White Horse Black Nights (The Godkissed Bride, #1)(50)

“Get her hidden,” one of his brothers hisses sharply to Adan. “I’ll handle the boat. Here.”

He shoves a bundle in Adan’s arms.

Clutching the bundle under one arm, Adan takes my hand, leading me toward the cabin. “Hurry, Sabine. We can’t take the chance anyone sees you.”

I follow him down a narrow set of stairs to the tiny cabin—if it can even be called that. It’s barely large enough for a person to lie down in, and half of it is currently packed with fishing nets. I have to stoop to keep from hitting my forehead on the ceiling.

Adan motions for me to curl up on the fishing nets, and then he starts pulling clothes out of the bundle. A crofter’s dress. Worn leather shoes. A white bonnet.

“We assumed you’d be naked,” he explains with the ghost of a half-grin, motioning to my sage green dress.

“Oh. Right.” I don’t want to reveal that Basten gave me my dress, because that might raise too many questions. “I, um, grabbed a dress from a clothesline while I was running from my guard.”

“He’s one hell of a brute, isn’t he? Maks and Bertine have been following you since Polybridge, looking for an opportunity to overpower him and take you, but we didn’t anticipate he’d be both godkissed and as strong as an ox.”

Apprehension prickles the hairs on the back of my neck.

Adan’s brothers have been following me? Yes, Basten is strong as an ox, and now he’s too far away to help me if I should need it. So is Myst. I’m on my own.

I swallow down a pebble of fear rising in my throat. “Where are we going? Those are your brothers, right?”

Adan nods, distracted. The sloop rocks sharply as we enter the river’s current. I grip the edge of a crate to steady myself a second before my head would have knocked against the low ceiling.

Adan rests his hand on my knee, his gaze eating me up now that it’s just the two of us in the shadowy cabin, with only a thin beam of moonlight slicing down from the stairs to light up his green eyes.

He smooths his hands down the hair on either side of my face, drawing me closer. “By the fae, Sabine, I’ve wanted to do this every second since I laid eyes on you.”

He pulls me into a kiss. Startled, my breath stalls in my lungs. His kiss is more aggressive than I’d have expected, his lips demanding my response. My thoughts freeze. Operating on instinct, I go through the motions of kissing him back, because my brain can’t function fast enough for any alternative.

But as our lips play against one another, I feel nothing. I’m too shaken from the fire and everything that came before it. My body feels only numb. Adan breaks the kiss with a satisfied moan, unaware of my arrested ability to process what just happened. He passes the bundle of clothes to me.

“You should change into these. We don’t want anyone recognizing you or the clothes you were wearing.” He stares at me, expectantly, and my pulse raps against my temples.

I blink. “You mean you want me to change here? Now?”

He gives a laugh that rings bitterly. “Every other man can see you naked, but not me? Is that it?”

My lips part, but only silence emerges. That’s what he’s thinking about right now?

His eyes soften as he runs his hand down the contour of my face. He gives a slight chuckle. “I’ll go up and give you some privacy. But there’s one other thing. How I said Myst was too recognizable to take with us? The same goes for your hair. It’ll identify you immediately.” He draws a long, thin knife from the bundle. “I’m sorry, I truly am, but we have to cut it off.”

A tightness knots in my chest. “My hair?”

“I know you prize it, but there’s no other way.”

He doesn’t understand. I don’t prize my hair, not in the slightest. In fact, my hair is the symbol of the binds that kept me imprisoned in the convent and my father’s house. I was forced to grow it out as long as possible to make me more appealing to a suitor.

Just one more way Adan is a stranger, and I am to him.

“Do it,” I say, tilting my head to give him the right angle. He seems surprised by my readiness, and he looks regretful as he saws through the thick tresses at my nape. I close my eyes, feeling the gentle tugs on my scalp like a thousand tiny fingers. Separating me from those shackles. Transforming me into something new, no longer the pretty girl able to fetch a high price.

When it’s done, and the rope of my severed hair is clasped in Adan’s fist, I run a tentative hand along the rough-cut edges that hang an inch above my shoulders. A part of me feels missing. Without my hair’s weight, my head feels too bobbly. And yet, at the same time, free.

Adan carefully stuffs my severed hair into the bundle. I suppose we can’t just leave it out loose in the boat.

One of his brothers shouts something down, and Adan squeezes my knee. “Stay down here. Don’t make a sound.”

Before he leaves, I snare his wrist as a shard of fear cuts into my chest. “Adan, everything’s going to be all right, isn’t it?”

He gives me a smile that, in the dark shadows, doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Everything is going to be exactly as it should, Sabine.”

And then he leaves me in the dark hull, uncomfortable on a pile of damp fish nets, crammed between reeking barrels, and all I can think is: This doesn’t feel like freedom.