Page 11 of Winter Unleashed
“Right, you heard me.No. I won’t let you use Astrid as bait for Artemis. You’d never win against her anyway.”
My head slammed into the wall so hard I saw stars. It happened so fast I hadn’t even noticed I’d moved until after my head broke through the wall. Dazed, I slowly righted myself again, glaring at the fairy.
She walked toward me way too calmly. “Request a meeting with Astrid.”
“No.”
I held my breath waiting for her to toss me across the room again, but nothing happened. Honestly? Her lack of reaction was freakier than anything else she could have done. Then she smiled, and I realized I was wrong.
“You will regret refusing me, Ember Steele.”
Chapter Four
Iwoke up in a strange bed in an unfamiliar room. The sounds of someone chanting floated in through the open windows. A warm breeze made the sheer curtains billow into the room. I slid from the bed and shuffled to the window. What I saw had me taking a step back.
A striking woman with dark brown skin and ankle length gray hair that contradicted her apparent youth, stood in front of an enormous cauldron in the middle of the backyard. As I watched her, the energy rolling off her became unavoidable, and I stepped further away from the window.
She looked up at me then, her eyes pinning me with such hatred I gasped and took another step backward. Before I could move again, she was standing in front of me with a soft expression that contradicted what I’d just seen.
“You’re finally awake,” she said with a smile.
“Uh-huh,” I grunted. “Who are you?”
She frowned a little. “Do you really not know who I am?”
I studied her for a while, letting her energy move over me. “Celeste.”
“Well done.”
“Why am I here?”
She clucked her tongue. “You know that as well.”
I rolled my eyes and sighed. “Seriously? You kidnapped me because I won’t help you? Did you train Cybil, or did she train you? You have awfully similar persuasion tactics. Are you going to torture me too?” And there I went, letting my mouth run faster than my brain again.
“You’re a smart girl, so you’ll understand taking you away from all that you know and love is the best way to break you down. Once I have you distraught and weak enough, I can build you back up the way I want you. Then you won’t say no to me ever again.”
I snorted out a laugh. “It seems you don’t know me as well as you like to think you do. I’m not likely to do something I don’t want to, even if you hurt me. Let’s not forget, I’ve been beaten down my entire life.Ibuilt myself back up, no one else.”
Her thin lips pulled into a grin, revealing small white teeth and the next thing I knew I was on the ground on the other side of the room. She strode over to me and crouched down to take my hair in her hand, forcing me to look at her. “Oh, I’ll break you, and youwillgive me what I want. For now, I’ll show you what happens when you don’t.”
She dropped her hold on me and stood straight. I braced for pain, but nothing happened. I sat staring at her, barely breathing as she stared down at me. For a long while, all she did was move her lips almost imperceptibly. Then she stopped even that. After a few moments, a searing pain hit my chest so hard I couldn’t breathe. I looked down expecting to see myself on fire, but there was nothing to see, nothing to tell me what was happening.
My hands moved between my breasts where it felt like a gaping hole should be, but the extreme pain had caused no visible damage. The agony became so awful I curled into a ball and waited for it to stop.
“I’ll give you tonight to recover. Then we get to work,” she said as she strode out of the room, locking the door behind her.
I lifted my gaze to the open windows, and as if she could read my thoughts, they slammed shut and bars slid over them. There was no way out. I was stuck in a room waiting for a maniac to do who knew what with me… again.
There was nothing left for me to do but crawl my way back to the bed. With the pain still clouding my mine, I could at least try to get comfortable while in agony. With some effort I got myself onto the bed. I pulled my shirt up to look at my chest. There were no cuts, no bruises, no marks at all. But it felt like she’d ripped my heart out and poured acid into the open wound.
After what felt like hours, and maybe it was, the pain subsided, and I drifted off to sleep. My dreams were full of blood and pain. A man with wavy black hair that just touched his shoulders stood over me with his head thrown back as he laughed. When he looked at me, I saw a white streak running through the center of his hair.
Something in the way he looked at me scared me to my core, and I averted my eyes. It was then I realized I was on the ground with blood covering most of my clothes. I just couldn’t tell whether the blood had come from me or someone else.
The man grabbed me by my hair and lifted me to stand, he pulled me so high my feet barely touched the ground. “You think you’re good enough to be mine?” he spat.
“I don’t even know who you are,” I said in a surprisingly steady voice. “But if you don’t let go of me, I’m going to make you wish you’d never laid eyes on me.”