Page 39 of Cold Hearted
She nodded, her black hair streaked through with gray. “There are about a dozen guards, they’re all highly trained and heavily armed. Slave traders,” she said, and those two words caused nausea to churn in my stomach.
We had no such thing in Faerie. Sure, a child had been kidnapped twenty years ago, but it was because the woman couldn’t have children and had been sick in the head. And in times of discord among the courts, prisoners had been taken, but there was no capturing and selling of people on the regular.
“Are we in the Northern Kingdom still?” I asked. The weather was mild, reminding me much of Spring or even Summer.
Sabine shook her head. “No, dear, you’re in the Midlands. A half day’s ride from the Eastern Kingdom.”
Half a day’s ride from Easteria!
The irony was not lost on me that I was in the place I had lied and told Zander I was from. I wanted to think about Zander now, to wonder if he was okay and what he was doing, but my own survival was at stake.
“Who do they sell us to?”
“Miners mostly. They need cheap labor to dig up their diamonds and gold. But sometimes you get bought by a private party. Especially if you have powerful magic…” Some of the color leached from her cheeks, her eyes taking on a faraway look. “You don’t want that. That takes you to a personal household to be their staff. It almost always ends badly I have heard.”
I swallowed hard, having zero intention of being sold to anyone.
“What do we do here until the next auction?” I glanced outside.
It looked like just open dirt fields and some wheelbarrows with some guard tents.
“We mine fae gold,” the grumpy girl, Nysa, growled.
Okay… I could work with that. Digging wasn’t the worst thing in the realm, and if it got me out of this cage maybe I could make a run for it. I’d go get Omen and cut the black heart out of the next Ethereum lord I found. Probably in Easteria. It didn’t matter to me which one I got, so long as it wasn’t Zander’s.
Chapter 10
Zander
Horns blared and I woke with a start, drawing my weapon even as I pushed to my feet.
Where am I? What time is it?
The events of the night before bled into my mind much slower than they should: sneaking into Noreum, Dawn discovering the truth, our shared moment of passion followed by falling asleep in front of the fire with the flaxen-haired beauty in my arms.
I ran my tongue slowly over my teeth, feeling a sluggishness pulling at my limbs that did not normally befall me upon waking.
I’d been drugged, and I knew immediately by whom. With a growl of frustration I shook off the remnants of fuzziness. Even if she hadn’t been missing, I’d have known it was Dawn. She might have warmed to me, but I knew her mission to save her people was still first and foremost in her heart and mind. She believed the fate of her realm depended on returning with one of our black hearts, and honestly it might. I didn’t know much about the curse placed upon her world. I just knew that every hundred years one of the princesses of Faerie came and tried to kill one of the Ethereum lords,my family, to take their heart.
If I knew anything about Dawn in the time we’d spent together, it was that she wouldn’t give up. Her fierce determination and loyalty warmed me toward her even as they frustrated me now.
Sheathing my sword, I gathered my belongings, shoving them in my bag and snatching my cloak as I clenched my jaw. I’d been exhausted and lulled into a false sense of security with her after we’d kissed, but I should have known this would happen and chained the little bird to me before falling asleep.
Little bird indeed. The moment I’d first gazed upon Dawn with her bright green eyes and corn silk hair, she’d reminded me of a strik, the small bird with butter-colored feathers known for its beauty, cunning, and resilience. It was considered a bad omen if you passed one because of their penchant to feed on fae flesh and blood, but I always thought that just made them more interesting.
Others might not find the comparison particularly flattering or overly romantic, but I recognized the fire within Dawn immediately. Something inside of me responded to it, flaring to life in an instant. Every day since I’d met her, she’d lived up to her namesake, for she was the most beautiful, most cunning, and most resilient fae I’d ever met.
The little savage also had a thirst to spill blood that would have been shocking if I hadn’t understood she’d been raised to kill, according to my great-grandfather who taught us of her kind. To kill me and my brethren in particular, but that was trivial. No relationship was perfect.
Despite what she’d been sent to Ethereum to do, she’d surrendered so sweetly into my arms earlier that night.The cuffs had fallen off the moment she discovered who I truly was, letting me know what I’d suspected all along, that her feelings for me had grown stronger than her desire to kill me.
And as we’d kissed, the bond between us had sharpened and solidified. She might not know it, might not realize the permanency of what had happened between us at that moment, but I did. There was no going back now.
Dawn owned my heart, and I wasn’t going to let her go that easily.
When I found her again, I would tie us together with a magical tether until she realized what I already knew, that our fates were woven together for a reason. The bindings that now tied her to me, and me to her, were as unbreakable as the Northern Mountains, and unbendable as the strongest steel.
But Dawn was stubborn, which I happened to find attractive, and if anyone were to fight against a foe as unchangeable as fate, it would be her. I was up for the challenge, but now I had to find her again—before she managed to cut out the heart of one of my brothers and return home, for that’s assuredly where she’d fled.
