Glint (The Plated Prisoner 2)

He scoffs, a humorless laugh to shove against my confidence and try to topple it over like he’s done so many times before. “What about Carnith Village?” he says, and the blood drains from my face. “You thought you were okay then too, didn’t you, Auren? And look what happened.”

The bruises in my heart seem to spread and discolor with mottled grief of blues and sickening greens. “That was an accident,” I whisper, feeling my eyes well up, my vision blurring.

How could he bring that up? How could he say that to me, when he knows how badly it destroyed me?

He sneers. “Tell me, did you have any accidents while you were gone?”

“Stop it,” I say, squeezing my eyes shut tight. I don’t want to see him, don’t want to hear him. “I’ve done everything you ever asked me to. I’ve been devoted to you for over ten years of my life, overlooked every flaw, shoved aside every hurt. I’ve done it all because I trusted you. Because I loved you.”

I’m crying freely now, and the tears wound as they fall, as if they were plucked directly from the ache of my heart and sent to scratch down my walls.

He sighs, shaking his head as he looks at the floor for a moment. “Alright. You’re tired and hysterical. You just need to go lie down. This isn’t you, Auren.”

“This is me!” I yell.

Midas is so shocked I dared to raise my voice against him that his eyes go wide.

“I am finally, after all this time, starting to be me,” I cry, pressing a hand to my chest. “I’m finally starting to say what I think, and I’m not going to lie down again to make it easier for you to keep me beneath your thumb.”

Midas may have put me on a pedestal, but I put him on one too. The height of those foundations made it impossible for us to look each other in the eye.

But we’re looking now. I’m looking, not my romanticized fifteen-year-old self. I don’t like what I see.

“I gave you everything, and yet you still want to take. You told me to lie, said it was the best way to keep me safe, but that wasn’t really it, was it? You didn’t do it for me. You did it for you.” My words are an accusation spoken from the deepest parts of me—the ones I’ve long ignored. “I won’t live like this anymore, Midas.”

“You’re mine,” he roars, taking a threatening step forward.

My eyes flash, but I don’t flinch. “No, Midas. I belong to me.”

He shakes his head, the glint of his crown catching like fire. “You gave yourself to me a long time ago, Precious. It’s time to remember your place.”

My place. The one in a cage. The one beneath his thumb.

I keep my expression unyielding. “No.”

A sharp silence sticks between us, like a skewer ready to impale. And then in a blink, Midas moves so fast that I can’t even gasp before he’s on me.

He spins me around, gripping me around my middle, and I let out a surprised shout.

He wouldn’t hold me for comfort, but he’ll hold me for control.

My mind blares that realization in my head, and with it, everything, every single tattered pain, ignored doubt, shoved aside feeling, they all come barreling out.

I let him put me in a prison.

He rescued me when I was at my lowest, and because of that, I thought staying with him would keep me at my highest. But really, he’s trapped me in place and forced me to accept it all.

He dragged me into a foreign, frozen kingdom.

He married a cold queen who hated me.

He fucked saddles in front of me.

He made me into a spectacle.

He kept me in that cage, day in and day out.

He used me.