Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,108

down on my dread enough to train my entire mind on listening.

As my captors walk in, my fingers keep clutching the blanket. It’s the only protection I have against their harsh gazes and sneers. They can’t be bothered to go to the trouble of clothing me, but they don’t want me coming down with a chill either. I’m valuable enough to be kept alive but not remotely comfortable.

The man at the head of the bunch gazes down at me where I’m crouched on the hard metal floor, his nose wrinkling in undisguised revulsion. It must stink in here—I must stink, considering I can’t remember the last time they bothered to even hose me off. I’ve lived in filth for so many years I can’t tell anymore.

As far as I can tell, that man—the one with hair as brilliantly yellow as the petals of a sunflower and ears that rise to inhuman points—is the leader. He doesn’t do much other than watch and order the others around. But he’s the one who unlocks my cage. I have to focus on him.

The second man, the one with the rotund belly and heavy feet, goes to the plain cupboard that’s the room’s only other furnishing. He gets out the little ivory-handled knife and a glass vial. My skin twitches in anxious anticipation.

The third man bends down beside the cage until he’s almost at my level. His lips curl into a grin that looks cut into his ruddy face. That one isn’t burly like the other two but all sharp angles, from the tips of his ears to the toes of his narrow boots to the tufts of his blueish white hair that poke from his scalp like icicles.

I’m uncomfortably familiar with those angles. Occasionally he gets bored enough with whatever else his life consists of to saunter in here and “play” with me. He’ll poke and prod until he forces a gasp of pain out of me.

They have a rule about injuring me—I’ve heard them talk about it. Nothing that could jeopardize my life is allowed. The sharp-edged man-who-is-really-a-monster has made a hobby out of discovering all the ways he can torment my body without causing any tangible damage.

Not surprisingly, he’s always the one who volunteers to pin me down.

I could make it even easier for them. I could sprawl out on my belly the way they’ll want me positioned so he has no reason to shove me down. But he’ll push me around anyway, and whatever small fragment of pride I’ve somehow held onto balks at the thought of prostrating myself quite that willingly.

The yellow-haired one leans forward. Black tattoos in unfamiliar symbols mark all of their bodies, but he has the most, several on his arms and neck, one poking from his hairline at his temple. A twisting line from one stretches across his chin all the way to his lips.

He’s going to say the word—the word that spills from his mouth with a resonance that prickles down my spine. The word that opens the door.

The word I have to learn.

He rests his hand on the latch. His lips part, and the sounds slip out fast and sibilant, one blending into the next. “Fee-doom-ice-own.”

That’s what it sounds like to my pricked ears, anyway. That’s what it has sounded like since I realized some kind of magic holds my cage closed and that the word is the key, although it took several attempts before I was sure of each of the syllables.

I’m still not really sure, or I’d be able to say it properly, wouldn’t I? Just how much does his voice lilt upwards with the “ice” bit? How long does he stretch out the “o” in “own”?

What am I missing?

I might be missing the capacity to work any kind of magic word at all, no matter how well I say it. In the back of my head, I know that, not any flaw in my concentration, could be the problem. Because these aren’t really men, and they have powers beyond anything I understood before they threw me in this cage. He says the word quietly and quickly, but I don’t think he’s all that worried about me overhearing it.

He doesn’t think I could use it. But it’s all I have.

He unhooks the latch. The hinges squeak as the door swings open.

The cage is barely big enough for me. When I’m sitting, I can touch the bars overhead without raising my arm completely. Standing is out of the question. But the doorway