Page 106 of The Hunted

“Is it true your mother was allowed different freedoms than other slaves because of your love for her? She was privileged, even?”

Eryx opened his mouth to speak.

Arelle beat him to the punch, saying, “I hear talk. Some walls are very thin.”

He glowered at the wall; a scowl settled deep.

“Do you only ignore the wrong of your people when it suits you, Prince?”

Eryx pulled in a sharp breath. “I have—I do. Often.”

His admittance of ignorance surprised her. The privileged rarely admitted their fault—only their victimhood.

She had a mind to ask if he ever planned to change. Arelle decided against it—he would be who he was meant to be; change like that came from within.

He passed her a look from the side, adding quickly, “They will get better now with you, however.”

“Because I’m in your bed?”

“Call it what it is, darling.”

She continued watching him ready for the day. He flipped through a stack of papers the servant must have dropped off for him earlier, because they hadn’t been on the table the night before. He then pulled back all the curtains on the bed, but they didn’t speak.

Arelle hated the silence.

She blurted out one more truth she figured he needed to know. “She asked to die.”

Those blue eyes of his nailed into her. At the foot of the bed, he stilled, with his hands curving around the carved footboard that showcased two swans in an embrace. “Who?”

“Your mother. She asked to die in the water—to be taken to the sea. One of my sisters tried to help her, the other attacked. That was how she died.”

Eryx tilted his head up, staring down at her until all her fidgeting stopped, and she was helpless but to wait until he spoke again. “Would you have done it?”

“Done what?”

“Killed her. She asked to die, you said. Would you have done it?”

“She may have walked on land for all your life—that’s how you knew it, but she was my kind. And ours have suffered enough. I won’t make even one suffer more.”

A tremor worked its way through his jaw.

His hands flexed on the bed.

Then, without another word to her, Eryx turned and left the bedchamber. The silence echoed when she heard the door to the room creak open before it slammed shut.

He’d thought he’d known the truth. She bet it was hard for a man like him to learn he actually knew nothing at all.

TWENTY-THREE

Eryx

SEVEN.

Seven nights the little mermaid had spent in his bed with that collar on her throat and naked for him—waiting for him. She let him fuck her until his mind stopped running; woke him up in the middle of the night with her lips around his cock; she hid beneath the sheets in the bed every morning with the sweetest smiles.

The only good thing about landwalkers are the blankets you have, she’d told him once. It bothered him more that he wondered if she might actually be right.

The bigger problem he now faced was the fact that he’d allowed that woman a space in his bed for seven entire nights. Oh, and he was no closer to figuring out what, exactly, he wanted to do with her than he had been before. He certainly wanted to hurt her. To take the breath right from her lungs and watch her eyes as her heart stopped beating because of him.