Page 39 of Seduced By Darkness
Mother shoves the stranger forward and he hits the ground face first. But I can see his wild eyes, finding mine. Blood drips from the little wedge she’s carved from the skin beneath his eye.
We stare at each other for a frozen moment.
I’m sorry, I want to say.
And I don’t even know what for, because I’m not the one who put him in chains. I have no power here. I can’t change his circumstances.
And to even breathe those words with my mother in the room will earn him more than an unkind death.
“Get up.” Mother steps over him and sweeps toward me as if she didn’t just threaten to cut his eye out, right in front of me. “Get up and straighten your skirts. You are my daughter and you will not appear before Maren looking like some slovenly slattern.”
I can barely breathe, but somehow my body pushes itself to its feet. I move like a puppet on her strings.
There has to be some way out of this mess.
I can’t just give in.
I won’t.
But… how?
I’ll sign the contracts, I promised. But I never said I’d marry him.
The world slows down around me as I lift my gaze to my mother.
She wants me to learn how to be manipulative?
She wants me to learn to play the game?
So be it. It’s a heady, unbalancing thought. I don’t even know what I can do, but now it feels like there are options out there if I can just find them.
“What am I supposed to do with him?” Edain calls, reminding us both of Finn’s presence.
Mother stills, casting the stranger a hard look.
“I urge a cautious response,” Edain tells her. “Finn can still be useful to us. Perhaps Evernight won’t pay your price for him, but the prince is known to be loyal to his men. If he wants his little pet back, then he’ll have to agree to some sort of arrangement.”
“Fuck you.” This Finn spits a bloodied gobbet of spittle at Edain and bares blood-stained teeth in a smile.
Edain tears a silk square from his pocket and wipes the blood off his hand and shirt. “Careful now. We’re bartering with your life, and I seem to be the only one who gives a damn if you live or die.”
“Kill me then. I’ll die for my prince here and now if it will spare him your trap.”
The loyalty in this Finn’s eyes steals my breath, because nobody in my mother’s court would ever offer their life for her like that.
“Throw him back in his cage,” Mother finally says, before her fingers dig into my wrist. “I care not. If Evernight can be brought to heel, then I will have him grovel at my feet. Right now….” She wrenches me cruelly toward the door flap of the tent. “My daughter and I go to greet the queen of Ravenal and pay her respects.” Her fingers leave cruel marks on my arm. “And shewillbe signing a marriage contract today.”
7
Iskvien
If Mother was surprised by my smile when I greeted Maren, and the easy grace with which I signed my name to a marriage contract between Aska and Asturia, there’s no sign of it on her face as she leads us into the heart of the Hallow.
I keep waiting for the lash to fall but it occurs to me that the reason she doesn’t suspect something devious in my heart is because I’ve never dared openly defy her before.
She thinks me cowed.
We climb toward the Hallow.
