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“Archon. He's come back to rule over us all.”
Iris felt her stomach start to do flip-flops of extreme nervousness. Archon had returned. Why? Was she being arrogant if she thought it was on her account?
It barely seemed to matter. From the cell in which she had been thrown, beaten and bloodied, it was an irrelevance. The king didn’t know where she was, unless the general had told him, and that seemed unlikely.
“Come on then! Out you all come! It’s your lucky day!” The guards started hollering at the lot of them, confirming Thalia’s words.
“They’re letting us go! The king is pardoning all prisoners!”
The cry was taken up by all the ladies, and what ensued was best described as a stampede from the dungeons. Iris let the others go first. She assumed that she would still be put to death. No doubt the king they were referring to was Naxus. He had the bearing of a male who would declare himself king just to make the peasants bow.
Shuffling toward the end of the line, Iris tried not to get her hopes up. If she did somehow get out of here alive, she was going to keep her head down for the rest of her life. Better have a head down than no head at all. She had not enjoyed her incarceration even a little, and facing inevitable execution had not been any easier on her sanity.
Ahead of her, the women had all formed something like a receiving line, and were going past thanking the one who had set them free. When Iris looked in his direction, she thoroughly expected Naxus.
But it wasn’t Naxus.
It was Archon. He was standing handsome as ever, wearing the most astonishing gold scale armor which gleamed more brightly than the sun she had not seen in a long time. He was there to take credit for his alleged act of mercy. He was there, perhaps, to look for her.
Iris pulled her cloak up over her head and kept her face bowed. She was indistinguishable among the stinking wretched women who emerged from the dungeon. Or at least, so she thought. They all passed by the king, bowing, scraping, crying their gratitude.
“Thank you, thank you so much! I will forever be in your debt!” Thalia wailed in front of Iris.
It occurred to Iris that she shouldn’t stay silent. Some noise should emerge from her, even if she didn’t mean the words, or even if the words weren’t the same as the others words.
“Oh thank you wonderful dick bag king whose fault this all is,” she gasped, putting emphasis on the nice words and muttering the not so nice ones under her breath. It gave her a certain satisfaction to defy Archon one more time.
A large, scaled hand closed around her arm. She was yanked from the line, roughly and with urgency. Her cry of horror was matched with the king’s roar of discovery as the other hand ripped the cloak from her head and displayed her to his gaze.
“You’re alive!”
“You're hurting me!” She growled right back.
“Sorry,” he said, loosening his grip ever so slightly. “I thought you were dead. I killed Naxus because he told me he had killed you.”
She stared at him, wondering if he expected her to be grateful for the fact he’d been a complete murdering bastard yet again. Killing people and things was Archon’s favorite past time.
“I… I uh… missed you,” he added, his tone incongruous with the rest of his bearing and the general kingliness of his existence. He sounded almost nervous, and definitely uncomfortable. The words did not come freely from his tongue, and there was an awkwardness in his stance. It would have been endearing, if he weren’t the bane of Iris’ existence, the male solely responsible for every ill which had befallen her.
Iris tried to pull her arm away, but failed. He wasn’t letting go of her. She wondered if he’d just gotten lustful again, but the logical part of her brain told her that a king like Archon could have spilled his seed in almost any willing hole in the universe. He wanted her for some reason. Her specifically.
“What do you want?”
“Did he hurt you?” Archon answered her question with one of his own.
“No more than you did.”
Archon gritted his teeth and clenched his jaw. “Did he touch you the way I did?”
“Nobody has ever touched me the way you did, Archon.”
Chapter 19
Archon could not blame her for her anger. He had treated her poorly, used her as entertainment and then left her to the merciless Naxus when he thought he had finished with her.
“You have suffered enough, and it is time you no longer had to mourn. Your village, the people who were in it - they are all alive and well. I did not kill them. I took them into the belly of my ship with transport beams and I moved them to another colony. They are all still very much alive and well.”
