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“HEY.”
Caelina mumbled incoherently in her stupor. Was it morning already?
“Hey!”
Still ignoring the voice calling out, Caelina groaned in complaint.
Her sister Soleia was always waking her up with the ruckus of stupid morning exercises from the next room. As if Fae mages like them needed more physical training as opposed to regular deep (quiet!) meditations to hone their casting skills.
Her throat raw, Caelina moaned at her difficulty to swallow. She almost couldn’t feel anything beneath her neck. Her numb body was unwilling to respond to her brain asking it to move or even shiver.
Did someone leave the window open? Even with harvest season having arrived, the air could still get quite brisk in the early mornings.
Taking a deep breath, her eyes still closed, Caelina wrinkled her nose at the pungent brine in the air. Was her grandmother making a stew from last night’s leftovers?
Last night...
The wedding.
Caelina’s blood froze as her eyes flew wide open with a gasp. She forced her eyes to focus in the dim light.
Shit.
Long, curved wooden boards nailed together made up the walls surrounding her. The likewise wooden paneled floor she was sitting on was damp. Dripping water echoed hollow all around, amidst the faint, distant creaking of machinery chugging and straining in operation.
The light of dawn peeked through the single round window affixed to one wall. A couple of seagulls flew past the porthole, their squawks were muted to Caelina’s ears. The entire hold rocked gently from side to side, battered by the waves splashing and slamming against the ship’s hull.
Oh, shit.
“Great, you’re finally awake.”
Startled at the deep voice from across the way, Caelina jerked in her seat. “What?” But there was a loud clank when she tried to move her hands and her gaze dropped to her lap where a heavy chain attached to clamps on her wrists.
She made a face.
Ohhh...shit.
“Are you okay?”
Squinting, she tried to locate where the vaguely familiar voice was coming from.
A soft grunt accompanied the movement from her left that caught her attention. When her eyes met his, partly obscured by the shadows, she blew out a breath. Caelina would have felt genuinely relieved, except that the person sitting across from her on the same damp floor was Stellan.
Tall and lean, his loose robes concealed his muscled warrior’s build, and with his dark hair and those high cheekbones on his famously, uncommonly handsome face, Stellan was the strongest and most attractive warrior Fae in their entire clan.
And because he knew that, Stellan was also the most arrogant warrior Fae in their entire clan.
Also, technically, he was now her husband.
Caelina pressed her lips together in annoyance. “Am I okay?” she echoed in mocking. “Where the hell are we? Why the hell am I chained to—” Her eyes followed the rusty chain from her wrist clamps up to a pulley mechanism above their heads which was tethered to a wooden brace on the ceiling before leading down a support beam, and ending up welded to the matching clamps where Stellan’s wrists were bound behind his back.
“Me?” he finished. “I have no idea.”
Caelina narrowed her eyes at him. Stellan was still wearing his formal trousers and button-down tunic with the ornately-stitched embellishments. She cast her eyes down. Muddy hem and all, she was still wearing that annoying lace and frill mother-of-pearl wedding dress with the ridiculous low-cut neckline that, according to her sister, she apparently just had to wear for the ceremony.
She finally shivered, dread creeping into her stomach. The clamps on her wrists bit cold against her skin. The sensation coming back to her extremities was a sobering indication that this was neither merely a dream nor a hallucination.
Caelina made another face as she strained to remember. “What-What the hell happened last night?”
But Stellan’s gaze was pinned to the far corner of the hold. “That’s an interesting question,” he scoffed. “Let’s see. I think what happened was that you managed to tell every single person at the Ipera village reception how opposed you were to this match, even though it was already blessed by the elders—and oh, by the way, not to mention, your honorable parents.”
Caelina rolled her eyes, the sneer in his voice activating a tick of displeasure in her jaw. “I am allowed to express my opinions,” she declared. “As first-born of the High Fae ruling family, I had known all my life I was going to have to wed for the sake of our clan. I already never had a choice in the matter. But I accepted my fate, my responsibility. Doesn’t mean I can’t complain about it.”
Stellan’s huff sounded more like a growl. “Well, it’s an insult to me and to my parents.”
Caelina couldn’t help her dry remark, “Well, at least your parents are still alive. You can blame them to their faces.”
Stellan’s gaze shot to meet hers in an instant, his eyes clouding over at the nonchalance of her words. He opened his mouth to say something but Caelina cut him off.
“Oh, don’t pretend to feel sympathy for me right now. Nobody’s ever cared how I feel. Ever since my parents passed, I already knew my life was going to be different.”
His forehead creased but he didn’t seem keen to argue with that.
“Now, if someone could just actually properly answer my question.” She blew out another breath to clear her head as fragments of last night flashed in her mind. “I remember the reception—and the really bad dumplings—and then you wanted to go for a walk...” She furrowed her eyebrows to recall.
“It’s all a blur to me too,” Stellan confessed. “We must have been abducted from right outside the assembly hall and brought to this ship.”
Regaining the feeling back in her hands, Caelina grunted in the effort to make her fingers meet so she could summon her magic and get the hell out of here—to no avail. She groaned out loud in an unhappy rage.
Whoever had captured them knew what they were doing since the metal clamps around her wrists were welded apart just enough that she couldn’t make her hands meet.
These people knew how to stifle her magic. She was definitely in trouble now.
Unable to contain her temper, she tossed a dark glare back at Stellan again and bit out, “You realize this is all your fault, right?”
Stellan shook his head in derision. “Oh, here we go. Is this how this marriage is going to be? Everything’s always my fault?”
A loud bang made Caelina’s gaze snap upward as a wooden trapdoor flew open. Light from the deck poured through to the darkened hold. She swallowed in alarm as two sets of legs clad in ratty trousers thumped heavily down the stairs.
One of the men bent his head to peek at them with a grin on his grimy face, his two gold teeth glinting. “How’s you all doing down here?”
At the sight of the inked marks across their burly forearms, the stench of sun and salt oozing from their brown, wrinkly skin, Caelina’s stomach sank.
Pirates. Perfect.
