{A Wattpad Featured Book}
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Her heart or her people. Only she can decide.
Hated, cursed, outcasted. It was Eleena Asterin's life ever since she was blamed to have betrayed her village. So when she is offered a task to earn back her honour and prid...
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The rain was pouring, heavy and merciless, covering up the cruel sounds of the whip against skin. Behind me, three shadows lurked—no, watched. I didn't dare turn to look at them, to see who might be within those shadows, observing, not as I watched the crimson rivers of death snake between my knees.
Another strike and a strangled gasp echoed in the misty air. As if begging, as if pleading for the pain to stop. The rust-covered iron chains connected to the cuffs around my wrists and ankles clanked as I flinched—and stilled again.
No—no, I didn't want to look, not this time, not again, not—
But I had no control over my body, absolutely none, when the footsteps approached me. Cold, smooth fingers gripped my chin and lifted it sharply. There was no kindness, no compassion in that touch—only cold maliciousness.
"Look," Japeth said. I didn't. Didn't move, didn't blink until my eyes started to water.
"Look girl," he barked as a plume of blood splattered before my knees. "Look what you have brought upon him, upon everything you love if you don't tell me the truth."
I started shaking uncontrollably as my head ached from restraining to look for so long.
"Look Eleena," Japeth said as he gripped my elbow and pulled. Pain shot up my hip as I hit the rain-and-blood-soaked cobblestones. "Look!"
And I could do nothing as I lifted my head, the action taking more strength and concentration than I would have thought needed. Sweat coated strands of chestnut brown hair, pale skin as white as freshly pressed snow, a sigh of wind, and the crack of the whip. No.
It was a man, tall and gangly. Theodore.
But no—not a man I realised as I watched my brother's features morph and change. But a Seelie Faerie, with those pointed ears.
I blinked, and then—then my hands were warm and sticky with his blood, then he was the one taking the blows, his ghastly pale, muscled back a frenzy of blood and scars, and it was his eyes—his silvery eyes flecked with violet—that I had looked into, and—
I threw myself awake, sweat slipping down my back, and forced myself to breathe, to open my eyes and note each detail of the night-dark bedroom. Real—this was real.
But I could still see that Seelie Faerie male's back, a whip against his snow-white skin, red and bloody all over from where each lash had come into contact.
Bile stung my throat.
Not real. Just a dream. Even if what the Elders had done to me, even if it was my brother or the fae male, was ... was ...
I scrubbed at my face. Perhaps it was the quiet, the hollowness, of the past few days—perhaps it was only that I no longer had to think hour to hour about how to keep my family alive, but ... It was regret, and maybe shame, that coated my tongue, my bones.
