Page 86 of The Hunted

He’d let fickle emotions distract him from what was supposed to be his plan. She should have been dead by now. Every vision of ending her life and discarding her remains with as much disrespect as had been shown to his mother had become a background thought to the fact that she was there.

With him.

He had her.

She was supposed to be his. His to do with what he wished. His to ruin or keep or end; to make suffer and ache or just to watch her simply lose. Lose anything at all. Something that meant even a fraction to her what his mother had meant to him.

Instead, he found himself chasing after her in a rain that stung his skin with every drop that slapped against him, on the fastest horse he’d ever ridden. And not to get her back so that he could kill her. But rather, because she was not to leave. She couldn’t.

The thoughts made no sense. The emotions, even less. So, he ignored them as he pushed the horse harder. To its very limits, if the heavy panting and snorts that accompanied every stride from the animal were any indication.

Eyrx caught her, though. Right around the bend of that turn, his horse slid against hers, and with a twist of his body and a snag of his arm around her waist, he’d easily yanked her from her horse to his in seconds. He was sure she didn’t even know what had happened at first. Not until the sight of her horse running ahead of them while his slowed.

She tensed, and then the struggle began. Her nails caught his skin; her teeth found his wrist when she damn near fell from his grasp.

Gods.

The horse would kill her when it trampled over her. The thought would have sent him to his knees, had he not been focused on staying atop the horse while subduing Arelle in his hold. It was the only reason he stopped the horse because it was dangerous and fuck …

If her life would end, it would be from his hand. Not because he dropped her under the hooves of a galloping horse. The second it was safe for him to drop to the ground, he did. Arelle went with him, kicking and fighting the whole way.

“Let me go! Let me go!” she screamed.

Yet, even as she said it, her body pressed into his like she didn’t intend to pull away once they were on the ground. She said one thing—did another.

He couldn’t let her go.

Wouldn’t.

The horse trotted on while Eryx kept his stronghold on the now-sobbing woman in his arms.

“You don’t understand what I’ve done,” he heard her say into the wind. “You have no idea at all. Let me go.”

“Stop!”

“Let me—”

“Stop it,” he snapped, the words flying straight from his mouth and into her face.

Never had he been so harsh with a woman. He probably deserved what came next because of it, too.

The slap landed to his cheek with a crack that sent his head flying to the side. The hit had come fast, but he swore he heard her hand pull away from him quicker as she sucked in a hard gasp. Never in his life had a woman dared to put her hands on him. Not even a man would, because they all thought royals were something handed to them by the Gods above.

A joke, really.

Yet, Arelle had done exactly that.

Even as the anger inside him swelled, so did the heat for something else.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” she said, her words all rushing out at once. “I—”

“Why?”

Just like that, the fight had left her, and all it had taken was her hand hitting his cheek. Was that because she thought he would answer her in kind, or something else?

“What?” she asked.

She might not have been struggling against him anymore, but Eryx refused to let go of the hold he had with his one arm snug around her middle. He used that to his advantage to pull her closer, flush against the hard lines of his body while his face hovered over hers. Then, all she could see was him while he spoke and nothing else.