Page 46 of A Bond so Fierce and Fragile

I won’t do it.

A whimper worked its way up her throat.

Father.

She curled onto her side so she could face the body.

The next sound stuck in her throat as she began crawling toward him, using only her legs and ignoring the splinters that lodged in her bare breasts and stomach, her torso pressed against the floor as she inched forward.

“Father,” she whispered when she reached the body. “Please.”

But the amber eyes staring back at her were filled with nothing.

And the hand she managed to touch with her own when she squirmed on the floor…

It was cold.

Hard.

As if…

He’d been dead for a while.

She heard her heart break then. A crack that must have spanned realms, that must have shattered every silence in Havlands and every realm beyond, echoed within her mind.

He was dead.

She didn’t have to look back at the group to realize this wasn’t a vision.

It had been a fool’s hope—her mind trying to protect her.

Perhaps even her mind breaking a little… perhaps even breaking a lot.

Like the king wanted.

He wanted her broken and dead.

Lessia moved her gaze from her father down to herself.

Her exposed chest was scratched, blood—dried and fresh—mingling with the dirt lying like a sheen of sweat over her skin, and she again glimpsed the carvings Torkher had entertained himself with.

Twisting, she found the hand she’d damaged looking white—pale—as if she’d managed to drain all blood from it, and although the wound had already started closing, the part of her that was Fae trying to save her, it would leave a nasty scar.

The blood, though, made her wrist and hand slippery, and she could barely believe it when she tugged at the iron cuff around it and her hand began to fall out.

The pain was so intense that Lessia bit her cheek until it also bled.

But she didn’t stop.

Not until the hand, which appeared to barely hang on, even if she could somehow still clench and unclench her fingers, was free from the chains.

Falling over onto her back, she panted, thinking she heard one of the others speaking, but it was as if their voices couldn’t reach her, her ears filled with too much pain.

Lessia looked at her other hand and tugged at the shackles around it, then realized it was useless.

The chain the cuffs were bound to was fastened to the middle of the room, and although it gave her a much wider berth than she’d had before, she wouldn’t be able to leave the space.

She stared at the hand again.