Page 31 of The Court the Fae Forgot
I looked up into his face, at all the hate and rage pouring out of him—but it wasn’t his face that made me freeze in terror. No, that was when I looked at my mother, her arms still wrapped around my screaming sister, whose voice I still couldn’t hear above the buzzing in my head.
What scared me the most wasn’t the rage or fear or hate I saw there.
What scared me was the relief.
There was nothing left in her to temper him as she had all the years before. As my father lifted the belt above his head, all I saw in her face was the look of someone who was finally ready to be done with me, too.
I was no stranger to the sting of my father’s belt, but this time was different.
I had only enough time to turn over, to make sure that the blows didn’t scar my face.
The first lash struck me across the shoulder blades, the leather stinging as it bruised my skin and bone. The second hit me square across my back. The pain should have dulled by the third or fourth strike as my body grew used to it, as I prepared my flesh for the temporary torment that it was once again expected to endure.
But there was nothing brief about it, nothing to prepare myself for, because with each strike my father hit harder. There was no tempering him, no slowing him. With each strike, that wild look in his eyes only grew brighter, until even my mother had to turn her head away, one hand lifting to cover Ada’s eyes.
I tried to fight back. I tried to throw out an arm to stop him, to halt the belt just long enough for me to gain some footing and drag my bleeding, broken body from the cottage in some attempt at escape. I didn’t have any plan on where I would go, or how I would get there, but it didn’t matter. I just needed to get out, to getaway …but even that wasn’t going to happen.
Not when the next lash caught my wrist instead, wrapping around it and jerking nearly my whole arm out of socket when my father yanked it back. I fell back down to the ground in a heap, my knees pulling up to my chest as I fought off the urge to vomit.
I’d long since stopped crying out in pain by the time his foot drove into the side of my stomach the first time, knocking the last of the breath from my lungs. The second kick, aimed swift and hard at my ribs, was coupled with a sharp, stabbing pain and a distinctivecrack. I nearly blacked out, fighting the urge to let myself succumb to the sweet numbness of unconsciousness, knowing if I did, it was very unlikely that I’d return.
Though, from the way my father lifted his hand even higher to strike me once again, with the metal end of his belt this time, it was seeming unlikely either way. He curled the leather around his fist so that the metal prong stuck outward, then raised it above my head, his target chosen.
I caught one last look into his face, at the hate that fueled him, and then braced myself for the final blow.
It was a blow that never came.
The door behind my father exploded open with a thundering crash, and three towering figures tumbled in. The sounds of their shouts stayed my father’s hand for just a second, his fist still raised above my head in damning evidence of what he was about to do.
Slowly, every eye in the cottage turned—including my own, swollen and blackened—to watch as three tall, golden-haired fae stepped forward into the light. At their head was the first fae I ever met, the one whose accusations started all of this, one finger now pointing at my father with all the fury of fury itself.
“Don’t youdarelay a hand on fae royalty,” he roared. “Though …”
Disgust darkened his eyes as he drank in the scene before him, his eyes finally lifting slowly, and menacingly, back to the frozen form of my father above me.
“From the looks of it, we may already be too late. How unfortunate for you.”
CHAPTERTWELVE
In an instant,the fae was upon my father.
He wrested the belt from his hand, and before my father had fully comprehended what was happening, turned it upon him.
The first of the fae’s blows knocked my father to the ground. The second had him crying out in pain. By the third, it wasn’t just his own desperate pleas piercing the air.
My mother still clutched Ada, but now her cries mirrored my sister’s earlier ones for me.
But just as my father before him, this fae had no intention of stopping. Over and over, the fae raised the lash high over his head only to bring it back down with such force that the floorboards shook beneath the weight of each blow.
It wasn’t long before my father’s blood mingled with mine on the floor, seeping into the rug and staining it a deep, dark red. My father reached out his hand just as I had not too long ago, but his efforts to stop the fae were accompanied only with the sharp, crisp sound of crunching bone as the fae took hold of his wrist and broke it neatly in two.
I was no stranger to violence, but I’d never witnessed it like this.
The fae was going to kill my father if I let him.
My stomach twisted, bile rising in the back of my throat. I forced myself to my shaking knees, my hands reaching out to grab at the hem of the fae’s cloak.
“Stop!”
