Free Exquisite Captive by Heather Demetrios Page B

security team brought her back, Malek had put her in the bottle for months, so long that she could hardly get out when he finally set her free. The iron walls had poisoned Nalia almost to the point of breaking. Convincing Malek to take the chain off his neck would be a delicate maneuver. How? How was she going to manage this before the Ifrit came to finish her off?
    Malek crossed to her window and looked out over the lawn and rose garden that lay silent in the coming dawn. Nalia prayed Raif had already evanesced, or at least had the sense to glamour himself to appear invisible.
    “I’m sorry I can’t have that lecherous client from this evening killed,” Malek said. “Would have been easy enough, but you’ve made it rather impossible for me to track him down.”
    Here was the man who ran a vast criminal empire with an iron fist. Bringing up the client made her nervous—had he decided he wanted to punish Nalia for her trick after all?
    “That’s all right,” she managed. She despised the client and all the wishmakers just like him, but that didn’t mean she wanted him dead. There was enough blood on her hands. “I think lifelong invisibility is punishment enough.”
    He frowned. “For now, anyway.”
    Malek pulled a thin velvet box out of his pocket, then walked toward her, holding it out. She looked at it, uncertain.
    “Go ahead—open it.”
    “I’d rather not.”
    An expensive trinket she could have manifested on her own in the first place could never make up for the humiliation and horror of being a slave. But Malek seemed to think it could.
    “Just.” He stepped closer, his voice soft. Expectant. “Open it.”
    She took the box and slowly lifted the lid. Inside, lying on a bed of blackest velvet, was a thin gold chain holding a piece of polished lapis lazuli nestled in a gold pendent. She gasped, tears pricking at her eyes. It was the stone that made up the entire Qaf Mountain range in Arjinna, from which the palace was carved. She’d had no idea the same stone was on Earth.
    The mountain:
                  “Nalia-jai, come on! We don’t have time to gawk at sunsets.”
                  Nalia looks at the group of Ghan Aisouri she has traveled to the mountaintop with. They’ve been there since dawn, patrolling the border between Arjinna and the Ifrit-controlled wastelands of Ithkar. Like her sisters-in-arms, she is just as eager to return to the warmth and comfort of the palace. But she can’t take her eyes off the way the sunlight dances over the smooth surface of the azure rock. Walking the mountain paths is like strolling across a sun-soaked ocean.
                  “There’s always time for sunsets,” Nalia whispers.
                  “Tell that to the Djan’Urbi rat who’s giving us so much trouble,” laughs Wardi, one of the older girls. “I’m sure that’ll keep the serflings in line.”
                  “Oh, don’t give her such a hard time,” Japhara says. She throws an arm around Nalia’s shoulder. “We’re Ghan Aisouri—surely we have time enough to look at sunsets and kill a few serfling rats. Right?”
                  Nalia tenses. “Right.”
                  But the color of blood doesn’t look beautiful in the sun. Why can’t anyone else see that?
    Now, Nalia stared at the pendent. She’d never be free of the memories, not as long as she lived. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to be—they were her only link to Arjinna. The memories, and now this necklace.
    “Do you like it?” Malek asked. He sounded . . . nervous. Like it really mattered how she felt.
    She looked up. The moonlight softened the lines of his face, brought out the feeling in his eyes. How could he look at her like that, after all those times he’d put her in the bottle?
    She nodded, unable to speak.
    “Here, allow me,” he said.
    He took the box from her shaking hands. She lifted up her hair and turned around,