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I like my life now. It might get a little lonely, but it's mine. I control it.
Before I buried my powers, I had no control of anything.
“Alis,” Reiks repeats, pronouncing my name so slowly it seems to have several extra syllables. “What are you, then?"
A fair question, but a loaded one. I can only shrug. "I'm a demi, technically, but my innate ability is unstable, so I don't use witchcraft. If I can repay you for the goblet in any other way, I will. Just no magik."
"Any other way?" he challenges, his eyes flashing with a wicked glint as they zero in on my chest.
I roll my eyes. "You don't need me to get off. You have a harem for that."
I'm not certain he does, but his father has one, so it would stand to reason.
Reiks shrugs. "I could have you join it."
I grimace in distaste. "Why would you?"
He's amused at my expense again. "Why, indeed? Well, Alis, I’m Natheran Reiks, heir of Anderkan, and from this day onward, until you've repaid the value of my ancestor's goblet, you belong to me. Agreed?"
"Err, no. That's not how it works. I need details. Estimates, both of time and value. A job description. A contract." I'm grasping at straws.
"What's the fun in that?" Reiks counters.
I want to throttle him. Nothing about today has been remotely fun to me, but he's loving this.
“No contract. As for the duration…let’s say you'll serve me until the end of the year. I will not ask you to perform any witchcraft, and well, I suppose I won't demand you warm my bed either. Otherwise, you're mine. And everything you’ll do for me will stay between you and I. Understood?”
I bite my lip, running all his words through my mind. “I have classes.”
“As do I. I won’t take you away from your work, Alis. Your free time, however…” He chuckles easily. “Let’s just say you won’t have much of it.”
Well, it isn’t like I’m doing anything groundbreaking in my spare time currently. Still, my instincts want me to protest, to find a loophole.
"Or I could go to your family for compensation."
That little snake. He has me cornered, and he knows it. "Fine!"
Then Reiks’s mouth curves, slowly shattering his casual mask.
I wish I'd seen this smile before I’d agreed to anything. Before ever speaking to him. I would have run away screaming in the other direction.
Oh, it's beautiful. Devastatingly so. In that moment, he looks like a warrior of old, calculating, cruel, brutal, and merciless. The kind of man who'd do anything to get what he wants.
Reiks is terrifying.
And he's so, so not common. What I feel from him isn't just an echo, a memory of power.
I sense more.
I sense wildness.
I sense the same thing that slithers inside my chest, coiling to strike at the first sight of weakness.
He's a bound beast.
"I suppose that from now on, you’re my bitch, Alis.”
What the hell did I get myself into?
