“By the Ethers,” she exclaimed. “So you’re gullible too?”
“No, not gullible,” he said in a deep protest that sounded more like Night’s voice than his.
“Ah, I see.” Her lips tipped up in an infuriating little, So just stupid, then?
He growled yet again, sounding more and more like the monster she was accusing him of being.
“We have a deal,” he said.
“We do. And if I have anything to thank you for, it’s for that, for agreeing to release Marina too. Now I’ll take care of her.”
“We sealed the deal with a kiss. It’s unbreakable.”
“Ah.” She hitched a shoulder up and down. “Not so much. If neither of us meets our end of the deal, there’s no deal.”
“That’s not how deals work.”
“It is today. See ya later, Baz.” It was the first time she’d ever used his nickname, and she made it sound like the foulest of insults. “I’ll come for you someday when you least expect it.” She winked at him. “Maybe I’ll starve you and make you fuck me, eh? All with a collar wrapped around that thick neck of yours. Fair’s fair, I like to say. Or, ooh! I should find a tiny, teeny collar for your tiny, teeny dick. That’ll teach you.”
“I have a big dick, and you damn well know it.”
“Hm, maybe I do, maybe I don’t.”
After all her enthusiastic outbursts, he expected that Velle would keep going long enough for him to figure out what she was up to and how to stop her.
But Baz blinked, and where a solid hardwood floor supported her, with wispy shadows swirling across it like smoke, the floor opened into a gaping maw, as dark and terrifying as the abyss. One moment she stood there, looking as fucking infuriating as she was gorgeous, and the next … well, the hole sucked her into it with a squelch that made his insides lurch.
She and her book, whatever its true title, had already disappeared when Baz, holding on to the rope that bound them together and could never be broken, lunged after her.
Chapter 12
Deep Inside Your Grandiose and Naughty Castle
Tugged along by the Rillis rope, Baz was in a freefall he feared would never end. When he finally smacked onto a padded surface in the darkness, he landed in a crouch that rattled his knees. For a heartbeat he experienced tremendous relief—until his lumoons caught up with him to illuminate the bottom of a pit with smooth and shiny walls. Dark as shadows, they reminded him of gum tissue, or perhaps of a monstrous vagina. He saw no exit to the circle that was the diameter of two men.
When he touched the walls, they were cool but not cold for once, and his fingers glided across them, coming away the slightest bit moist, adding to the sense that this plunging pit was somehow alive.
“By the Ethers and all the Fuerin,” he muttered as he glanced around. “This cannot be good.”
Never had Baz had cause to wonder what it was like for prey to travel through a predator’s guts.
He drew his shortsword and stared at the Rillis rope, stretched taut and still tied tightly around his wrist. It disappeared into the tissue-like wall. Experimentally, he yanked on it. It lurched toward him. When he released it, it slid back into the wall. This next time, he pulled harder, and was rewarded with a thud and a yelp from the other side of the wall—or from inside it, maybe, who knew? The usual laws of nature didn’t hinder Mauldrene. The rope appeared to be … absorbed. There was no hole for it, no disturbance in the tissue.
From the wall came a muffled, “Dammitall, is that you, Alobaz?”
Relief at hearing her voice surged through him in a warm wave, leaving him grumbling and shaking his head. His friends were right. He’d lost all perspective. He should be whipping the woman who’d attempted to murder him, not pining after her, for dragon’s sake!
When an image assailed him of her nude and prone on his bed, with her smooth, beautifully round ass up in the air, he behind her with a whip pulled back and ready to smack, she with eyes pleading for him to do it, he understood with complete clarity. So long as he remained on the same island with the woman, he was in grave danger. Remaining tethered to her so that he couldn’t distance himself from her more than a few feet made him a monumental dumbass. Had any of his soldiers left themselves so blatantly vulnerable to their assassins, he’d have locked them in a cage and lost the key—for their own damn good.
“Of course it’s me,” he snarled at the wall. “Who the fuck else would it be?”
Who else would be stupid enough to follow the contemptible woman into the bowels of a cruel, magical castle? No one, obviously. He squirmed at the renewed sensation of being stuck inside Mauldrene’s digestive tract, hoping fiercely that she didn’t actually have one.
You’re linked to her via the Rillis rope. You had no choice but to follow. That’s the point of it.
The lie that popped into his mind, ever so conveniently, only made him angrier. No matter the circumstance, there was always another choice, another way out—one just had to search for it, think it through and find it. Wasn’t that what he taught his soldiers? Never to settle, always to spot the better move, the win concealed behind fear and weakness?
Baz was bound to her, and the Rillis rope was no toy. It was a powerful magical object. Its enchantment had never been broken by the person who was bound by it.
