claimed by the demon king

Chapter 4

The woman looked like someone who had never once needed to repeat herself. Her eyes were an unusual blue, steady and assessing, moving across the destroyed room the way you move across a problem you have already started solving. Two men stepped in behind her. Broad. Silent. The kind of still that isn't relaxed.

"You were quite difficult to track," she said. Almost conversational. "For someone who had no idea she was being tracked."

I pushed myself to my feet. My hands were still shaking and I didn't try to hide it.

"Who are you," Yara said from behind me. "And what do you want."

"I have no business with you." The woman's eyes didn't move from my face. "Just her."

"I don't know you," I said. "I have never seen you before in my life. Whatever you think I am or whatever you think I've done, I suggest you let it go. We were leaving anyway."

"Were you," she said. Something moved through her expression that wasn't quite amusement. More like someone confirming a calculation. "Isn't it a little late for that."

"What do you want from Rhea," Yara pressed.

"Simple." She said it the way people say things that are not simple at all. "I want her to come with me."

"She is not going anywhere with you," Lucas said, stepping in front of me.

He crossed the room without anyone touching him and hit the wall on the other side.

"What the hell," Yara breathed.

The woman exhaled. Slowly. Like we were taking longer than she had scheduled for.

"Take her," she said to the men. "We are done here."

"Don't..." I tried to step back. Two hands closed around my arms before I completed the motion. Strong. Practiced. The grip of people who have done this before.

Yara moved. She was yanked backward and pinned against the wall by nothing, struggling against air. Lucas hit the same wall the same way, still dazed, held without a single hand on him.

"What is this," Yara said, fighting against nothing and getting nowhere. "What are you doing."

"Stay out of this." The woman's voice was almost gentle. "Both of you. Your friend is not who you think she is. Get out of this town the moment we are gone and don't come back." She turned toward the door. "It is the kindest thing I can offer you."

Her footsteps were already moving away. I felt the pull on my arms.

I stopped fighting.

I was empty. Whatever had come out of me when I screamed had taken everything with it and I had nothing left to spend on this.

I turned back to look at them both. Lucas against the wall, jaw tight, watching me with an expression I had never seen on his face before. Yara's eyes red at the edges, still fighting the invisible grip even though it wasn't moving.

I thought about how long I had known them. How Yara had gotten into bed beside me last night without making me explain why I was scared. How Lucas always put both hands on my face when he needed me to actually hear him.

"It is okay," I said. My throat was tight around the words but my voice held. "Don't fight it. Leave in the morning like we planned." A pause. "I love you both."

"We are not leaving without you," Lucas said.

"We will find you Riri." Yara's voice cracked at the last word and she let it. "We are not leaving."

"Please." Just the one word. I didn't have anything else.

Then I was through the door.

Outside, the woman spoke something low and the air in front of her tore open. Light and dark folding together, the edges moving like something alive and slightly wrong. She stepped through without looking back.

Before I could process what I had just seen the men pulled me forward and the world came apart at the seams.

Sound first. Voices, low and scattered, coming from somewhere I couldn't locate.

"Is that her."

"She doesn't look like what I expected."

I blinked hard and pulled my vision back together piece by piece.

I was standing in the center of a massive chamber. High ceilings. Rows of seats filled with people, all of them looking directly at me with varying degrees of curiosity, pity, and an open disdain I hadn't done anything yet to earn.

I had walked into rooms where people didn't want me before. This was a different category of that.

"It gets easier," the woman's voice came from ahead.

She was seated in a silver chair at the front of the room. Same composed posture. Same assessing eyes. Like she had simply been waiting here for me to arrive and the waiting had not inconvenienced her at all.

I spotted a man near the middle of the rows before he spoke. Red beard. Eyes the color of something that had never been warm. He was watching me the way you watch something you have already decided about.

"Have you met him," a voice called from somewhere in the crowd.

"There is no point asking that." The red-bearded man leaned forward. "I say we kill her and be done with all of this."

My stomach dropped.

"Kill her and he comes for every one of us." The woman Anya, someone had called her said it without raising her voice. "You know that, Barnes."

"Anya." A woman's voice from the left cut cleanly across the room. She looked like someone who had been beautiful for so long it had stopped being the most interesting thing about her. Her eyes moved to me with the flat assessment of someone running numbers. "She is his strength. Which makes her his weakness. That is what we use."

"Thank you, Sapphire." Anya turned back to me. "Now. You are wondering why you are here."

"I am wondering a lot of things," I said. "Starting with whether I can leave."

The answer, based on the room, was clearly no.

"You are the fated mate of the demon king," Anya said. "He has woken. We believe you are the reason." She let that sit for a moment. "What you felt at the ocean last night. What happened in your lodge just now. That was not random and it was not nothing. It is what you are."

"What I am," I repeated.

"Yes."

I looked around the room. All those faces. Barnes with his blood-colored eyes who had just suggested killing me like it was a scheduling matter. Sapphire watching me like a variable in an equation. The rest of them somewhere between those two positions.

I laughed.

I couldn't help it. It came out of me the way things come out when the alternative is something worse.

"I am going to leave now," I said, and turned to find a door.

My feet didn't move.

I looked down. I looked up.

"You will stay and listen," Anya said, "unless you would prefer to leave in a body bag. Your choice."

I pressed my lips together. Looked at the ceiling. Made a private note about what I thought of that offer.

"Fine," I said. "But I need you to promise me he cannot find me here."

"This place is warded. Given his current state he cannot reach you." A pause. "Not yet."

Not yet. I filed that away and did not think about what it implied.

"I will cooperate," I said. "All of it. Whatever you need. Just keep him away from me." I met her eyes. "And get my friends out of this town. Tonight. That is my condition."

Anya considered me for a moment. Something shifted in her expression that I couldn't read.

"Fine," she said.

"Good." I exhaled. "Now what do you need me to..."

The doors came open.

The room changed before he appeared. Like the air pressure dropped. Like something in the chamber recognized what was standing outside it and made adjustments.

Anya's face went very still.

In three years of knowing Yara I had watched her be afraid exactly once. Anya's expression right now had the same quality. Not panic. Something quieter. The specific stillness of someone recalculating everything they thought they knew.

I turned around.

He stood in the open doorway. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Clothes still wrong for this century. He looked exactly the same as he had on the beach except now he was standing in front of a room full of people who had spent a thousand years preparing for this and not one of them was moving.

His eyes found me immediately. They didn't look for me. They just found me, the way you find something you already knew the location of.

"It seems," he said, low and unhurried and completely unbothered by the silence, "that you have something that belongs to me."

The room did not breathe.

I thought about the beach. About his footprints that stopped in the sand. About this place being warded, hidden, unreachable.

About not yet.