Page 32 of Once Upon a Fable

I’d always thought I’d be brave when faced with danger. I’d never shied away from risk and received praise from my self-defense teacher. I even remembered bragging to my good friend Katie, from my local bouldering gym, that I would beat up any man before he could touch me. If I could master stone, I could master men.

How wrong I’d been.

How stupidly, awfullywrong.

This wasn’t just a man. He wasn’t some overweight jerk on the street. He wasn’t some nerd from an online dating site. He was...feral.

Don’t be weak, Gem.

Get ready to fight.

I held my breath as he stalked into the small cell, his bare feet whispering over dank concrete. Unlike when I’d first seen him, he wasn’t naked. The shirt he wore looked as if he’d crawled through caves and gotten into a fight with thorns, and his slacks weren’t much better. The cuffs were torn around his ankles, ragged and discolored with dirt. His long hair had been scraped back to his nape, and his skin once again glittered with scars.

Thick ones, fine ones, crisscross ones, and ones that looked like round pennies along his jaw. Each wound had lost the redness of healing andturned silvery with age. His pain wasn’t recent. Whatever he’d lived through was in the past, but it’d scarred his soul as well as his body.

Needing oxygen, I sucked in a shaky breath as he closed the door behind him. He didn’t have a common scent. Once again, a faint whisper of rivers and woods entered my nose. He seemed to have adopted the earthiness, the ivy sharpness, and the fragrant subtleness of the valley’s neglected wildflowers.

He made a show of inserting a key into his pocket before crossing the small space and stopping a few feet from me.

He didn’t speak.

I didn’t speak.

I hated that my fight had fled before I’d even tried. That curse words and shouted slurs for my freedom remained stubbornly out of reach. If he hadn’t talked to me when he’d strangled me, I would’ve been adamant he wouldn’t understand me.

It wasn’t that he looked uneducated or not smart enough to converse, more like he was above such practices. The way he watched me spoke of an undomesticated creature who didn’t use words often. His wildness and aura of viciousness hinted that he hadn’t been around another human in a very, very long time. Perhaps so long, he’d forgotten he was human himself.

It’s just shock, Gem.

Stop making him scarier than he is.

He’s just a man.

He’s a hermit with bad clothes and overgrown hair.

A nudist most likely who lives in a cult.

Oh, God.

That thought brought a trailer load of other worries. Maybe I had it all wrong, and this place wasn’t just his, after all. Maybe it was some secret coven that was hidden for a reason. What if I’d stumbled onto something I was never meant to see?

My chest rose and fell as my breathing accelerated.

Even if I do fight and get free, who else is out there?

He noticed.

His dark eyes fell to my chest, narrowing as my breasts moved beneath my windbreaker. A scalding intensity drenched his stare, making my body flinch to get away.

I pressed harder against the wall, wishing I could dissolve right through it.

Licking his bottom lip, he dropped his stare, scanning me from head to toe. Slowly, carefully, so thoroughly it felt like a violation and seduction all at once, he drank me in.

The front of his slacks tightened as he hardened. He made no move to hide his reaction. Nor did he move to unbutton and use me.

He merely kept staring, his eyes scratching over my skin.

I kept my head up and lips pressed together. I didn’t let him see that his stare affected me. That the sheer potency of being alone in a tiny cell with him made me sick to my stomach.