Page 137 of The Hunted

OVER THE FLAMES licking toward the roof of the makeshift shelter, Eryx watched the mermaid stare into the black nothingness of the forest around them. It didn’t matter what he did, whether it was actively attempting to engage her in a conversation or even just adding more driftwood he’d found to the fire, she wasn’t speaking.

In fact, she refused to even look at him.

At first, Eryx hadn’t minded. He wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do with the mermaid he’d stolen from the whorehouse where Corval had said she would be, but one part of his plan at a time. It was all about patience, he was sure.

Now, though, as she was safe in the camp he’d created away from the storms and anyone who might see them, he wanted to fill the silence with anything but the thoughts in his mind that threatened to send him running crazy if he fed into it, and the dread that had his heart racing with thundering beats.

“I won’t fuck you.”

Her first sentence since the moment he’d taken her from the whorehouse days earlier. It’d taken him a while to get a horse that would travel in the storms after they’d killed all of his at the stable estate. And then, by the time he’d arrived at the west village to begin the process of removing the mermaid from her current prison, well … it had all taken too much time.

Or, that’s how it felt.

Eryx cleared his throat. “I don’t plan to fuck you. Apologies if that was your first assumption for why I took you.”

He saw the roll of her eyes, and the pull of her lips turning them down into a frown. “You would be the first. Seems their favorite thing is to break a mermaid at the whorehouse by having a constant line of men waiting. And when you don’t shut up, they invite a second one in to make sure your mouth is—”

“What is your name?” he asked because as of now, he couldn’t do anything to help her pain in that regard except not be another name on her list of who had raped her. “Poe, yes?”

He knew she’d heard him, if only because a small knot formed between her brows, although she still didn’t turn her stare away from the dense forest.

“Arelle told me—my mother, she killed the one. Coral, I think. And then you killed—”

Poe turned burning violet eyes on Eryx and quieted him from the intensity he found there. “She begged to die. Imagine … I dare you to even consider what it would have been like for that mermaid to go back to a colony with her fin destroyed by your people, having been a whore to landwalkers for only the Gods know how long. And that is before we consider the collar on her throat so she couldn’t breathe. Disgusting. I did her a favor. You should thank me.”

He was struck at the bright contrast between the way Arelle had treated the murder of his mother, and how this woman did. One had almost soothed him in that she hadn’t suffered. This one, however, had him struggling to stay on the other side of the fire so that he didn’t rip her smooth throat into pieces.

He couldn’t kill her.

Right now, he needed her.

She may help his cause.

“You thought that was a favor?” he asked in a murmur. “To take her from me?”

“I have a child,” Poe returned, “and I love her. I love her enough that if my death brought her clarity or success, I would be the first to feed my blood to the ocean. I’m not sure what your mother’s death has done for you, but I am sure she would have done the same had she needed to. But having a child does not negate the need you have in your own heart because you are an individual. I did not say it was a favor to you. If she asked for the death, was it not right for her?”

Eryx’s jaw ached from clenching so hard. He wanted to argue, but he knew it was better to let it go. Or, as much as he could.

“You know,” Poe said, sighing as she turned to stare into the forest again instead of Eyrx, “we believe that’s why we can hear the calls of our mates. All that magic—when we die, we go to the sea. We can’t take what changes us with us when we go, and so we give it back. It’s also why in water, the blood changes. Stickier. Not potent. Because the sea is us, and we are it.”

“Is that why the matings always happen on land?”

Her gaze cut to him again. “And what would you know about—”

“I’m mated. Someone took her from me. I would like to get her back.”

Poe stared hard at him, waiting for him to fill in the blank, clearly. Eryx figured it was better for her to do it on her own. The longer he stared at her, however, the more easily he could find the similarities between her and Arelle in her features. From the shape of her lips, the color of their eyes—though all full-blooded mermaids from the Blu Sea had those violet eyes—to the shade of her hair, and even the way she regarded him in her annoyance.

It bothered him.

She looked just enough like his mate to make him pause. It was not enough to quell the rage or rawness in his heart.

“My sister?” Poe asked quietly.

Eryx shrugged. “Seems I’m stuck with her, considering how this works, and so I best get her back, no?”

That urged a smirk from the woman across the fire. Oddly, despite the hatred he felt in his heart for Poe because of what she had done to his mother, he still thought that hint of a smile was a battle won for him here.