Page 22 of The Hunted

Right then, nothing was all he saw; he liked that just fine. Now, it felt appropriate.

• • •

“Stop it.”

Eryx didn’t even have to shout for his annoyance to be clear because the physician who was currently attempting to look at his neck was fast to step back. Why his father had even bothered to call these useless fools, he didn’t know. All they had wanted to do with him when they’d finally arrived—after Eryx had woken up and been feeling fine—was bleed him out.

As though that would do any good.

Then, he’d mentioned his neck.

Knowing what they did about where he’d come from, the three physicians now wanted to take their time looking over the gills the bastards had sewn shut when he had been fresh from his mother’s womb.

“Don’t touch me again,” Eryx warned the man. “I’m fine.”

“Yes, but how?” the doctor asked, raising a thick, unruly white brow at the same time. “Because according to the stable boys who pulled you into the house, and the king, who directed them to which room you were using, you were all but dead, Prince.”

And now?

“Clearly not,” he said, waving at himself, “as you can see.”

“It’s possible the water in your lungs is attempting to be expelled through the natural route, but given the procedure done when you were an infant … If you’d just remove the scarf and allow us a look at—”

“Get out of my rooms.”

“Your High—”

“Get out!”

He’d had enough of being the physicians’ test subject, considering they’d already had their go at trying every tincture and tonic they’d brought along. His shout was punctuated by the ornate vase he slammed to the floor from where it sat on the decorative table currently full of the physicians’ things. It wasn’t the first thing he’d broken in the room since waking up, and he doubted it would be the last, frankly.

He was just in that sort of mood.

The doctors didn’t even grab their belongings before fleeing the room. He wished that made him feel at least slightly pleased, but it didn’t. The things they brought along hadn’t helped him before, and it wouldn’t help him with what he felt now.

Nothing would.

His heart ached again.

His mind went back to his mother again.

“Fuck.”

Thrusting his shaking hands into his hair, Eryx put his back to the opened doorway as he stared at the reflection in the mirror across from the bed. He should have recognized the man standing there in night clothes that belonged to him. He knew that face—watched it change day by day as he aged and turned from a child into a man.

Yet, he didn’t know it now. He found no familiarity in it tonight.

Disheveled. Pale. So fucking angry. In the eyes of the man staring back at him in the mirror, however, he found the thing that bothered him the most.

There was nothing in his eyes. Deadness stared back.

Eryx approached the mirror, his thoughts racing like the beats of his heart and the constant thud-thud-thud in his neck that still hurt each time. More so when he breathed, he noticed. He tugged the cotton scarf, trimmed with silk, away from his throat and finally got a good look at the faint scars on either side of the thick column of flesh and corded muscle.

His Adam’s apple bobbed.

The scars expanded.

Were the physicians correct? Was his body trying to expel what water was left? Had it saved him? Or might it had killed him because they’d taken away what would have allowed him safety in the water all those years ago?