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“Jerrik, take this to the queen. Tell her the deed is done. The rest of you get your horses. We need to secure our prize in case the queen becomes suspicious and wants to see the body.”
The humiliation of this eve’s events, coupled with the imagined horrors to come, were too much for me. I closed my eyes and surrendered to the darkness.
CHAPTER 3
It felt like hours later when I opened my eyes to see a massive structure hidden deep in the woods behind the sheltering branches of several ancient pine trees.
“Here we are, princess. Your new home.”
The beasts had taken me to their lair.
“Let me take a look at your feet,” a huntsman said as he guided me by the arm into the cabin and sat me down on a stool near the cold hearth. Looking up at me, he added, “My name is Tore, and I handle all the wounds around here.”
He wasn’t asking permission, and I knew I didn’t have an option, so I obediently remained on the stool. I had upset them enough with my foolish attempt at escape, and now that I was confined within the walls of the cabin with these men, I had no desire to anger my captors any further. To my right, I saw that I had left footprints of blood along the wooden floor. Tore knelt down at my feet and stared me directly in the eyes as he did so. His dark eyes screamed disapproval, and I couldn’t maintain eye contact with him for more than a mere moment due to the severity of how he looked at me. His brown, shoulder-length hair hung haphazardly around his face, and a thin layer of facial hair covered his firm jawline. With him being so close, I could smell leather and masculinity before me.
The other huntsmen seemed to go about their normal business as if this were simply another ordinary morning. A fire was lit in the hearth quickly, which I was grateful for, considering that my thin nightgown was doing very little in providing warmth.
“You shredded them up pretty badly,” Tore mumbled as he held my foot in his large hand, twisting and turning it so he could get a closer look. “I’m going to need to clean the wounds and remove all the slivers.”
Maybe it was because the adrenaline was wearing off, or because Tore was actually touching my wounds, but the stinging intensified, and a dull throb emerged from the balls of my feet. I didn’t want to look to see for myself how bad they were, but the growing pain told me that I had indeed shredded them up with my barefoot flight through the woods.
A huntsman whose name I had yet to hear walked up behind Tore and, placing his hands above his knees, bent at the waist to study my feet. “You better clean those up really good. I’ll get you some hot water and a rag,” he said as he looked at me with the same severe disapproval that Tore had given me. Luckily, I didn’t have to endure his silent lecture for long because he walked over to a large pot of water that had just been brought in by Jerrik—who also glared at me with anger—and hung it above the now roaring fire to heat up.
Tore reached for my other foot and began pulling out the larger pieces of wood and glass that were embedded into my flesh with his fingers. For such a large man, and for someone who exuded anything but softness, he had a gentle touch as he did so. He took great care in removing each piece with slow precision. I tried to remain as still as I could, even though I had to hiss under my breath as the sting almost became too much to bear as he did so.
“I’m sure this hurts,” Tore said as he continued pulling out each invading shard of debris. For a moment, I thought I saw kindness on his stern features, but it was near impossible to read this beast of a man. He both terrified me and fascinated me at the same time. My foot looked so tiny in his hands, and I knew he could snap it in two without the least bit of effort if he truly wanted to. Yet he handled my feet like they were one of his finest possessions, careful to never be too harsh in his movements.
I bit my lip but refused to admit my discomfort. I always considered myself a smart woman and running barefoot through the woods with huntsmen on horseback behind me had been far from smart. So if having to endure in silence the removal of the forest’s floor from my feet was my penance, so be it. But as agonizing minute after minute went by, I found it more and more difficult to remain still as Tore concentrated on removing every last sliver.
