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“Youwould offer a bargain tome?” The chuckle is wrapped around his voice. He shakes his head almost in disbelief as he runs his mouth along mine to the corner. There, he brushes a chaste kiss.
“I mean,” I correct myself, “I would accept a bargain. If,” I add hastily, “it was right for me.”
He peels back an inch; enough for me to see the hunger burning deep behind the frost of his eyes. His smile fades to a smirk, a dark one, and his hand loosens on the back of my neck. He dances his fingertips up the back of my neck, and into my hair where he threads his fingers.
“Come to my bedchamber one Quiet,” he tells me, “and I will feed you the white powder.”
“How many times will you give me the powder?” I ask, sharp to pick apart his wording.
His smirk darkens. “For as many times as I have your body.”
My mouth twists with a frown as I try and work that out. So each time he slides his fingers beneath my skirt, kisses my core, takes pleasure from me—I would be owed the treatment for my sickness.
But what happens when he tires of me? I’ll be left with nothing.
I could ask him to secure the white powder for me (at least until I leave the castle), but then I don’t think I can risk bartering for the whole certainty of his only bargaining chip.
I settle instead on, “And you must promise to take me home at the end of my service in two months. I must return home.”
His face hardens for a heartbeat. Eyes no longer burn, they have frosted over into blocks of ice.
Then, he surprises me as he looks me up and down before he gives a firm nod. “I accept those terms.”
Slowly, he leans into my again, a forced and wicked grin warping his handsome face into something vengeful.
He whispers against my lips, “Evate.”
He says it to annoy me.
It twists my face into a pout, which only has him winking in answer at me before he steps back.
In dismissal, he waves his hand. And the gesture cuts through me like a sword through the heart.
I slide off the table, my moody face fixed on him. “Will you tell me what that means?”
He dips his head to near mine. “You should have put that condition in the bargain.”
My mouth puckers as I turn and leave the parlour room, cheeks burning all the way.
10
My hand is deep in in the cloth bag, riffling through the last of the boiled sweets I have stashed in my skirt pocket. Behind me on the step, Terry sucks on two at a time.
We have found a sweet spot in the left-north tower (a near-abandoned part of the castle where the prince’s past lovers once lived) to look out at the rest of the lands beyond the valley.
From the window that I tuck up to—despite all the dust caked onto the glass panes—I can distantly see the far marketplace that gleams like those little jars of glowworms on the castle’s balconies; faint, but enough light to make it out.
Fleetingly, I wonder if the dark fae stole glowworms from our lands—from Grandfather’s stories, they once belonged to us—and took them back to their own, or if they also had them in their world.
I have another motive for being at this window this Breeze. The prince has gone out with his brother, Elden.
Elden lives furthest away from Daein’s castle in the valley, closest to the palace, so I gather that they are simply close as brothers. Cruelty is the company kept, it seems.
I can’t shake the stories that Terry tells behind me.
She’s sprawled out on the plush-carpeted steps, rolling boiled sweets around her mouth (clanging against her teeth), and telling me of all the horror stories she’s witnessed from Prince Daein since she came here.
Once, he drowned a backroom slave in a bucket of water—and that makes me think of the time he drowned Sira’s friend in the lake.
