Page 16 of Of Bargains & Betrayal

I did, however, manage to wince.

Chittering erupted, a squeaky shout I couldn’t parse, and my surroundings ignited to life.

“But what about its leg?” another voice squealed. “It…it’ll get all tainted if we don’t clean it, and it’ll fall off!”

My entire chest tightened, and my fingers twitched.

“You can clean it while we wait for the mage, you idiot.” A smack, a scoff, and then a voice trailed away. “I cannot wait to get back to the Keep.”

My fucking eyes opened.

Although my vision was blurry and shaky, the unmistakable verdancy of a tree canopy hung above me. I couldn’t make out any substantial detail, but bits of glass or maybe metal glittered all around, picking up light struggling to filter in.

And all around me were wings.

Shaped like butterflies’ and the size of feast platters, they were translucent and gave off a mesmerizing, rainbow-like iridescence. They were connected to little, lithe bodies that blended into the surrounding greenery. My mind was operating far slower than usual, but I was confident they were⁠—

“S-s-sprites?” The word stuttered out of me as a hoarse rasp.

Wings ceased buzzing.

The blurry outlines of frantic bodies halted.

Child-like rambles and giggles died.

Like time itself had stopped, except for an outline that shifted in my periphery.

A single glimpse of dark, marble-like eyes drifted past mine, framed by a small face, and a blanket of weightless cold settled over me. A shiver ran through every fiber of my body, and my tongue felt heavy in my mouth again.

“No, please,” I whispered, but the darkness was back, skirting the edge of my vision.

Small, warm hands touched my face, and a tiny, soft voice said, “Sleep tight, pretty golden lady.”

I remembered little after that, except for a voice so warm, it brushed my soul, saying, “Goddess below…what’s happened to you?”

Despite not wishing to be, I was awake.

The thick, chilly dampness clinging to the air was unfamiliar, but breathing slow, measured lungfuls of it was all that kept me from spilling my guts. From the moment I’d roused to unwitting consciousness, my stomach knotted and churned disastrously. It was only a matter of time, and I’d mapped a clear shot to the empty bucket on the filthy ground beside my cot.

I was definitely imprisoned, but I couldn’t fathom where.

Not in Caenleigh Fortress—unless, somehow, in my thirty-one years of exploring every crevice of my home, I’d missed a block of decrepit jail cells. But the crumbling stone walls were wrong in a way I knew in my bones—colored a tenebrous black that was nowhere to be found in Odessa’s pale peaks.

Even more concerning than where the walls of my prison were quarried was the state of me.

I was flushed head to toe and tacky with sweat, but I couldn’t stop shivering. The scratchy, threadbare cover draped over me did little to help, and the sweat-soaked linens plastered to my skin weren’t much better. Distantly, through the bars that made up the door of my cell, I could see blue light dancing against the walls, and its icy shade only worsened my chill.

In that flicker of strange light was the shadow of a man’s body, if I trusted my sore eyes, hunched over or sitting, and I was not keen to catch their attention.

My body had other plans.

I shifted up on my cot to form a cocoon of body heat, but, as always, I overestimated myself. The movement was so exerting, it sent my stomach surging the final distance up my throat, and I scrambled for that bucket. I fumbled the damn container, clanking it off my cot and cursing hoarsely as the most violent dry heaves I’d ever experienced wracked my body. The heaving went on until I could barely breathe. I alternated gulping lungfuls of air with spitting bile-tainted saliva into the empty bucket.

When I finally had a handle on the unraveling state of my body, I eased out of my rigid hunch for two seconds before I went stiff again.

“A thousand times worse when you ain’t got nothing in you, isn’t it?” came a low, amused voice from across my cell.

The figure filling my now-open door was a dark fae male, through and through.