Cruel Enchantment (25 page)

“Subject of the Unseelie Court or not, you are under arrest, Blacksmith. If the Shadow Queen wants you back, she’s going to have to pay for it.” She waved her hand. “Get them both out of my sight. Emmaline, Lars has missed you. He can’t wait to see you again.”

Emmaline went stock-still and paper pale at the mention of that name. Her reaction made a strong wave of protective-ness surge through him, made him fight the guards as hard as he could.

The guards yanked him back toward a door partially concealed in the throne room wall. He watched with rage simmering in his veins as they manhandled Emmaline out of the room. She’d appeared in shock when confronted with the Summer Queen, almost pushed over the edge psychologically. Now she was angry, pulling and pushing at the iron-strong hands of the guards as they dragged them both out of the throne room through a door that let out an odor of old blood and unwashed bodies as soon as it was opened.

The dungeons.

Just like the dungeons in the Black Tower, these were dank and filled with misery. It appeared even the shining ones couldn’t escape all the ugliness of life.

They tossed him into a small cell with a concrete floor, piss bucket, and heap of moldy straw. Emmaline went into an identical one beside him. The fact that they weren’t completely separated was the only upside to this ordeal.

He collapsed to the floor when they pushed him inside, his palms and almost his nose finding the gritty floor. “Are you all right?” he asked as he pushed up and looked over at her. She was sitting on the floor, one hand splayed behind her and her head bowed, hair concealing her face.

“The key.” Her voice was rough with emotion.

“I have it.” He moved closer to her. “
Emmaline
, are you all right?”

It took her a moment to look at him. Her eyes weren’t quite focused. “I’m fine.”

She wasn’t, of course. Seeing the Summer Queen again had thrown her. That name,
Lars
, had been like a kick to her abdomen. He licked his lips and looked around the cell for some way to escape. He wanted to punch something—
someone
, maybe someone named Lars. “How’s your injury?”

“Messed up again.”

“We’ll get out of here. Don’t worry.”

She shook her head and looked up at him with a film of despair over her eyes.
What was wrong with her?
She needed to snap out of it. “She wants me back, Aeric. You’ll get out of here. I won’t.”

There was a note of helplessness in her voice. Emmaline Siobhan Keara Gallagher was not helpless. She was a fighter, a survivor. Had seeing the Summer Queen flipped her backward in time, back to when she’d been under the Seelie Royal’s thumb? What sort of trauma had she received at the Summer Queen’s hands that would cause that kind of reaction?

He gripped the bars that separated them so hard his knuckles went white. “You fucking stop that right now. You have to get out of here, Emmaline. The mission. The key.
The key
. Don’t you remember?”

The haze cleared from her eyes and they locked on his with a ferocity that he recognized. “The key. You’re right.” Her expression hardened. “I need to make it through this.”

“Fuck, yeah, you do. The Shadow Queen will bargain for us. We’ll both get out.”

She shook her head. “The Shadow Queen can bargain for you, not me.”

“You can bargain for your release with the promise of the piece. She’ll let you go if you agree to give it to her once you get it.”

“No.”
The word was a lash of anger. Her expression turned vicious for a moment. “She can’t know about the piece, let alone possess it, Aeric. She can’t be allowed that much power. The piece needs to go to the Shadow Queen. I see that very clearly, having met her. The Shadow Queen lacks the . . . insanity of the Summer Queen.”

“Why does the Summer Queen want you back so badly?”

“I was the perfect assassin. I could take on the appearance of anyone, I was strong, I healed fast, and I wasn’t much trouble.” She grinned. “I’m much more trouble now that a few centuries have passed. The Summer Queen just doesn’t realize it yet.”

“She really fucked you up, didn’t she?”

Emmaline’s grin faded and her eyes went out of focus again. “It wasn’t easy back then.”

His voice was a low growl. “What did she do to you?”

Her face took on that haze again, but she blinked and came back to herself almost right away. “I didn’t realize until years afterward that she’d murdered my parents and arranged for the conditions that pressed me into her service. Back then I really thought they’d died by accident. I was just a kid. I didn’t put it all together until later on.”

“She
did
kill your parents. I’m sure of it.”

“Yes.” The word sounded heavy with a grief he wasn’t sure she’d ever truly allowed herself to process.

“What else did she do, besides make sure you starved for a couple years?”

“I was ten when they died. Yes, you’re right, I starved for two years, though not all the time. I wasn’t totally alone. Graeme helped me sometimes.”

“Not enough,” he rasped in anger.

“After I’d had a good taste of the world as an orphan, that’s when the Summer Queen took me in. It was nice at first. I was warm and there was food, regular baths, safety. She made it clear it wasn’t for free. I was expected to work for my keep. She gave me crossbows and I trained with professionals. I learned how to use a knife, how to fight. When I turned fourteen, that’s when my first order to kill came.” Her fingers curled tight around the bars. “I resisted.”

“And what happened?”

She touched her abdomen in what seemed like an unconscious gesture and Aeric remembered the scars he’d seen there and on her upper thighs. His body tightened.

“What happened?” His voice was a low, enraged lash in the fetid air.

She jerked herself out of her stare and looked at him. “At that point, I trusted them.” She blinked. “They broke it, my trust.”

“How?”

“They took away my security, my comfort.” She looked away from him. “They showed me what life would be like if I disobeyed.”

His hands tightened on the bars.
“How?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Emmaline, you can trust me.” He touched her fingers and she grabbed on to them through the bars as if he could save her.

Drawing a ragged breath, she forced the words out in a rush. “Forced nudity, solitary confinement, making me wear a black hood for as long as I could go without food or water.” She pressed her lips together, trembling, while he mentally kicked his ass a hundred different ways for forcing her into the burlap sack. No wonder she’d gone berserk. “I don’t want to talk specifics. The bottom line is that they broke me down and built me back up the way they wanted me. By that time only the killer they’d trained me to be was left. It suited them.”

“You keep saying
they
, Emmaline. Who besides the Summer Queen did these things?” He was pretty sure he knew the answer.

“Lars. It was always Lars. The Summer Queen never got her hands dirty; she only gave orders.” Her hand went to her stomach again.

His gaze flicked downward. “What about the scars? Did Lars make those?”

She nodded.

He was going to kill this man. Tear his limbs off. Some of those scars were in very intimate places and
she’d been a child
. “
How?
”

Emmaline had a faraway look on her face. It took her several moments to answer. “Knives,” she whispered.

“Look at me.”

She continued to stare off into the distance.

Blinking slowly, she turned her head toward him and her eyes focused on his face. “Sorry. I haven’t thought about that in a long time. I blocked it out.”

Aeric gripped the bars and fought his temper. He’d always had a bad temper, but right now it was boiling. He wanted to find the Summer Queen and rip her apart with his bare hands. He wanted to strap Lars down and deliver that bastard’s karma fiftyfold.

He took a deep breath, knowing he needed to at least seem calm for Emmaline’s sake. “Hey, Emmaline, it’s okay. That was a long time ago. It’s over and it will never happen again.” He spoke the last words with icy vehemence. He needed to get her out of here before the Summer Queen made him eat his words.

It
had
been a long time ago, but what had happened to Emmaline had cut deep and left emotional scars. Those scars hadn’t healed; she’d only slapped some psychic Band-Aids over them. Seeing the Summer Queen again had ripped those Band-Aids off and she was bleeding.

He wouldn’t be able to handle it if they hauled Emmaline away to fuck her up, bring her back to the same emotional state she’d been in when she’d worked for the queen. He’d go nuts if that happened and he was stuck in here unable to help her. He wasn’t sure how much magick the Summer Queen had—but despite being Seelie some of it was dark. It was possible she could use magick to strip away some of Emmaline’s free will, just as she’d done when Emmaline was a child.

He had to get Emmaline out of here. Now.

“Funny. Feels like it happened yesterday.” She gave him a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “I never should have come into Piefferburg. It’s brought up junk that I buried a long time ago. I should have laid it all out to the HFF and we could have tried to arrange for someone else to come. It would have been hard, but maybe we could have managed it.”

He motioned to her. “Come here.”

She scooted over to the bars as close as she could get to him. Sighing, she laid her head against them and closed her eyes. He stroked her hair, wishing he could take her into his arms, regretting he’d ever doubted her story and hating himself for thinking she’d come to Piefferburg to go back to the Summer Queen.

He settled for resting his head against hers on the other side of the bars and closing his eyes, images of retribution against the Summer Queen and Lars dancing through his head.

 

 

THE
next morning Aeric woke sore and stiff, having fallen asleep slumped on the floor next to Emmaline. He blinked, groggy, realizing the sound of the opening cell door had woken him.

A rose-and-gold-bedecked guard stood in the threshold. “Get up. The Summer Queen has ordered your release.”

“And Emmaline?”

“She stays.”

Emmaline roused beside him, her eyes coming open blearily.

He rubbed his eye with the heel of his palm, chasing one fuck of a headache. “No, I won’t leave without her.”

The guard looked at him as if blue snakes had suddenly sprouted from his head.

“What?” Emmaline pushed into a sitting position. “No, Aeric. That’s crazy. Go. Get out of here!”

He shook his head. “Nope. Not without you, cupcake.”

She pushed to her feet, gesturing in frustration. “Aeric, you can’t help me anyway! You’re locked in a cell! Look, you’re amazing for wanting to stay with me, but you can’t do me any good in here.
Are you hearing me?
Take this chance.”

“Make your decision, Blacksmith,” said the guard. “I won’t stand here all day.”

You can’t do me any good in here. Are you hearing me?
Yeah, he heard her. Maybe he could do her some good beyond these walls. Maybe she was hoping he could.

She needed hope.

But, damn it,
no
. He couldn’t leave her alone, not in her current mental state.

She stared at him, brows knit and jaws locked. Then she limped to the bars and curled her fingers around them. “Come here,” she ordered.

He pushed up and went to her, wrapping his fingers as best he could around hers. “Yes, cupcake?” he drawled.

Her eyelid twitched. Ah, he was annoying her. There was the Emmaline he’d come to know and admire. “You want to get me out of here, right?”

“Of course.”

“Then go be my hero, Aeric.
Go.
”

He hesitated, but it was going to be painful leaving her here, not knowing what the Summer Queen had in store for her.

“Aeric, go,” Emmaline pleaded softly. “Please.”

He slid his fingers through to touch her cheek. “I’m getting you out, Emmaline. No matter what I have to do. Do you understand? Are
you
hearing
me
this time?”

Fear flashed in her eyes. She was worried he’d use the piece of the
bosca fadbh
to bargain for her, and she had reason to be worried. “Don’t tell her—” She glanced at the guard. “Don’t, Aeric. I’ll find a way to get free on my own. Don’t do it.”

“No promises. You can’t stay in here. I saw just how much damage she did to you yesterday and that means you need to get the fuck out of here before she does more.” He pulled away from her.

She tried to grab him as he backed away. “Don’t do it, Aeric. Do you hear me? Don’t!”

He walked away from her, toward the guard. He could still hear her yelling at him clear down the corridor. She was strong, that woman, for not taking the easy way out of this mess.

He hoped she could stay strong for a little longer.

 

 

WRAPPED
in charmed iron, Emmaline knelt at the Summer Queen’s feet. She parted her lips and forced out a strong voice despite her weakening from the effect of iron against her skin. “I won’t go back to working for you.”

“Who said you have a choice?”

Magick flared along Emmaline’s skin, soft and seductive, coaxing her to let down her guard and allow it past so it could have its way with her will. The lucky thing for her was that she was older now—much. And she was more experienced. In the years since she’d left Ireland, she may not have fully dealt with the atrocities of her childhood, but she had found her inner strength in other ways. She was no longer the vulnerable, starving child she’d been, willing to give up her soul for even the ghostliest illusion of a mother figure.