Page 4 of Faerie Fate (Fae Academy for Halflings #7)

Chapter Three

T he pain never got any easier to tolerate no matter how many times I got knocked out.

At this point, I practically majored in unconsciousness.

My pulse thrummed in my ears, but through the tympanic explosion I caught the echo of voices. Arguing voices. The surface from unconsciousness left me with a muddy head and struggling to figure out exactly what was being said.

Nerves needled my insides and I sucked in a breath to the bottom of my lungs.

“You’ve got some fucking balls.” A male voice.

“I’m sorry.” The second person to speak was pissed, the reed-thin voice wavering but hard. Also male. He seemed to bite down on a growl that ended with a strangled whine. “I’m sorry .”

Flesh sounded on flesh in a dull slap.

“Sorry? You haven’t begun to be fucking sorry!” the first man yelled, the grind and cut of his voice plucking at my insides. “You think you can play a joke on me? Lie to me?”

“No! I’m not—I mean, it’s not a joke. And I-I’m not lying. She’s here!”

A pause, another thud, and then a yelp.

Realization hit. Because I knew that voice. The one handing out insults like Halloween candy. The one yelling, raging, that carried the same sound as dozens of claws grating on a chalkboard.

That voice was written into the deepest fabric of my nightmares.

“Stay on the goddamn ground, Sampson, or I’ll leave you there in pieces,” Kendrick Grimaldi snapped.

Their conversation, a struggle to catch at first, now became clear.

The world sharpened as I shook off the fog.

I pried open my eyes, catching a blurred glimpse of a pair of legs.

He stood a few feet away with his hands fisted at his sides, screaming belligerently at three minions, his face red and visible even from this angle.

His nearness was akin to standing too close to a fire and feeling the burn but not being able to move away.

A human female might look at Kendrick and lick her lips. He was the tattooed bad boy of many erotic dreams. But for me he was straight out of a nightmare.

My taut nerves screeched at me to free myself.

After the last time Kendrick kidnapped me and brought me to the mortal realm, Nurse Julie had given me a glamour that was supposed to keep me safe from him. No matter the circumstances, she assured me, he’d never be able to abduct me again because he couldn’t see me or smell me or sense me.

And now I wondered if he hadn’t seen me yet. Can he sense me at all ?

Perhaps not, but my heart sank anyway because unfortunately the glamour didn’t keep Kendrick’s wolves from hunting me down. They had full capacity to see and smell and gut me.

They’d brought me to him.

My muscles ached from being trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey. Ropes held my wrists together and connected my wrists and ankles to the chair beneath me.

I shifted and twisted but the ropes refused to loosen. Sweat dripped along my brow bone down to the corner of my eye and scalded.

“She’s right there. Can’t you fucking see her, Sir?” one of the wolves asked. “We have her hogtied!”

Kendrick’s growl splintered through me with all the command of an alpha and my skin burst into goosebumps. “Watch how you talk to me.”

“You’re not getting it, Alpha,” a second man piped in. “She’s right in front of you. We have her tied. Right there. We’re not lying to you.”

Ahh… So maybe the glamour was working after all. Hope flared to life in my chest.

“Pointing isn’t going to help me see her.” Kendrick’s tone promised retribution for whatever game they played with him. “Will it? What aren’t you assholes getting? I see nothing but an empty chair!”

I shivered, the movement violent enough to tug at the ropes. Come on .

The knots held firm.

“Sampson, explain. You might be the only one with half a brain cell left in your miserable goddamn skull.” Kendrick stomped closer to the man lying in a fetal position only feet away from me.

“It seems, Alpha, that we can see her but you can’t. Which makes it some kind of?—”

“Dark magic.” Kendrick grumbled out the word with equal parts realization and desire.

Onyx had said that his father maintained his youth and long life with the use of dark arts. The memory surfaced and brought with it pain as well as insight.

The instant my mind latched onto the name, a sketch of my friend appeared behind my closed lids, with his face tilted up in laughter.

Onyx was dead. And his father was very much alive.

I was the only one left with half a chance at balancing the scales, because the universe surely fucked up with that one.

“If you’ll permit me, Alpha, I’ll walk you to her,” Sampson said. “Touch her. You can assure yourself she’s real and we’re telling you the truth.”

Silence, then a muffled thunk followed by a grunt. Kendrick must have punched or kicked the wolf. I grimaced and ground my back molars together. He really was a monster.

Would the glamour hold if he touched me?

Doubts drowned out the rest of my sanity until the voice inside my head became a long, drawn out droning scream.

“Here.”

Feet shuffled against the floor and I yelped at the first probing fingertips along my collarbone.

“See, Alpha?” Sampson sounded eager to please. “You see?”

“Interesting,” Kendrick said. His voice dropped into a chuckle, then laughter. Absolute joy and amazement. And then— “I can feel you, Tavi.”

He leaned in to whisper the words directly next to my ear and it felt like cold water dousing my entire system.

“There you are.”

Each word hit with the thud of a hammer against a helpless dented nail head. The glamour fell away piece by piece and the safety of the magic was replaced by Kendrick’s gloating laughter. It pierced my ears until they wanted to bleed.

“Leave us. My fiancée and I need to have a little alone time. Get the fuck out of here!”

He sent the other shifters away.

Just us now.

Alone .

My shaking increased until my entire skeletal system was replaced by arctic ice.

Kendrick pinched my chin and wrenched my head back. “Open your fucking eyes, Tavi, and look at me .”

The command in his voice made it impossible for my wolf to ignore. She rose up inside of me, taking control, hating the way we cowered. The way his voice made us want to show him our belly.

Like it was the ultimate defeat.

“I said open them,” he repeated with a barely constrained roar.

Terrified, furious, my eyes slowly opened for him, and Kendrick forced my chin higher. It left me with no choice but to meet his gaze.

His smile grew when we connected. The gloating glint in his mud-colored eyes sent a wave of sickening heat through me.

“There. Isn’t that better?” he whispered.

The lines around his sunken eyes were deeper now than the last time I’d seen him. Kendrick wasn’t only a man who’d seen too much but one who saw things no normal person was meant to see.

He’d found knowledge he shouldn’t have, in places no one should go. He’d survived an unnaturally long time which only gave him the opportunity to hone his delights.

A sadist to the core.

“I like looking at you.” He dropped his gaze to my lips. “You’ve grown up to be beautiful.”

His arms and shoulders were grotesquely muscled, and I knew from experience the fingers gripping my skin hard enough to bruise were scarred.

His strong, square jaw tightened, a vein standing out on the side of his neck while he perused me. His slightly misshapen and narrow nose had been broken in too many places to count and never healed right.

He still wore the earring on his right lobe, too, his dark hair longer and trailing past his shoulders.

I’d heard him described as a bad boy wet dream. I only saw the devil.

“You’ve been a bad girl,” he murmured. “I knew one day I’d finally get to punish you. That day’s here.”

I’m going to die . There was no way out of it this time. Not when the desire in his eyes took on a maniacal glint, promising my worst nightmares would come true.

He pinched my chin harder before shoving me backward with such force the chair rocked onto its back legs and teetered.

“It’s time for you to do your duty to me. To be mated to me.”

I squeezed my legs together when they trembled hard enough to give me cramps. There was no way on god’s green fucking earth I’d let this man touch me.

Not the way Mike touched me.

Some things were sacred. Or they ought to be, anyway. People like Kendrick twisted the beautiful things in life and made them ugly.

I couldn't speak. My throat tightened and made even breathing impossible. And the way he looked at me?—

Salivating.

Kendrick’s brazen laugh echoed in the space. “Oh, I see it written on your face. You hate me.”

He bent forward, gripping my knees in his massive palms, then shoved my legs apart roughly. Pain splintered up my thighs and into my hips and I yelped.

“We could do this the natural way, if you like. I’ll take you against your will, the way it used to be done by our ancestors, when the strongest wolf claimed whatever was rightfully his.”

“You’d rape me?”

My voice held firm even if my insides did not. I sneered up at him. If I let the anger go, if it slipped an inch, I’d break.

The steady tone of my voice only made Kendrick chuckle. “I promise you’d like it. Even if it started out as a no, by the time I slide into your sweet little cunt, it would be a yes.”

My uncle had given me to this creature.

He’d used me like a pawn to get more power for our pack. Had Uncle Will somehow scrounged a truce out of Kendrick, that the other alpha wouldn’t hurt me the way he’s proposing?

Surely Will wouldn’t let me be raped for the sake of pack connections.

Kendrick was so much stronger than me. When he forced my legs apart again, my thighs shook, and he slid his fingers toward my core.

He drew in a breath and I shuddered with sudden nausea.

“Such heat rolling off of you, Tavi,” he whispered. “I can’t wait to bury myself in you?—”

Horror moved my limbs, my wolf and I in accord. I slammed my head into his face, cracking the top of my skull against Kendrick’s nose.