eyes narrowing on him.
“Tell me what to do to save Meghan,” she corrected.
Rain took a sip from the goblet, and when he lowered it, his head leaned back to the grassy ledge and she realised he wasn’t going to answer her. He just stared at her, like one would stare at a mildly interesting statue opposite them.
Callie had almost fallen for his trick. If she was going to free Meghan, she had to be more cunning.
Rain set down the goblet and stood.
Water swept down him, returning to its pond, and he stepped onto the ledge.
She saw everything.
His smooth, muscular chest; the scars that crossed his body in the oddest of shapes, as if they were meant to be symbols—words in his language, carved into his flesh like tattoos.
Before she could drift her stare down any further, she turned her pink cheek to him and looked at the drapes.
“Come.” He held out his hand for her, and even upturned she saw the sharpness of his black nails. “I will bathe you. You might find you like it.”
It was getting harder to resist him.
She was only human, in the end. Her body had needs as much as his did. And the sight of his water glazed muscles, the indented V that shouldn’t have been so boldly displayed, his evident excitement for her further down…
It spurred a tickle of excitement of her own through her.
But hers was laced with fear and disgust.
Callie sneered and made a gesture at him, one so crude that even the servant choked on a breath of shock. She suspected the servant was from a different time.
Callie turned on her heels and grabbed her library bo
ok on the way to her nook. She didn’t bother announcing where she was headed. Rain would have guessed, and easily could have stopped her if he wanted to.
But as she pressed the book to the wall, she heard the ripple of water from the pond as he sank back in.
Rain fought little against her visits to the library. He knew she was meeting with Angus, and the guards kept a closer watch on them now, but he didn’t stop them.
For that, she had the smallest slice of gratitude. And only because it began to link in with her plans.
Still, her curfew was in place, and she rushed to the far human-aisles.
She found him by the iron fire pit in the middle of the circle aisles, sunken into a cushion bigger than a beanbag. Callie’s favourite spot in the library.
The beanbags brought flickers of memories to her mind—laptop on her knees, clocks ticking past midnight, other twenty-somethings poring over torn pages of notes and copying from their neighbours. But each time the broken memories flickered in her mind, they turned to smoke and evaporated.
“Forgetting again?” Angus said, and smiled up at her with his sharp teeth and bright lilac eyes that danced with secrets. “You ought to stop trying to remember. Memories taken are memories gone.”
Callie collapsed onto a plush cushion beside him. “What memories?”
“Exactly.” He dropped the matter and handed her an old, leathery tome. “I found this is my father’s study. It will be of use to you.”
Callie ran her fingers over the peeling letters that speared together in odd symbols. “He’ll have your head for stealing from him.”
“Borrowing.” Angus stretched out like a small cat near a mouse whom he’d imprinted on. Two animals that should never be so relaxed with one another. “And I did ask permission before I took it. He enchanted the pages for you.”
“Why?”
“The more you know, the better you might be. It’s the tome of everything. The marked chapters carry all the information of humans in our realm and human-fae marriages.”
Callie tucked the book under her leg.
“Thank you,” she said, her dubious stare lingering over his too-innocent eyes.
Angus had other reasons for giving her the tome. Reasons that went beyond Callie’s understanding of her marriage and the rules that came with it.
“I’ll read it later.”
Angus just nodded.
“How were your lessons today?” she asked.
He made a face, a new trait he’d seemed to pick up from her. “Governess Hilda finishes early on the full moons. She was too distracted by her upcoming reprieve to teach me much.”
“A human governess can’t teach a fae boy very well.” Callie crinkled her nose at him. “What does she know that your father would want you to learn?”
“Human history,” he said. “I study it every two weeks, but the lessons hardly stretch past noon when the full moon comes.”
“Your governess is too eager to return to her room and do what? It’s not like her breaks are small breaths of freedom from this realm.”
Angus shrugged airily, indifference softening his face. “Perhaps one day you might teach me about the human world. Past, present and lost stories.”
Callie grimaced. Lost stories ... She herself was a lost story in the human world. A name, lost in the woods, to be forgotten over time if she stayed trapped.
“Sure.” It was a small weapon to have in the fae realm, the ability to lie. So she did it to the best of her abilities, and turned a smile to Angus. “One day.”
“Human history is fascinating,” he said, and looked up at the balconies where guards stood, their colourful eyes shining down at them. “I almost like the lessons as much as I enjoy training.”
“Training?”
“Swordplay, combat.” He smiled. “I will be a knight one day. If I cannot be the heir to my father’s throne, I will get as close as I can.”
“You want to follow in the footsteps of the man who killed your mother,” she said, her brows knitted together, a terrible lump in her throat.
If she was ever unfortunate enough to have the same end as Rain’s first wife, the thought of her child loving the fae prince was enough to make her stricken with hurt.
“I can’t understand that.”
“Of course you cannot understand. You are human, as was my mother.” He turned a serious look on Callie, and she heard the warning in his voice, the flicker of his gaze to the tome under her leg. “You must respect him. I must, as his child. You must, as his wife. It is the only way.”
“The thing about me, Angus, is that I’ve never been one for obeying sexist rules.”
His placid smile sank back onto his oddly beige face, like freshly made suede. “It is not because you are a woman, but because you are human. My father’s sister is the High Mage, Princess of the Scrolls, and she took a human husband long ago. Long before my mother met my father. Her husband is expected to behave like you are—it is your humanness that dictates your role.”
Callie swept back her black hair into a ponytail with a piece of string from her pocket. “Angus, what happens if I don’t have children with him? What happens if I ... can’t?”
Angus studied her silently for a moment, then shrugged. “He might offer you the chance to return to the human world, he might steal children for you. I cannot say for certain because I don’t know. To my knowledge, fae and human bonds overcome all sorts of human ailments.”
Callie pursed her lips, a small possible hope snatched away with a single answer, and took out the tome from beneath her leg.
“Unfortunately,” she muttered, and climbed to her feet. “See you tomorrow.”
Angus’s face went blank and he pushed forward on the cushion, lilac eyes growing rounder and sadder by the second. “You are leaving already?”
Callie tucked the corners of her lips into her cheeks and gestured to the fire pit. He stared at it for a moment, then the flames turned green.
“I’ve gotten used to it,” she said. “I can almost feel the hours go by now. They’re like seconds in the human world. Insignificant, with no effects on your body. But then, to me—” she put her hand on her heart, as if feeling for her soul. “—those seconds feel like forever, and I know that I’m losing time out there. Too much time.”
Angus managed a sincere look of pity before Senah stepped out from the shadows and bowed even deeper than before—for Angus as much as for Callie.
“My Lady, I must escort you—”
“I know,” she cut in, and waved goodbye to Angus.
He tried to wave back, but his wrist was stiff and his fingers moved like spider legs still. More practice was needed in preparing him for anything human, especially if she planned on taking him back to the human realm with her.
16
The dusty pages stared at Callie from the open book perched on her drawn-up knees.
Across from her, Rain stood at the balcony barrier, looking out at the shadowy woods.
Even in the daylight, with the sun so warm that Callie’s lace skirt and bodice clung to her clammy skin, and the leather of the book stuck to her thighs, those woods were shrouded in darkness, the bark of the trees blackened by what looked to be a fire from long ago.
But Callie cared little about the woods or the sweat now beading down her spine, and ran her finger over the aged ink on the page.
It was opening her eyes to the consequences of a human marrying a fae, to say the least.
“Did you want to do it?” asked Callie, finger tracing over the jagged calligraphy at the top of the page.
‘THE JUDAS KISS’, read the title.
“What are you referring to, wife?”
Rain kept his bare back to her, the light catching on the wispy scars marking his skin, almost invisible unless one looked hard enough.
Callie lifted her gaze to them, noticing that the glittering tattoos shared similar sharp and zig-zagged lines as the translated English text in the book.
“The
Judas Kiss,” said Callie. “It’s the ritual your first wife faced, isn’t it?”
He was silent for a moment. “Yes.”
Callie looked down at the chapter. “A separation ritual demanded by infidelity within the confines of the marriage,” she read aloud. “Carried out over three moons, The Judas Kiss requires two phases before the final phase can be completed. Phase one demands both the unfaithful spouse and accomplice to be arrested to the reigning court. Phase two requires the betrayed spouse to sacrifice the accomplice at court with the audience of those of the realm.”
“Phase three,” Rain said, hands on the barrier, planted between the jars of fireflies, “slay the unfaithful spouse on the third night. I impaled her on my sword.”
Callie frowned at his back. She couldn’t tell, but there seemed to be a hint of regret in his tone.
“Did you want to do it?” She repeated her earlier question.
“Did I want to kill her.” He echoed the words as though they were of a foreign language that he wasn’t well versed in.
Eventually, he turned to face her, gaze running over the outline of her all curled up by the unlit fire, on top of a cushion-pile.
“No,” he admitted.
Callie’s shoulders slumped as relief ribboned throughout her. Maybe he wasn’t a total monster after all.
But then—
“I offered her what your kind calls a divorce after Angus was born, as a precaution. I suspected that she might be unfaithful again, without the pregnancy to protect her. You see, to end her life meant to remove my son from the line of succession. He is no longer my heir. Every crown of this realm requires an heir.”
Callie was a fool to hope for regret—for any compassion or redeemability.
Born a monster, always a monster.
“I forgave her errors during her pregnancy,” he went on, but Angus had already told Callie this. “She mistook my mercy for affection, and the following risk led to her end.”
“What if you were the one?” Callie challenged.
There might not have been flames in the fireplace on such a hot day, but they could have been found in her eyes—burning with the blaze of a lightning-struck forest.
Feared Fables Box Set: Dark and Twisted Fairy Tale Retellings, (Feared Fables Box Sets Book 1) Page 23