Page 6 of The Longing

She’s already pulling up her lower garments even before I tell her to. She grabs her upper clothing and swiftly pulls it on, picking up the weapons holster before I snatch it from her and shove it into my pocket.

“I will keep this, save you from temptation.”

Alice glares, but her eyes have no magic, proving she is, at least, no witch.

“Whatever you want,” she says, finally. “You’re bigger than me, after all. It’s yours.” Her voice is strange, slightly strangled. She wipes at her face for some reason.

“No one gets the better of me. Not even you, little creature. I will find any weapons you have, and I will take them,” I respond.

“I don’t have any weapons.”

It’s my turn to make a noise, this one of incredulity. “And you think I’m going to take the word of ahuman, whose kind has persecuted mine for centuries?”

“Then why not leave me at the stone? Why bring me here and…” She screws up her eyes. “Humiliateme.”

“Because the Yeavering stone gave you to me. It called me a day and a night from my lair, and I found you.” I study her carefully. “But nothing is what it seems in the Yeavering. And I will not take a gift without being sure it is not deadly.”

“Do I look deadly?” she bursts out.

Admittedly, she does not. But then neither does a Redcap, and they are not creatures I’d turn my back on.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Then why take me?”

“Because the stone believes it is time I take a mate.” I pull her close to me. “And it is you.”

ALICE

He didn’t eat me.

He didn’t eat me.

He didn’t eat me.

I keep chanting the words in my head as Fenrother changes back into his massive dragon form and, without asking, captures me in his claws once again before rising into the sky.

He doesn’t ask for anything, that much is clear given how he asked me to strip…and I did. That he was looking for weapons and seems to have mistaken my bra for one is little consolation. The way he inspected my body was both horrible and, when he started handling my breasts, humiliating.

I’ve never been confident with how I look, and his cold appraisal was utterly awful.

I’d have been better off if my aunt had shot me on the lonely moor road than in the grip of this monster who has decided I belong to him. That I am his mate.

I turn the word over in my head a few times before the chilling realisation hits me. Mate means partner.

Fenrother believes I’ve been somehow given to him to be hiswife.

My blood becomes solid in my veins. Is this what my aunt meant about her bargain? Has she made me a bride for a monster in return for Faerie gold?

Confusion spreads over the humiliation. Was this Wyrm looking for weapons or inspecting his goods? He certainly sounded convincing when he stated he wasn’t going to be fooled, but then he kept my bra.

He put the lacy garment into his pocket then changed into a dragon.

My head hurts with the switching, the spinning, and all the new things I’m trying to process, the biggest of which has me in his claws and is flying me back to his lair.

But if I’m to be his wife, how is he so suspicious of me?

All these questions mean I know I’m still at risk of being eaten and not in a good way.

---