Page 52 of Seduced By Darkness

“What are you doing?” Finn sits up, frowning a little.

“Isn’t it obvious? I’m rescuing you.”

Apparently, it isn’t obvious, because his eyebrows almost meet his hairline. I study the lock and then realize those gorgeous blue eyes are searching my face.

“What?” I whisper.

There are shadows in his expression. “What’s the cost of this, Princess?”

“There is no cost. Not to you.”

He captures my wrist through the bars, moving shockingly fast. “I’m not talking about me. I saw and heard everything your mother did yesterday.” He shakes his head. “I always knew she was a bitch, but I didn’t realize she treated her own family like that.”

I wrench my hand back.

There’s a gaping wound in my chest, an emptiness I can’t fill. It’s one thing to know that my mother despises me, but another to have others see it.

He pities me. My enemy pities me.

“It doesn’t matter,” I whisper, and then try to force a smile. “It won’t be the first time she hurts me. It won’t be the last.” And then there’s the matter of this marriage to Etan.What’s the worst thing she can do to me when she’s fuckingsellingme to a monster?

A hand curls around mine and I realize I slipped away for a moment.

He’s watching me. Eyes full of sympathy.

“I’m Finn,” he says, as if he’s not locked in a cage barely big enough to house a dog.

“I know.”

His smile curves, slightly wicked. “I figured a formal introduction might be in order, considering you’re rescuing me. It’s a little embarrassing, after all.”

“Embarrassing?” The word draws me out of the emptiness.

He shrugs, muscle moving in his chest and shoulders. “I’m the one who’s usually rescuing princesses.”

He has an easy charm about him that makes me relax.

“Do tell…. Ever tried to pick a lock?” I ask.

“Frequently.” He nudges the door of the cage with his boot. “Not this one though. Not yet.”

“The lock will be warded,” I murmur. “If anyone touches it….”

“It will summon a wrathful prince,” he says with a wink. “Want to know a secret, Princess?”

I arch a brow.

Finn slowly reaches out and grips the lock in both hands, gritting his teeth with pain as the iron burns through him.

But nothing happens.

Both of us breathe out as he lets go.

“I kept grabbing the lock in the first day,” he says with a smile. “Having that ward blare in his head like a horn every hour or two was annoying him. So he altered the ward.”

Finncan touch the lock without summoning Edain.

“I just need something to pick it with.”