Page 155 of Hunted By Fae

I can only stare across the road at her, on her back, arms splayed, mouth parted against air she can’t draw in.

Samick prowls at the nose of the car, his eyes blizzards, hands fisting for a beat. Pure, unfiltered rage pulses through him, a glacier rush in his veins.

He pauses at the handgun on the road, then swipes at it. As he lifts his gaze to Dare, I see the difference in his eyes—no longer frozen blades of grass, but now wholly white, like glacier sheets.

He grips the gun with both hands, then bends.

It snaps in the middle, pieces of metal splintering all over.

Dare hums a curt sound, then tugs the rope coiled around me. “She really shouldn’t have done that.”

I don’t know if he means she shouldn’t have tried to run or shouldn’t have raised the gun to Samick.

The strain of my voice is slick with tears, “What are you going to do to her?”

Dare arches a brow. “Me? Nothing at all.”

My grimace twists. “What’shegoing to do to her?”

Dare considers me, a small smile on his rosy mouth. “Samick,” he says, “is going to keep her alive.”

My sob hitches—and I wait for the punchline, the torment, the gory details to come.

But Dare says, “Eamon told me how important your human friend is to you. He was also very eager to strike a bargain with me.”

Tears slick my wavering voice, “What’s the bargain?”

“I bring you back home. Alive. And to do that,” he lifts his gaze to Tesni, “I need her.”

Tesni is insurance.

In Samick’s control, I can’t guarantee her safety. If I run, he’ll kill her.

And if my old friend Eamon really did tell Dare that about me, that my bond with Tesni is of soul love, then he did it for a reason.

I trust Eamon.

He wouldn’t wrong me, not like that.

He did what he thought was right—to protect me.

But it means to be separated from her.

It means to leave her in the clutches of a dark one I do not trust. I don’t trust any of them, but this one…

I shudder at the sight of him.

The light of the torch is distorted. The red hue of Emily’s blood rains over the gleam and splinters the whitish glow over the road.

That glow glistens over his leathers up to the marble cut of his jaw as he considers the stillness of Tesni on the bonnet.

“She is weak,” he says.

Dare lifts his gaze to him, that single gold iris glaring in the dark. “Samick—”

“Perhaps it is best to end her suffering now.”

Dare’s lip curls around his sharp bite. “Since when have you cared about ending the suffering of others?”