Page 102 of The Hunted

“When I came to you tonight—you said you had a theory about us. What was it?”

“It was right,” he replied. “The theory, I mean. I was right.”

Arelle tipped her head to the side, those red curls of hers spilling over the edge of the table when her gaze met his. “Do you want to know what would happen if you opened those doors and let me go?”

“You told me what would happen.”

“I lied.”

He wanted to look away.

He didn’t.

“I would come back,” she said, her fingertips running over the flaring gills at the side of his throat. It was only with her that he allowed his neck to be bare. Both a vulnerability and a reminder to others, it was her that he trusted to know. “I have to.”

“Do you still want the sea?”

A nod answered him back. “All the time.”

She looked past him at the large doors leading out to the stairs filled to the very top with the sea. On the offseason, there were a good forty stairs to the bottom. Like this, they could see the sea reaching as high as it would be for the season of storms.

“And yet, you would still come back?” he asked.

Even if he knew the answer …

Arelle smiled. “For as long as you can call for me.”

TWENTY-TWO

Arelle

IN THE TIME that Arelle had been taken from the sea and put in Eryx’s care, there were a few things she had not been allowed to do. One of them was to access any of his private chambers. It hadn’t been permitted in the previous estate, and as he’d made the guards keep her locked in a room, it hadn’t been an option in the House of Miller, either.

Until now.

Maybe that was why she found the space so fascinating. From the sitting room, situated between the bedchambers and the private bathing room to the ornately carved four-poster bed that dominated the space, it all felt comforting to her. Candles, piled high on a corner shelf, flickered, giving the space a bit of light. The shutters had been pulled on every window, but she thought that was more to keep the water out from the pounding rain hitting thin glass than the storm itself.

Large rugs made of black furs kept the stone floors warm and soft to walk across, while the drapes hanging from the closed windows matched the color of the spreads on the bed. Black. A color the prince clearly preferred considering everything from his private spaces to his daily dress put it front row and center.

A book lay open on a chair trimmed with gold in the sitting room. She had just bent over to pick it up, curious to see the language she’d learned to speak as a child in the written word. Not that she would be able to read or understand it this way, but it still created a sense of wonderment for her all the same.

“Do you read at all?”

Eryx’s question came from somewhere behind Arelle—toward the bedchamber. She flicked over a page in the leather-bound book, unable to understand the writing on the cover.

“I was never taught—not an important piece of my education as a third princess.”

His dry chuckle followed his next question. “Ah, well, do you care to learn?”

She peeked over her shoulder to find him leaning against the wall next to a portrait painting of the sea. “And who would teach me—you?”

“Do you think I couldn’t?”

“I think a prince wouldn’t have much time, actually.”

“I had enough time to do all of this, and if you haven’t noticed, my duties to the crown and people are … nonexistent at the moment.”

She hadn’t really thought about it. Now that he mentioned it, however, he had a point. He rarely left whichever estate he was using, didn’t often take meetings or visitors, and rarely talked of the realm or the crown.