AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Selena? Are you alright?”
“No,” I admitted.
“I’m so sorry.” And I knew he was apologizing for a lot more than what had happened tonight.
I fell into his arms and let him hold me close, his strong body seeming to hug away some of the pain and fear. For no good reason, I felt safe with him. Perhaps I’d never be able to convince myself of the right way to feel about this man, but it seemed my body felt one way and my brain screamed at me another—that he was going to sell me, that was I was so foolish for ever trusting he wouldn’t.
And yet… yet, somehow I still didn’t believe it—every part of my being was convinced of the opposite.
***
“This is them?” The captain of the Gaunt soldiers asked.
Devon nodded. His face was grave and grim; set hard.
Wordlessly, he passed the tethers across to the captain who gave a sharp tug, pulling Uther and me over to his side of the guard room, where more soldiers were standing, watching us as if we might somehow make a break for it.
“Where are we going?” asked Uther.
“You’re coming to Gaunt,” the captain replied. “Honored guests of the Queen.”
Uther nodded, smiling. “That’ll be nice.”
“I wouldn’t count on it.” The captain turned to Devon. “You’ll want paying.” He said the words in a tone that suggested the contempt he felt for someone who’d sell a girl and her father for money. Personally, I didn’t think much of someone who would buy them either.
Devon held out his hand and the captain handed over a bag that clinked with the coins within.
It was such a small bag. All that had happened and in the end, it all came down to such a small bag.
As I’d done once before, I watched Devon go, after he’d taken money for us. Though on a conscious level I’d known this would happen, deep down, I hadn’t believed he’d go through with. It wasn’t just that I’d wanted to believe as much, to believe the best of the man I liked so much, despite myself, I really hadn’t believed him capable of it. All along, I’d imagined that at the ninth hour, his guilt and his feelings toward me would overthrow his duty. And he would realize he couldn’t hand us over to our deaths.
And yet… yet here we now were.
I’d made the wrong bet, taken the wrong odds.
The door of the guardhouse stayed open as Devon went through it and walked on. He paused and looked back. And then, just for a second, I thought I saw the flicker of that roguish smile tease across his lips, as it had the last time we went through this.
A little flutter from within lifted my spirits.
Oh, how much I wanted that smile to mean something.
Chapter Fourteen
Gaunt
“Dear sister, how revolting you are looking.”
Sylvia was much as I remembered.
The middle sister of Uther’s daughters had always struck me as being all angles. There was something sharp about Sylvia in appearance and in manner. She was a beautiful woman, if you liked a bone structure that looked like cut glass. She was thin but her breasts and hips seemed so angular that she looked like two diamonds, one on top of the other. But it was her tongue that was sharpest. Sylvia possessed a natural cruelty that had never failed her when we were growing up, and which made her a natural queen in some ways.
I stood in her throne room in chains, pulled down to my knees in front of her as she sat, resplendently perfect on her throne, beside her husband, King Titus of Gaunt.
“She was always a shadow compared to you, my love,” the king said.
Sylvia flicked a sharp look at him. “For the love of the gods, Titus, you don’t have to fawn.”
Titus’s big head drooped. “Sorry, my dear.”
