Total pages in book: 154
Estimated words: 144411 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 722(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144411 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 722(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
Whatever energy Asherah passed through her lips and onto mine I feel coursing through me, changing my structure, making me become primal fury.
I feel my teeth sharpen in my mouth, look down to see my fingernails extending and curving, growing into hard claws, feel strength building in the marrow of my bones, giving me power I hadn’t felt since I was sixteen.
Aerik makes a sound of horror and surprise and my gaze shoots to him, pinning him in place. I growl at him, baring my razor teeth, and before I know what I’m doing, I’m jumping out of the tank and landing right in front of the cell.
“From this moment forth, I will never have to listen to you again,” I grind out, my voice sounding less human, more monster.
More Syren.
His mouth opens to say something but I cut him off.
Forever.
My arm shoots out through the bars with my claws extended and I pierce his skin with them, reaching through muscle and fat and bone until I feel his beating heart under my palm. I snarl and close my hand around his heart and pull it back out of his chest and through the bars.
While he’s still looking at me, while he’s still alive for just a few more seconds, I take his still beating heart and shove part of it in my mouth, biting down with needle sharp teeth as ravenous, monstrous hunger takes over.
I make sure it’s the last thing he sees.
CHAPTER 16
Ramsay
It takes me a moment to comprehend what I’m looking at. At first I reckoned the princess was offering some type of meat to the prince just outside the cell.
Then I realized she was holding not meat but a pulsing heart.
Then I came to see that it wasn’t just any heart, but it had come from Aerik himself, and I watched as the princess brought the heart to her mouth and started eating it gleefully.
Aerik’s dead body teeters on its feet for a moment, the sight of her eating his own heart no doubt the last thing he will ever see, and then he topples over, his head smacking the bars as he slumps to the floor. Dead.
I stand here flabbergasted because I still can’t figure out what’s happening.
Princess Maren just pulled her husband’s heart out of his chest and is currently eating that heart like she’s never eaten anything before. She’s eating his heart with more gusto than she did the roast boar the other night.
She’s mad. This woman is pure madness. She needs to be locked up. She’s dangerous and wild and unsafe.
And yet, how is it that I’ve never been so delighted before?
“You have a monstrous little soul, don’t you my dear?” I whisper.
She whips her head toward me and sees me standing in the doorway. She’s literally caught red-handed, her mouth smeared with blood that also drips down her arms and hands and onto her dress, which is partially wet when it wasn’t before.
“What on earth am I supposed to do with you?” I muse to myself.
She just stares at me and finishes eating the heart. I don’t make a move for her, not until I have a plan. She’s clearly deranged and, more than that, clearly not human. She has to be a witch or magicked in some way. Perhaps a demoness. That would explain a lot.
Or maybe she’s just like me and has adapted to this life…differently.
She swallows down the rest of the heart, wiping the back of her hand over her lips and I notice her claws, how they slowly shrink in size before my eyes, until they are just fingers and nails again.
“Are you a sea witch?” I ask carefully. “Have you been sent by Edonia?”
She only scowls at me.
“You know I told you not to do anything stupid.”
“I haven’t done anything stupid,” she snaps. “I only did what I’ve been dying to do for the last ten years.”
“Aye, well, you killed my hostage.”
“You still have me.”
“Do I? Princess, I don’t know what I have at this point. What in god’s name are you?”
“A monster,” she says and smiles. Sharp teeth slowly fade back into her regular ones. Once again she looks like her normal self, though now I’m wondering how normal that self is. Has she been wearing a mask this whole time? Has this creature always been under her skin? I’ve touched her, briefly, but the only thing I noticed was how soft she was.
But I need to take her at her word. She is indeed a monster and if she has the strength suddenly to rip the heart out of her husband, then she has the strength to do that to me, and that’s something I wouldn’t survive. No one with a heart would.
This woman is now my equal.
And therefore, she can’t be trusted not to kill me.