Page 30 of Bartered by the Shadow Prince (Bargain with the Shadow Prince #3)

Caged

ELOISE

T he box is painful. It’s not large enough for me to stretch out fully or to stand up.

Worse, every time the cart hits a bump, I’m thrown against the side, where the light burns me until I’m able to right myself.

Afterward, the itching and tightness as the wound heals is enough to drive me mad.

This light of the elves, it hurts, although I wonder if it would be enough to kill me.

So far, my wounds have only been skin-deep.

The irony that I am the key yet I am once again someone’s prisoner isn’t lost on me.

The tattoo on my back represents the gift of my family’s magic.

I should be able to bust through any lock, open a portal and step from any world to the next.

But by some cruel twist of fate, the harder I’ve worked to free myself and then Damien, the more I’ve found myself caged.

I seriously must have pissed off the wrong god.

I try to prepare myself for what will happen next. Brahm bartered me to the elf king. Adril is evil; I know it deep in my soul. But Damien will come for me. It may take him a few days to figure out where they’re keeping me, but he will come for me. All I have to do is stay alive until he does.

The cart rolls to a stop, and I wait for someone to come around to let me out. All I can see are strange trees and the empty road we arrived on winding into them. A bat-like creature with a barbed tail lands on one of the branches and blinks red eyes at me. We are not in Stygarde anymore.

My stomach drops as my cage lists, and I have to dig my nails into the floor to keep from toppling into the side again.

“Through there,” a deep voice with a metallic timbre says from behind me.

I’ve come to associate that tinny quality with the voices of elves, and it makes my scalp tingle.

My cage bumps and jostles as my box is carried backward through an enormous portcullis I only see once I’m through it.

I catch a glimpse of the dark-haired guard who must have directed my abductors before the metal slab slams down and seals us in.

My box bearers carry me down a long hall of roughhewn stone punctuated with sun-tinged bars.

This is a prison—or perhaps dungeon is more apt a term.

Given my limited perspective, I spot no other prisoners.

I hear them, though. They moan and call out as we pass.

“Help me,” one raw voice calls.

“Water, please,” comes a female voice, so weak I can barely make it out.

A guttural cry of pain rings out from one of the cells.

My box is turned and slid into a cell, and then the door is lifted.

I’m out before I draw my next breath, relieved to have room to stand up straight.

My relief ends when I whirl around to find the box sealed into the wall.

They’ve unloaded me into this cell like a tiger might be released at the zoo.

If I wanted to, I could go back into the box, but there’s no way out of this cage.

I’m in a twelve-foot cube with a door of sunlight enchanted bars and a tiny, rectangular window that lets in a trickle of moonlight.

There is no bed. There is no toilet or sink. The stone floor is covered in straw.

Talk about being treated like an animal.

I don’t bother screaming about my conditions. I walk to the door and squint through the bars, surprised to find an elf standing there.

“Kneel,” the elf commands. He’s tall, as I’ve learned all elves are, but with more muscle on his weirdly jointed frame than any other I’ve seen so far.

But it’s the scars that pepper his face and exposed arms that unsettle me.

Puckered dots the size of quarters populate his exposed chest, and thick bands of scars mar his wrists.

Silver-white slices travel up to his biceps.

Was he once a prisoner too? A warrior? Was he himself once tortured in this place?

“What’s your name?” I ask softly. People always respond better to being treated as individuals.

“On your knees,” he commands. There is no softness in his words.

“I want to speak with Adril.” In truth, I never want to see Adril again, but any chance out of this cage is a chance to escape.

He snorts. “You are in no place to make demands, woman. You will see no one but me until you learn to obey. Now, kneel.”

“No.”

He snorts again, then walks on, pulling his cart behind him. The scent of food and blood wafts into my cell as he passes.

I hear him at the next cell. “Kneel.”

There’s a thump as if my neighboring prisoner collapses to their knees. I hear a tray slide across hay-covered stone and then the unmistakable sounds of eating and drinking. So that’s to be the game. If I want food, I’ll have to kneel or obey whatever other command they give me.

But I know better than to eat the food. Cassius and Damien told me that the elves lace their prisoners’ meals with light, and that that’s how they kept Malek mortal and unable to leave his cell.

There is a chance that the light magic, like that infusing the walls of the box, won’t be strong enough to turn me to ash, but presumably, it will hurt me.

Which means that, as a vampire, I can’t risk ingesting it at all.

I pace my cell. I won’t kneel, and I won’t eat the food or drink the blood. It’s safer for me to fast until Damien rescues me. He’ll come for me. I know he will. He broke his father out of prison. It’s only a matter of time before he tracks me down.

He’ll come for me.

And they’ll be sorry when he does.