Into Enemy Territory

THALIA POV

“It's now or never, Thalia,” I murmured in my head, replaying my plans over again.

"I need the restroom," I finally voiced, smiling at the guard nearest to the carriage door. He was a Lycari soldier, broad-shouldered, and ridiculously named after one of the Greek letters. He glanced at me with no interest at all; he looked like he'd rather be doing literally anything else than escorting a witch through his own territory.

I knew he must have considered snapping my neck since it was his shift to watch over me, but I couldn't help but ramble and ask for his pet goat's name. He got pissed when I asked if he had the urge to eat them raw.

"There's a stop in two hours, my lady."

"I don't have two hours," I said flatly. I wasn't ready to argue about that with him again. "Unless you'd like to explain to the Duskmere court why your new queen arrived having ruined an entire wedding dress on the road."

That did it. Nothing moved men like the threat of an inconvenience they'd personally be blamed for.

"Quickly, then," he said, jerking his chin toward the treeline. "Stay in sight."

“I didn't run away the last two times.”

I had absolutely no intention of staying in sight.

The forest swallowed the torchlight almost immediately, the carriage lanterns shrinking to a dull orange smear behind me within a few dozen steps.

My magic was still sealed, a hollow ache where instinct used to sit, but my legs weren't sealed, and neither was my sense of direction, or so I told myself as I kept walking, putting tree after tree between myself and the two men who were, I was fairly certain, not counting the minutes as closely as they should have been.

I didn't have a plan beyond "away." Away was enough for now.

The forest floor was uneven and unfamiliar, roots catching at the hem of my dress, branches scraping at bare arms that had already been through enough for one week. I kept going anyway. Every step further from that carriage felt like a small, private victory nobody else would ever know about.

Then the trees thinned, and I realized that I really had no plan whatsoever, and I had no idea of the direction I had come from. I was certain they would start looking for me already. But the fear of actually getting lost became more pressing.

I stopped walking. I turned in a slow circle. Trees. More trees. The kind of identical, indifferent darkness that didn't care in the slightest whether I found my way back or not.

"Wonderful," I muttered, although I still felt motivated to get even deeper.

That was when I heard the voices.

Low, more like they were sharing secrets, definitely not the voices of guards searching for a missing bride.

I crouched behind the nearest tree, my heart suddenly very loud in my own ears.

"—keep them at the treeline another hour, that's all we need." A man's voice, rough and unfamiliar.

"The Alpha's own patrol," another voice said, low with something that might have been satisfaction. "Fooling that one is worth bragging rights alone."

"Focus. If he realizes what we're actually doing out here before we're finished, none of it matters."

I didn't understand a single word of what they were actually doing out here. I understood enough, though, to know that whatever it was, it wasn't meant for witnesses, and I had just become one entirely by accident.

I started backing away as carefully as I could manage, testing each step before I put weight behind it, and made it exactly four steps before a branch snapped beneath my heel with a sound that felt loud enough to wake the entire continent.

The voices went silent.

Then, "There. Something's there."

I ran, lantern fast discarded.

I didn't bother thinking about direction, or the carriage because I had no idea of either. All that was on my mind was running far from these men. The feeling of déjà vu washed over me, except these weren't my family; these people might actually kill me.

Branches tore at my dress, at my arms, at my face once, sharp and stinging, and I kept running anyway because stopping felt like the one option that guaranteed I wouldn't survive the night.

Something moved to my left. Fast. Too fast to be a man.

I screamed before I could stop myself, veering hard right, and my foot caught a root I never saw, and the ground came up to meet me all at once, pain lancing white-hot through my ankle as I went down hard against stone.

I couldn't get back up. I tried, and my ankle simply refused, buckling the second I put weight on it, and I collapsed back into the dirt with a sound that was half sob, half furious disbelief that this — this — was how my story ended, alone in a foreign forest, hunted by creatures I couldn't even see, my magic gone and my legs broken and no one left who even knew where to look for me.

Something large moved through the brush ahead. Close now. Close enough that I could hear breathing that wasn't mine.

I shut my eyes.

I don't know exactly what happened next — but I know screams came from nearby and in a blink of an eye, I was swept off my feet, my heart beating even louder, anticipating my doom and silently praying the Lycari killing mechanism would be less painful than witches.

But it never came.

When the sound settled, I was placed gently back on the ground. A voice spoke above me. Male. Low and rough in a way that had nothing to do with unfamiliarity and everything to do with fury.

He was angry.

"You," it said, "are an idiot."

I opened my eyes. I couldn't see his face; he'd angled himself away, I realized, a shadow against deeper shadow, nothing of him visible except the shape of broad shoulders and the glint of something at his hip that might have been a long blade.

"Excuse me?" I managed, my voice thinner than I wanted it to be.

He ignored that entirely, turning instead toward the guards who'd finally, finally caught up, crashing through the brush with torches raised and expressions that suggested they already knew exactly how much trouble they were in.

"You lost her," the voice said, and it wasn't loud, but something underneath it made both guards flinch like it had been a shout. "One task. Keep the bride within sight. And you let her wander half a mile into Hallowmere territory at night, unarmed, unescorted, with her magic sealed."

"My lord, we…"

"I don't want excuses. I want her back in that carriage, and I want this to never happen again."

I stared up at the shape of him, my ankle throbbing, my whole body shaking with adrenaline that had nowhere left to go, and something in the way he said "her" — clipped, distant, like the word cost him something to use — told me everything I needed to know without seeing a single feature of his face.

Whoever this was, he did not want to be the one who'd just saved me.

He didn't look at me again. Not once. He simply turned and vanished back into the trees the way he'd come, leaving me on the ground with two guards too afraid to meet my eyes and a question I couldn't stop turning over as they carried me back toward the carriage.

If he hated me enough not to even look at me, why had he been the one who came?