Escape From The Green Read online

  I didn't see her often, though, as her parents sent her off into the human realm every couple of months to slowly age her up, to make her useful to them.

  I had been around the Winters, most especially Opal, enough to know what she would be used for when she was old and pretty enough.

  Then, there was that too, you could say.

  I was only a man.

  It would be wrong to say that I didn't notice the way that coming back the last time, having aged from maybe eighteen to a ripe twenty-two, had made her become truly, breathtakingly gorgeous.

  She was on the tall side like her parents, long-legged, elegantly boned, like her mother. She also had the classic Winters look, just like her older brother and sister. She was light-blonde, her hair kept long and shiny. Her face was angular, but softer than Opal, Jasper, or Jade. Her eyes were large, round, innocent-looking, and of course, green.

  Then, well, there was the curve she took on as a grown woman. The understated, but intoxicating roundness to her hips, her ass, her chest, even her thighs.

  She was fucking perfect.

  And for some unknown reason, she was standing there bundled up like she was going to play in the snow the way she did as a kid in my half-dilapidated barn, fumbling around in her pocket.

  It wasn't that I didn't want her there. If I were being honest, I would say that I had maybe had more than a few fantasies about her walking in and coming toward me and things... progressing.

  But those fantasies usually involved thin, almost see-through nighties and nothing underneath as she ran her hands up my stomach, not full-on snow gear with her fluffy hands moving behind my back while declaring that she was running away and freeing me.

  Of all the crazy things that she could have said.

  "What are you doing?" I asked as I felt the chain shift slightly, making me hiss out my breath. It had been far too long since I started wearing the iron for the pain to be as raw and fresh as it used to, but it still burned.

  "Just trying to..." she said, and there was more pulling on the chains along with the odd brush of her gloves on my bare skin. "There!" she declared, sounding victorious and then I could feel the heavy chains lifting slightly. "Um, these are too heavy for..." she started, and I realized what she had done; she had freed me.

  The sweet, silly girl.

  "Honey, I can't go," I said, turning to face her, her cheeks and the tip of her nose pink from the cold. "You'll get in troub..."

  "I'll be long gone before they even find out," she said, shaking her head. "I'm not leaving you here. Don't be like the elephant tethered to the chair."

  "The... what?" I asked, brows drawn together. What the fuck was an elephant?

  The smile spread for a short second before she pressed her lips together to keep it in check. "They're these huge, gentle giant creatures in the human realm. They weigh tons. And humans can keep them captive by chaining them during most of their lives with heavy chains, but once they are programmed enough, they can just connect them to this tiny chair and the elephant is so submissive by then, that they don't even realize they could just run away. Don't be the elephant."

  Put that way, yeah, I could see her point.

  But I had spent so much of my life trying to keep her from getting in trouble for her kindness; I didn't want there to be any chance someone could find her and trace my freedom back to her. I had seen what had been done to her brother Jasper when he betrayed the family. His body had barely survived the beating and carving it took. I couldn't let her have a similar fate.

  "What are you doing? Shrug off the chains so we can go. Oh, and um... do you even have any, ah, shirts?"

  Fucking hell she was too goddamn cute for her own good.

  "Amethyst," I said, lowering my head slightly. "You are the only child the Winters family has left that they have any chance of using to their advantage. They aren't going to let you go."

  Her eyes went sad at what she knew was a likelihood, but damn if her chin didn't raise and her jaw didn't go tight in determination. "The plan is to be so far gone by the time they find me missing that they can't find me. Which is why you need to stop stalling, get out of those chains, slip into a shirt and shoes if you have them, and get a move on."

  I don't know if it was just the steadfast determination in her small, too soft body, or the bone-deep understanding that if she was running, then shit must have really taken a worse turn for her. She knew she wasn't like Jasper and Jade. She knew she was too sheltered to truly survive in The Green. But whatever was going on was enough to send her out into it in the worst snowstorm in years.

  I shrugged off the chains, hissing the entire time they fell from my skin, left raw and broken open in places.

  I moved away from her, finding the jacket I was given for work assignments because it could slip right over the chains. I didn't have any shirts. But I did have shoes.

  And that was about all I had in the world.

  So I got them on, grabbed the makeshift bag I had made out of a discarded shirt one of the guards left around, and stuffed it full of the stash of food I had gathered all spring through fall, knowing that winter were the lean months, that it was always cold and my body burned more fuel than usual even though my rations stayed the same. I had been doing it for years.

  "Alright," I said, stomach in a painful knot as I stood there, realizing for the first time that there was a chance for me to be free, to not be a prisoner, to make my own way in the world. I had long, long since gotten over any hopes of that. There had never even been a second where freedom was a possibility from the moment they strapped those chains on me so many seasons ago.

  Honestly, it almost felt wrong to leave. As fucking sick as that was to even think for a second.

  That was what years of imprisonment could do to a man.

  That being said, there was no way in hell I was letting Amy out into The Green on her own. I knew she had plans to get free. And I knew her plan was likely to do that alone. But I had watched closely enough through the years to know that that girl in her silly human clothes in my barn with the sweet eyes and the perfect skin and the honey-smooth voice, yeah, she had never stepped a foot off her parents' property her entire life. I, at least, had grown up in The Green. I knew what to watch out for. I knew how to survive. Maybe most importantly, I knew how to take care of her until she got wherever she was going.

  I wasn't going to let her take that journey alone, knowing some fates in The Green were likely much worse even than what her evil witch of a mother had planned for her.

  I knew that.

  She didn't.

  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 g
love-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.

  I stopped mid-stride, having to reach out to grab her to stop her momentum forward, my hand dropping hers so both could land on her shoulders.

  Her cheeks and nose weren't the same charming, sweet, cool-kissed pink they had been back in my barn. All her porcelain pale skin was suddenly almost alarmingly red. Underneath whatever absurd layers of clothes she had on which made her very slight body almost as wide as my own, her chest was rising and falling too fast; the puffs of white air coming out of her nose and mouth were too frequent.

  How the hell long had I been dragging her? Completely unaware of her inability to keep up?

  My hand reached up, my finger pressing into her soft lips, pushing them closed. "In and out through the nose, slow and steady," I told her when her brows knitted at the strange gesture.

  Of course she would be out of shape. She spent almost every moment of her day inside the Winters compound. She had no time to even enjoy the goddamn sunshine, let alone get any exercise.

  Her breathing quickly slowed; her chest rose and fell more evenly; the redness became a cool-flushed pink again.

  "Better?" I asked, finger still pressing into her lips, making her response a nod instead of words. "Sorry, I just knew we had to get as far as possible before we stopped." My hand fell and she gave a small, almost wobbly smile.

  "Sorry I'm such a pathetic fellow jailbreaker," she said, shaking her head a little self-deprecatingly. "I guess I understand why the humans are always talking about cardio."

  "Cardio?" I repeated, brows knitted.

  "Yeah, so they aren't the first to go during the zombie apocalypse."

  "What the hell is a zombie?"

  To that, there was a short, utterly still moment before her smile spread far enough to make her eyes crinkle as she let out a laugh that was jingling and musical, a sound that somehow managed to make an unfamiliar smile tug at my own unpracticed lips just hearing it. "What?" I asked when she shook her head at me.

  "It's just strange to live half my life in The Green and the other half in the human realm. Both cultures are so different. Every time I came back to the compound, I would talk about things that, to me, were normal because I had been around humans for so long, but to everyone else, it was like speaking in tongues."

  The compound.

  Not home.

  That wasn't lost on me.

  "And no one wanted you to tell them about the human realm?"

  She snorted at that, looking down at her feet, and shaking her head a bit sadly. "The Winters? Opal and Declan Winters, the holier than thou Light fae with Dark connections? They think humans are sub-species."

  "Well, I've never seen one, but I doubt that's the case. What the hell is a zombie?"

  To that, her head snapped back up, her smile warm, obviously delighted in my interest in the things she had to teach me. "They're humans who have died then been reanimated, but they are brainless and soulless things that only think about eating."

  I felt my smirk tip up as a brow rose, having a feeling I knew where this was going. "And what do they eat?"

  "Human flesh. Especially brains. It makes for really interesting, albeit bloody and disgusting, movies."

  Movies.

  I knew the term, but had never seen one myself.

  The way she talked about them, the way she talked about the human realm as a whole, everything about her animated and excited, it almost made me want to do the unthinkable- cross out of The Green.

  I wasn't exactly raised with the disdain for humans that the Winters obviously had. My culture was small, secluded, rich in tradition, and wholly insulated even from other fae. Because the other fae thought us extinct and if they knew we weren't, we'd likely be hunted and imprisoned in masse. So we had always, in a way, lumped humans in with all the other types of fae, believing they might have been interesting, but knowing they were likely dangerous to us and our way of life.

  "You liked your time in their world." It wasn't a question, but she answered anyway.

  "What I got to see of it, yes. I didn't exactly have any more freedom than I do here. I had a tutor, guards, and a nanny whenever I was there. We stayed in this big building surrounded by walls, keeping the 'dangerous humans' away from me. After countless years of begging, I finally got my tutor and nanny to agree to let me have some human things like a television and some of their food instead of things the guards got every night by going into The Green to forage."

  Another tower she was locked up in.

  Even to me, someone who had spent a good chunk of his life in chains, I found that incredibly sad.

  "When you get back to the human realm and have all the freedom, what do you want to do?"

  To that, her face fell a bit, her lips parting, her brows drawing together, like it never occurred to her to think that far. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that she wasn't sure what freedom was, so she didn't even know how to think about.

  "I have no idea," she admitted, shaking her head. "But I have human money. And, from what I can tell, it's enough to find a place to stay and
keep me fed and such. I guess... I guess then I have to find a job."

  Jobs were jobs. Human or fae, you had to work in life. Though, for most common fae, work was generally of the sort that kept you and yours fed, clothed, and sheltered. The fae who lived in more populated areas occasionally went to markets and sold their goods which was likely more what a human job would be like. Somehow, I couldn't imagine Amethyst doing that kind of work. Maybe it was simply because she came from a family that was important in The Green, had old wealth and respect, and therefore... no one ever needed to work.

  "What?" she asked, smiling a little. "You don't think I can work? I can work. I mean... I don't know what skills of mine would be useful in the human realm. I think my sister made sculptures to pay her way."

  "And Jasper?"

  Her brows knitted at that, her green eyes going a little sad. "I have no idea."

  I felt myself wince slightly, knowing Jasper and Jade were likely sore spots for her, knowing she had older siblings, but never being allowed to know them, to learn from them, to play with them as kids, or stir trouble with them as teens.

  I had my own siblings I hadn't been able to see in years. I could relate to that piece of yourself that smarted when it got pressed.

  "Well, I'm sure you will figure out your place in their realm," I assured her, seeing the slip in confidence, knowing her spirits needed to stay up if she was going to get through the next couple of days of cold and pain and, possibly, hunger if we weren't careful. "Come on, let's keep moving. We need to get as much distance between us as possible by nightfall."

  "Hey, Drake?" she called, making my stomach do a strange dropping thing at hearing it. First, just my name. It had been so long since someone used it that it almost sounded foreign to me. It was always draca, the word spat like an insult. Second, though, I maybe liked it a little too much how her sweet voice curved over the sounds of it.

  "Yeah?" I asked, turning back, feeling oddly tense.

  "Do you know how to get to the human realm?"

  No, I fucking didn't.