Page 83 of Taken By the Fae

I try to smack his hand away, cringing at the sharp pain. “Who the hell are you?” I growl as two others step into my line of sight—a guy and a girl who both look around my age.

He presses his knee between my legs and leans in until his face is inches from mine. “Keep quiet,” he snaps.

“Ease up,” the other guy barks.

“Fuck off, Nikolai,” the guy snaps but lets go of me.

“You don’t need to hurt her,” Nikolai grumbles.

“What if I want to?”

Nikolai thrusts a hand through his messy black hair and shrugs. “Your funeral, asshole.”

The girl sighs. “Can we hurry? I’m bored.”

I shove the guy away from me. “I’m going to take a shot in the dark and guess that you lot are unseelies.”

Nikolai slow claps from where he’s leaning against one of the parked cars.

“What gave us away?” the guy still blocking my escape asks with a snicker.

“It certainly wasn’t your friendly demeanor,” I remark dryly.

The unseelie fae whose name I still don’t know growls and rears back to hit me, but his fist never connects. In the time I take to blink, he’s flying and smacking against the brick side of the building.

I suck in a sharp breath as Tristan prowls toward the guy crumpled on the ground. “Don’t.” I grab his arm. No matter how much that fae deserves what he’d have coming to him, I don’t think I can watch Tristan kill someone.

“Nice jacket, Westbrook,” Nikolai laughs from the same spot against the side of the car.

“You want to live, Sterling?” Tristan snaps.

Nikolai snorts. “Oooh, threatening. Showing off for your girl?”

Tristan steps around me, and faster than my eyes can register, he has Nikolai by the throat. Seeing fae shifting from one place to another so fast makes me queasy. “Since when do you do Jules’s dirty work?”

Nikolai cocks a brow. “Who says Jules sent us?”

“Nikolai,” the female fae snaps.

“Whyareyou here?” Tristan demands.

“Where’s the fun in giving that up?”

“You might get to keep your life. That could befun.”

“You’re so uptight, Tristan.” Nikolai glances over at me. “Anytime you want to get away from Mr. Broody over here, you let me know.”

Tristan growls and slams him into the car, shattering the passenger-side window.

I offer a tight-lipped smile. “Not in your lifetime.”

He chuckles. “I’m immortal.”

“Exactly.”

Nikolai rolls his eyes and twists Tristan’s arm enough to slip free, stumbling to the side. “Believe it or not, Westbrook, your fight isn’t with me.”

“My fight is with the unseelie fae,” he barks. “Until they—you—stop killing my people, my fightiswith you.”

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