Chapter 4

Kiara Pov 

I was confused. This was not the ending I'd budgeted for.

He looked furious, jaw locked tight, staring down at me, and for one strange second his eyes flickered from black back to that dark, near-navy blue.

"Is the king praising her?" someone in the crowd asked, craning to see.

"I doubt it," another said, and a few nervous laughs went up, nobody quite sure it was safe to laugh at all with him standing right there.

"What are you doing, Your Highness?" Beta Tristan asked, careful, low, easing half a step closer like he was bracing to grab him.

His eyes kept flickering, black to blue and back, and I was fairly sure I was the only one who could see it happening, because he was staring straight at me the whole time, unblinking, like the entire crowd had simply stopped existing around us.

"Instead of executing her and giving her an easy death," he said, loud enough to carry across the whole square, voice flat and cold as the block under my knees, "from now on, she will be my personal slave."

Murmurs broke out behind him, overlapping, someone gasped, a few people near the front actually stepped back, like proximity to whatever this was might be contagious.

Personal slave. Terrific. I'd been demoted from about to die to sentenced to a slow one, and somehow the crowd was reacting like I'd won something.

He crouched to my level, close enough that his shadow swallowed mine whole, close enough that the next part came out for my ears only.

"From now on, I am your master."

"No. No, I refuse," I said, voice cracking into something ugly and close to a scream, my bound hands twisting hard against the rope like that had ever once worked for me.

"You don't have a choice, slave," he said, already straightening, already turning away before the sentence had finished landing.

He left the platform without a backward glance. Tristan and Raphael fell in behind him, and the crowd parted for the three of them exactly the way it had parted coming in fast, obedient, nobody wanting to be caught standing anywhere near whatever had just happened here.

Guards closed in.

"Get away from me. Don't get any closer," I said, scrambling back on my knees, but the chains ran out of slack fast and there was nowhere left to go. They hauled me up by both arms, feet barely grazing the ground, and dragged me off the platform like luggage.

The crowd hadn't thinned. If anything they pressed in tighter, voices trailing after me the whole way through.

"She's so going to wish she died today," someone said, almost cheerful about it.

"I thought he was going to seek justice for her, earlier, with that question," another said, sounding disappointed in herself for having hoped even for a second.

"Of course not. His hatred for humans runs deep." A pause, lower now, the kind of thing people only say once they think you can't hear it clearly. "I heard his last personal slave didn't make it past one week."

Cold dropped straight through my chest at that. Why me. Out of every human in this miserable kingdom, why did the monster want me specifically.

I kicked, screamed, threw everything I had left into twisting free, and it did nothing. Might as well have picked a fight with a wall. My throat was still raw from Raphael's hand, and every scream I forced out felt like swallowing glass.

They hauled me off the square and into the palace grounds, the crowd's noise fading behind stone corridors I'd never seen before. Servants flattened themselves against the walls as we passed, eyes down, not one of them brave enough to actually look at me. I wondered how many other girls had made this exact walk. Whether any of them made it back out.

We kept moving down. Cooler air. Narrower halls. Fewer torches, further apart. Something in my chest eased, just barely. Down meant cells. Down meant distance, a corner that was mine, only pulled out when he had use for me.

The guards stopped.

One tilted his head, listening for something I couldn't hear. "What's wrong?"

"King wants her in his room."

My stomach dropped clean through the floor.

"What. No. No, no, please, don't take me there," I begged, legs giving out under me, my whole body trying to fold small enough to vanish.

"Guess today's your lucky day, slave," one of them said, hauling me upright and turning me back the way we'd come.

They dragged me down a long corridor lined with doors I didn't dare look at too closely, my bare feet numb against the stone, shaking so hard I could barely stand between them. We stopped in front of a set of tall dark double doors, carved with something I didn't have the nerve to study.

One guard knocked twice.

"Bring her in," the king's voice said from the other side.

I stopped breathing.