Page 8 of A Bond so Fierce and Fragile

The cell vanished.

Only the sound of water remained in the small wood-encased space, and as Lessia looked around, she realized the room they stood in was a ship’s cabin, with the heaving water sloshing against the sides of the vessel.

Her father still hung limp by her side, and as she glanced to her right, she found Frelina, Kerym, and a male who must be Thissian chained to a wall.

Whipping her head around to the other side, her heart stopped.

Rioner actually stood tall there, a lazy smile on his bent face.

And beside him…

Three of the vilest guards she’d gotten to know during her stay in his cellars.

The green-eyed one, the one she believed was named Torkher, flashed his teeth, but when she couldn’t help but show her own back, Rioner slammed a hand into the Fae’s chest as he made to approach Lessia.

“That was quite the entertainment.” Rioner fixed the gilded crown atop his head. “I thought you might kill my dear brother.”

Lessia’s nostrils flared, but she kept her mouth shut, her gaze following the guards who began filing into the rounded room from either side of her, their eyes trained on her and the other prisoners.

“See, you were right. I can’t killyou.” Rioner’s frosty smile lifted further. “But I can kill everyone around you. Make you watch them suffer until their last breath. Force you to hear theirscreams every minute of every day until you’re begging to be able to kill yourself. I think it shall be quite entertaining as well.”

“Fuck you,” Lessia snarled, tightening her grip on her father and inching toward her sister and friends.

“Such a mouth on you.” Rioner chuckled as he began walking toward a rounded metal door. “I’ll see you tomorrow, little halfling. And… I think perhaps we start with the other Faeling.”

Red colored her entire field of vision when Rioner jerked his head toward her sister.

But she didn’t have time to respond before the first door slammed shut behind him, closely followed by the other two, the metal clangs telling her they were bolted shut, leaving them all in the little light that shone through the gaps in the planks of the side of the ship.

Chapter 2

Merrick

One day.

One fucking day without her and he was losing his mind.

Merrick paced back and forth on the deck of Loche’s ship, the one Raine had dragged him onto when he’d refused to stop trying to beat the regent into carrion in the cabin beneath.

Glaring at the wild sea crashing around the ship that Elessia’s friends had sailed in on to pick them all up from the water, he tried not to imagine what the king was doing to his mate right this moment.

But it proved futile when images of the first time he’d seen her forced themselves into his thoughts.

Her pale and too-thin body lying on that dirty stone floor beneath the king.

The shaking voice begging for it all to end.

Her unseeing eyes when she swore the blood oath to Rioner.

Fuck!

He’d thought the pain he felt when he realized what she was would be the worst he’d experience.

It had nearly killed him to follow the king’s orders.

But now?

Now that he knew her?