Page 12 of Escape from the Green

Which was why I was sent to the human realm so much, forcing me to age at the human rate instead of gracing me with the slowness of a fae life.

Not that I was complaining; I much preferred the human realm to being in her home.

But the plan proved fruitless for her anyway.

I never developed skills.

I remained an utter disappointment.

So she had to come up with other plans.

I was old enough now.

For the plans that came with pretty daughters with supposedly empty heads, with subservient personalities.

All I had known in idle moments was thoughts of freedom, of a life of my own, without the fear of my mother's disappointment, or - worse still - the wickedness of her schemes made for her advantage at my expense.

"Here," Drake's voice called, snapping me out of my wayward thoughts, making my head shoot up to find his giant hand holding out a handful of nuts toward me. "Eat," he demanded when I hesitated. "It's cold. You're thin. You need the fat," he added, voice a little softer.

"I appreciate it," I told him, meaning it.

"Can I ask you something?" he asked a few moments later as I slowly crushed the hard nuts between my back teeth.

"Yeah," I agreed, turning to find him leaning back against the tree, looking very much like he could win a fight against it, even at leisure like he was then, arms crossed over his broad chest.

"Why go to the human realm?" he asked.

"I have nowhere else to go."

"Your brother. Sister. I've heard the rumors about your brother's girl too..."

Right.

That Cece was a child of both Courts, that she was bound to be more powerful than any fae in history.

"My sister is still staying with Baba Yaga," I told him, my heart crushing down a bit in my chest.

I wasn't naive.

About our kind.

About the joy many got from indulging in the most horrific of acts. Against humans, but also against fellow fae.

The weaker ones.

And the females.

I knew what happened in the dungeons beneath the home I had been raised in - the lifetimes of torment inflicted on flesh for minor deeds done. My own brother had much of the flesh of his back flayed from him there. When the night was still enough, the compound silent enough, you could hear them down there. Moaning. Screaming. Begging for mercy. Something they weren't bound to find.

And I knew what happened in the camps. The labor camps. Where the women and children were separated from the men who might try to defend them, to save them from the almost nightly gang rapes.

I knew about them.

And I knew my sister had been there.

I knew she had come out a shell of the woman she had been before, had taken refuge in the empowering arms of Baba Yaga and her fortress of women where no man dared step unless they sought a slow, torturous death.

Other than that, I knew nothing. My mother was evil enough to have sneered at her fate. My father had gone pale, and taken off. To where? I had no idea. And were there any correspondence from Jasper to me, it had been intercepted before I could get my hands on it.