I shifted my reins to my left hand and tightened my embrace around her, slipping my free hand around her stomach, with my thumb tucked between her breasts from below. Her heartbeat pounded hard against my palm, telling me she wasn’t just worried. She was fucking terrified.
Pulling on the bit, I pulled Vela away from the water, and then turned her around. But no sooner had she started to make our way back to the path than the rumble of fast-approaching hoofbeats made her freeze in her tracks.
In my arms, Valeria stiffened, every muscle tightening with fear. It was difficult for me to figure out which direction the hoofbeats were coming from. Unless they were coming from every goddamned direction at once.
They were flanking us from all sides.
“Fuck,” I hissed, giving my mare a ruthless kick with both heels. Whatever was about to happen, it wasn’t going to be good.
A sudden roar of brutal blood-thirsty shouts sent Vela whirling with confusion, but I knew that fucking sound. It was my brother’s goddamned goons—vodka-soaked, drugged, and going berserk.
They rushed us like wolves, all of them mounted and armed. I did everything I could to keep us in the saddle, but my mare was too fucking spooked to control. She half-reared once and we stayed on, but as a big male stallion, wild eyes and snorting, rushed her from the flank, she reared up even higher, sending both Valeria and I flying backwards.
I broke her fall, and we landed hard together on the frozen forest floor. The bare branches spun above me and I blinked off the pain in my head. But before I could even sit up, before I could think what the fuck to do next, I saw the face I most detested, staring down at me from above.
Petre.
His men might be drugged and drunk out of their minds, but he wasn’t. In his eyes I saw that cold clarity that I’d seen so often—way the fuck more dangerous than any liquor or drug.
He smiled down at us and cracked his knuckles. The first time I’d ever seen him look like that I was five, when he’d been fighting me for that goddamned fishing pole. When the hook had gotten lodged right below my eye, he’d looked at me exactly like he was looking at us now.
Pure fucking evil.
I glanced around at his men and saw that they’d be no help to me now. They might’ve been on my side during that poker game and during our scuffle the next day, but that was before he’d pumped them full of their drugs of choice. Now, they were his dogs and he was their master, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to break through that wall.
Fuck.
Petre grabbed a hold of Valeria, yanking her off me. As I fought to stand up, with the forest still spinning, she went at him with everything she had—clawing and screaming, kicking and elbowing, but one of his human hounds stunned her with a sucker punch to the temple that quieted her screams and disoriented her enough for them to restrain her even more.
“You motherfucker,” I said, launching myself at my brother from behind.
But before I could even get a solid punch in, one of his hounds came at me from behind my periphery, body slamming me hard back into the forest floor and pinning me down with a boot on my throat.
Petre seized Valeria by the hair and hauled her off toward his horse. There wasn’t a fucking chance, not a fucking chance, I was letting him take her from me now.
I snatched my hunting knife out of my boot and plunged it into the meatiest part of the calf of the man pinning me down.
But as I did, nothing happened. Nothing at all.
It was fucking surreal, like being in a nightmare. There was my knife, buried up to the hilt in his calf. But he was so high, so fucked up, that he hadn’t even flinched, instead staring down at the trickling wound like it belonged to someone else completely.
Fascinated. Mesmerized.
“What the fuck?” I said, plunging my knife into a different place, with the exact same reaction.
My brother laughed a little, a slippery little hush from his nose that sounded more reptilian than human.
“Black henbane,” he said. “I put it in that disgusting fucking Turkish coffee they like. Magic, isn’t it?”
Fucking horrifying is what it was. They were like wild animals without the sense that an animal should have.
I landed a brutal kick to the balls of the one holding me down, and lunged for Valeria. But I’d hardly gotten to my feet before two other men seized me, one of them punching me in the throat, and the other giving me a boot heel to the kidneys that made me roar with pain.