Page 69 of The Enslaved Duet

But I did feel hurt that he had stripped away our rituals together after everything we’d gone through that night.

I was lonely. I missed eating dinner at his feet from his hands, washing his dense muscles and acres of gorgeous pale gold skin before dressing it well, buttoning him up like a present for myself that I knew I would unwrap later.

It was all gone, and it made my slavery feel worse, hollow and cracked like a broken tool.

The five-hour drive from Pearl Hall, which I’d learned was in England’s Peak District, to Glencoe, Scotland, was the first time I had spent any real time with him.

Yet Alexander made me sit in the front with Riddick while he closed himself behind a soundproof partition in the back seat and worked. It was only after we’d arrived, and I was getting out of the car that he’d stopped me with a strong hand on my arm and whispered a few words of wisdom in my ear, including the rules of The Hunt. Before I could reply, he’d turned on his heel and marched inside the stone home, yelling a greeting to someone inside.

A servant began to drag me off the stage, and I shivered as a particularly icy gust of wind raised the hem of my shift. Alexander’s jaw clenched with irritation before he wrenched his gaze away to a man who sat on horseback beside him.

“First time?” the girl with orange hair asked me as I rejoined the others in the corral.

I nodded, wrapping my thin arms around my torso for warmth.

“It’s my third,” she told me, lifting her chin so that I could look into her dead brown eyes. “I have a good hiding place; do you want to stick with me?”

“Gentlemen,” Sherwood boomed. “Welcome to the 76thannual Hunt!”

There was a cacophony of shouts and hollers before a servant in red on horseback raised a horn to his lips and blew.

The trumpet echoed through the small clearing and stirred the dark trees at the edge of the forest.

“What happens now?” I asked the ginger-haired girl.

“Run.”

The doors to the corral were thrust open, and a stampede of terrified women flooded out, nearly pushing me to the ground in their haste. I heard the muffled cry of someone fall behind me and then the crack of breaking bone, but I didn’t turn around.

I ran.

Away from the barking hounds and agitated horses. Away from the predatory men who would spend the entire night chasing us down, one by one.

I ran and a small part of my brain wondered if I could run fast enough and long enough, then maybe I could run away from it all forever.

It was dark as tar and just as sticky, tendrils of night black low-hanging branches from trees ripped across my arms and face. I tasted blood on my lips, the metallic heat of bile at the back of my tongue as my lungs labored like overworked billows to keep my arms pumping and my legs churning. Running. My mind would waste my body away to nothing just to keep on running.

The lord had finally let me out of the manor, but my liberation was a trap I should have known better than to have taken.

Why does any master let the fox out of its cage?

To hunt it down…

And I was being hunted, ruthlessly and ceaselessly through the late hours of the night by more than just my Master. I’d already dodged one man’s hands as he’d ridden close by on his horse and kicked another in the teeth so hard I felt them break under my toes.

I’d been running through the dense cover of frost-coated pines for hours. My feet were ripped to bloody shreds by roots and rocks, so bloody and slimy from brackish puddles that I fell more often than I could afford to, cutting up my hands and my face.

Acid burned through my tired muscles, pulsing in time with my cantering heart until I felt I would burst apart at the seams any minute and die.

Still, I didn’t stop.

I’d seen four girls taken by riders in the mist, heard their blood-curdling screams as they were raped against trees, taken in the mud, or flung like carcases over the saddle.

I didn’t want to be them.

In a way, I was lucky because Alexander had been teaching me self-defence and given me free rein to use the gym, which I did nearly every day. My previously thin body ripe with soft curves now had lean lines of muscle running through it, muscles I was using to race and dodge through the thicket of trees as agilely as the fox I was named after.

The howl of hounds pierced the thick night air to my left. I went careening in the opposite direction, my feet tramping loudly over debris, my breath like gunshots in the silence as I burst into a small clearing.