Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 88010 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 440(@200wpm)___ 352(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88010 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 440(@200wpm)___ 352(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
“You have my stuff in this weird cell,” I say. “Why?”
“Because you have been taken from me once before, and because you have not been obedient for more than a few minutes at a time before or since. You are an uncontrollable quantity. I like to make arrangements for all manner of outcomes. This is one. It is also possible that you continue to sleep in our bed and enjoy my favor. It very much depends on you.”
I can’t tell him what my actual plan is, that I am intending to run away and never, ever see him again because he spanked me and I hated it. When I think it that way in my brain, I do feel like I might be overreacting. But then again, I am a captive facing yet more captivity. The fact that my thoughts are not clear does not mean they are wrong. It also doesn’t mean they’re right. Fuck. I don’t know what to think or do. I just know that I am completely furious and ashamed and now freaked out by the cell.
“I thought you loved me.”
“I do. That is why I intend to keep you.” He reaches over me and opens the door of the cell. “Step in. Let’s see you experience a little captivity for your disobedience.”
“I don’t want to go in there.”
“I don’t know why you keep thinking you have a choice,” he says, sounding every inch the villain, and looking like it too. He’s wearing his golden scaled armor again, his long, dark hair half up and half down. Ornix is incredibly and impossibly attractive. He is so fuckable that even in this moment of him saying something truly horrible, I’m kind of turned on.
I splay my arms and legs and wings like a cat trying to avoid a bath as he nudges me in.
“Oh, my, you absolutely cannot cooperate in any sense, can you?” he growls, grabbing me up in his arms and carrying me in.
I start fighting. Scrabbling for the door, biting him and kicking him and doing about as much damage as I’d do if I were trying to bite an actual dragon.
“Let me fucking go!” I scream. “Let me fucking go!”
And then I remember that I know how to summon a portal. The next word that comes out of my mouth isn’t a shriek for mercy or a curse at him. It’s the word that rips worlds open. And it works. Immediately.
Ornix has not dragged me into a cell. I have dragged him directly onto the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The two of us appear outside a theater, me gripped in his massive arms.
“You!”
I look into the shocked face of a man I’ve seen before. Last time I saw him, I was falling out of the sky in front of him with broken wings. I’m almost certain it’s the same guy.
“Oh, my god, hi!” I wave at him.
“How did you do that?” Ornix growls the question at me, putting me down. We are drawing attention, but we are doing it in a way that allows us some plausible deniability, because this is a city where nothing real ever happens.
“How did I open a portal?”
“Yes.”
“What? Like it’s hard?”
He misses the reference, and drags me off into the nearest doorway.
“You are putting us both at risk of the kind of exposure that will change our worlds forever.”
“I don’t care. You were trying to put me in a cage.”
A second later, we’re both in the cage again. Fuck. He knows how to do the portal magic even better than I do. Quick as a flash, Ornix wraps a silken tie pulled from the bed frame around my mouth so I can’t speak, and can’t summon a portal.
“What the fuck is going on!”
I can’t speak, but the man we keep appearing in front of can.
Ornix swings around to face the poor guy. “You’re mad,” he says. “You’re hallucinating. Nobody will ever believe you.”
Then he snaps his fingers and pushes the accountant back through the portal before sealing it again.
I laugh, because this chaos is funny as hell. He likes to think he’s so in control, but me and Nox, we’re pushing against it. Me especially. I want freedom, or power. Whatever it is, I know he’s trying to take it from me.
Ornix
I have no idea how my attempts to maintain order only end up causing chaos, but there is something about the alchemy of a human that seems to make it unavoidable.
I knew she had snuck out of her class again. I knew she had not taken her punishment well, but I never imagined this interlude would end with me accidentally bringing a random human into our dungeon bedchamber.
“Sit down on the bed and don’t talk,” I tell her.
She makes an indication toward the gag that she can’t, but I think we both know she could articulate her annoyances if she wanted to. This girl is one act of rebellion away from…