Page 7 of Escape from the Green

I stopped mid-stride, having to reach out to grab her to stop her momentum forward, my hand dropping hers so both could land on her shoulders.

Her cheeks and nose weren't the same charming, sweet, cool-kissed pink they had been back in my barn. All her porcelain pale skin was suddenly almost alarmingly red. Underneath whatever absurd layers of clothes she had on which made her very slight body almost as wide as my own, her chest was rising and falling too fast; the puffs of white air coming out of her nose and mouth were too frequent.

How the hell long had I been dragging her? Completely unaware of her inability to keep up?

My hand reached up, my finger pressing into her soft lips, pushing them closed. "In and out through the nose, slow and steady," I told her when her brows knitted at the strange gesture.

Of course she would be out of shape. She spent almost every moment of her day inside the Winters compound. She had no time to even enjoy the goddamn sunshine, let alone get any exercise.

Her breathing quickly slowed; her chest rose and fell more evenly; the redness became a cool-flushed pink again.

"Better?" I asked, finger still pressing into her lips, making her response a nod instead of words. "Sorry, I just knew we had to get as far as possible before we stopped." My hand fell and she gave a small, almost wobbly smile.

"Sorry I'm such a pathetic fellow jailbreaker," she said, shaking her head a little self-deprecatingly. "I guess I understand why the humans are always talking about cardio."

"Cardio?" I repeated, brows knitted.

"Yeah, so they aren't the first to go during the zombie apocalypse."

"What the hell is a zombie?"

To that, there was a short, utterly still moment before her smile spread far enough to make her eyes crinkle as she let out a laugh that was jingling and musical, a sound that somehow managed to make an unfamiliar smile tug at my own unpracticed lips just hearing it. "What?" I asked when she shook her head at me.

"It's just strange to live half my life in The Green and the other half in the human realm. Both cultures are so different. Every time I came back to the compound, I would talk about things that, to me, were normal because I had been around humans for so long, but to everyone else, it was like speaking in tongues."

The compound.

Not home.

That wasn't lost on me.

"And no one wanted you to tell them about the human realm?"

She snorted at that, looking down at her feet, and shaking her head a bit sadly. "The Winters? Opal and Declan Winters, the holier than thou Light fae with Dark connections? They think humans are sub-species."

"Well, I've never seen one, but I doubt that's the case. What the hell is a zombie?"

To that, her head snapped back up, her smile warm, obviously delighted in my interest in the things she had to teach me. "They're humans who have died then been reanimated, but they are brainless and soulless things that only think about eating."

I felt my smirk tip up as a brow rose, having a feeling I knew where this was going. "And what do they eat?"

"Human flesh. Especially brains. It makes for really interesting, albeit bloody and disgusting, movies."

Movies.

I knew the term, but had never seen one myself.

The way she talked about them, the way she talked about the human realm as a whole, everything about her animated and excited, it almost made me want to do the unthinkable- cross out of The Green.

I wasn't exactly raised with the disdain for humans that the Winters obviously had. My culture was small, secluded, rich in tradition, and wholly insulated even from other fae. Because the other fae thought us extinct and if they knew we weren't, we'd likely be hunted and imprisoned in masse. So we had always, in a way, lumped humans in with all the other types of fae, believing they might have been interesting, but knowing they were likely dangerous to us and our way of life.

"You liked your time in their world." It wasn't a question, but she answered anyway.

"What I got to see of it, yes. I didn't exactly have any more freedom than I do here. I had a tutor, guards, and a nanny whenever I was there. We stayed in this big building surrounded by walls, keeping the 'dangerous humans' away from me. After countless years of begging, I finally got my tutor and nanny to agree to let me have some human things like a television and some of their food instead of things the guards got every night by going into The Green to forage."

Another tower she was locked up in.

Even to me, someone who had spent a good chunk of his life in chains, I found that incredibly sad.