Page 6 of Escape from the Green

I wasn't going to repay her lifelong kindness by heading right the fuck back to my family who likely thought I had been dead for years while fuck-knew what happened to her.

Not on my fucking watch.

"Let's go," I said, giving her a nod as I moved toward the barn door, stepping out, looking around.

"Most of the guards are stationed inside to make sure the Prince is safe."

The Prince.

Shit.

My head whipped over to look at her, reading the situation in a second, realizing just how bad it was for her.

Seeing the realization in my face, her gaze dropped to her feet, uncomfortable with me sharing that knowledge.

"It's just Noc on the front grounds today," she informed her shoes.

"And lucky for us, Noc can barely walk around anymore," I agreed, watching her head shoot up, brows drawn together. "Bad knees, especially in this weather. Knowing him, if he saw us, he would just pretend he didn't and then blame the other guards and say you must have escaped out the back or side."

"Not exactly untrue. I did escape out the side."

Of course she did. Because while she might have been sheltered and submissive most of the time, she had a good head on her shoulders. She paid attention. She had always known just how to play the guards.

"He just turned to look at the house," I informed her, not even hesitating as I reached down to grab her glove-clad hand, squeezing hard so she wouldn't slip through, and dragging her along as I fucking bolted from the barn toward the tree line.

There was a strange pulling sensation when I reached the end of what had always been my chain length, like my body was rebelling against me going any further. Like the elephant beast in her story. But unlike her human realm creature, I wasn't a fucking gentle anything. I wasn't going to stay captive when I was given a chance to be my own man again.

"Hey!" came the half-hearted, almost hesitant bark of Noc just as my foot crossed over a border that was just a couple hundred yards away from me for years, but might as well have been an entire realm away.

But I didn't stop, not even knowing that the body attached to that voice had brought me to submission more times than I cared to admit with a boot to my ribs, cracking them for the hundredth time, with a cane to the plates on my back, sending a pain through my body that there were no words to describe. He, along with all the guards, had been my tormentors, had been my judge and jury and near-executioners. Just a simple "draca" from them would usually freeze me on the spot.

But I wasn't their whipping boy anymore.

And I had someone other than myself to save.

Not even decades of training at their hands could stop me from getting Amethyst away from the fate she would suffer at the Prince's hands.

Because there was only one prince in The Green anymore.

The Winters were, technically, Light.

The only prince was Dark.

Not only was he Dark, but he was the offspring of one of the most vile, heartless, cruel Dark kings anyone had known in too many lifetimes to count.

Any child of his, quite frankly, had no fucking right to put his Dark, bloody hands on someone like Amy.

The things he would do to her...

I shook my head, clearing it of those disgusting thoughts as I kept dragging her, past endless twisted, leafless trees, knowing she wasn't going to be able to run for long, but understanding that I couldn't be gentle with her. Not right then. If I had to pick her up and carry her until we were in a better location to stop and rest, that was what I would do.

Having spent so much time locked in her home or in the human realm, she didn't understand just how massive The Green was. She had likely been thinking that she could get into the woods and within a day, be back into the human realm.

And maybe that would be true of some parts of The Green, but it wasn't true about the area around her family's land. It was going to be a long, cold, brutal couple of days.

That was something I planned to explain to her once we were far enough away to be able to stop for even a minute to catch breath.

It wasn't until I felt the burn in my own lungs that I was able to think clearly through the panic of getting her out of there, quit my racing thoughts enough, get my head out of my ass enough, to hear the frantic, labored breathing coming from Amethyst that sounded almost like whimpering.