Chapter 8

AURORA

I braced myself for his cruelty the second he stepped further into the room.

I didn't know exactly what I expected. Shouting, maybe. Or a hand roughly closing around my arm and dragging me out of the bed toward somewhere far worse than this warm, quiet room with its soft blankets and soothing fire.

Every single story I'd ever heard whispered about the Kingslayer came rushing back to me all at once, and none chilling fear ran down my spine when I realized that every one of those stories ended in blood, dead bodies, and empty packs.

But none of that happened.

He didn't raise his voice or even come all the way over to the edge of the bed. He just stopped a few feet away, his dark eyes slowly moving from my face down to my throat and staying there, as if he'd forgotten how to look anywhere else.

"Where did you get that?" he asked. His voice was low and even, nothing at all like I'd expected from a man with his kind of reputation.

I blinked up at him in confusion. "Get what?"

"The necklace."

My hand went to it without even thinking, the same way it always did, my fingers instinctively closing around the small silver piece that had sat against my skin for as long as I could remember.

"It was my mother's," I replied, my voice already shaking. "It's the only thing I have left of her. She died when I was young, and I've worn it every day since."

I caught a strange look behind his eyes, but it was gone so quickly that I almost thought I'd imagined the whole thing happening. He didn't explain anything to me. He just kept looking at me, studying my face like I was a puzzle.

It should have scared me more than it actually did. Instead, I found myself studying him right back, even with how scared I still was, my heart hammering hard against my ribs and my whole body still shaking from the fright of waking up screaming in an unfamiliar room.

He wasn't what I'd expected at all. He was cold, yes. Definitely cold. He was controlled too, as if every single action of his was planned in advance and he never did anything by accident.

But surprisingly, nothing about him felt cruel, and I couldn't understand how that could possibly be true of a man with a name like his.

"Why was I brought here?" I asked quietly. "Instead of wherever the others from the truck went. There were other people chained back there too."

His jaw tightened a little, but I noticed it in the glow from the fire.

"Because someone wanted you here," he replied. "Specifically you, and nobody else on that entire shipment."

The words sat heavily in the air between us, pressing down hard on my chest. Specifically me? Not just any woman pulled off that truck at random, or some nameless entry scrawled on a sheet somewhere in a trader's file, but me, Aurora Hale, of all the people in the world?

"I don't understand," I said, shaking my head slowly. "Nobody would have any reason to send me anywhere on purpose. I'm nobody important back home. I'm nobody at all, not anymore."

He crossed his arms over his chest, and for the first time since he'd walked through that door, his expression looked almost calm. "I need to ask you about the night you were taken."

My stomach turned over immediately, clenching from pain and anger. I didn't want to think about that night, let alone talk about it with a stranger. But there was something about the careful way he'd said it that told me this wasn't just simple curiosity on his part. This mattered to him somehow.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"How exactly did you end up on that shipment?” he said, watching me closely, not blinking. "Who took you, and from where? I need to hear every single detail you can remember, no matter how small or unimportant it seems to you right now."

I opened my mouth to answer him, but he was already watching me in a way that made my skin prickle all over again, like he already had some kind of guess forming quietly behind those dark, unreadable eyes. Like whatever answer I was about to give him, he already suspected something far worse than anything I'd even considered myself, not once in all the days since I'd woken up in chains.