Free Tempted by a Rogue Prince by Felicity Heaton

the guard dealing the blows that wetly cleaved flesh grunted with frustration once more. The elf made no sound, though she could feel his pain flow through the dungeon, held back and endured in silence.
    Why?
    Tears burned her eyes. There was no shame in crying out. During her captivity, she had heard the strongest of men break under the torture and the steel whips, lashed by barbs and bled until they passed out.
    Her heart pounded and the whip struck again. She swore she felt each strike, each lash of the whip on her body. Pain ran through her, quiet but there, buzzing down her back and over her thighs.
    The whip cracked again. She heard flesh give but no cry, no other sign that it had struck its target and rent another gash in the elf’s body.
    Rosalind tightened her grip on the thick steel bars, clinging to them so fiercely that her knuckles blazed white and her bones ached. Anger boiled within her, a seething need to do something even when she was powerless to act on her rage. Her magic was bound. The only thing she could do was endure, just as he did, and hope.
    Hope that they would bring her to heal him.
    She had cursed him, hated him with a force that had shocked her, when he had called her by another’s name, but when they had led him past her, she had known only pity for him.
    He had walked with his head bent, his eyes cast downwards, and she had seen his shame in them. They had stripped him of his pride.
    Silence finally fell, the strange sensation of pain in her fading as her heart settled at last. Had they stopped?
    She craned her neck, needing to see along the corridor to her right, but couldn’t find an angle that would permit her to see all the way to the end of it.
    What seemed like hours later, the same two guards who had marched him from his cell appeared again, not holding the elf by his arms but dragging him by his ankles. They had stripped him bare, leaving not a stitch on him and no shred of dignity, and they had done it on purpose. They meant to degrade him completely.
    The tears stinging her eyes wobbled on her lashes, hot and fierce, as they dragged him past her. His arms stretched out above his head, the manacles holding his wrists clanking on the flagstones and his head jogging around as it hit the gaps between each stone. A river of blood, red and stark, followed in his wake.
    Her gaze widened and she covered her mouth, stifling a wave of sickness when she saw the deep lacerations criss-crossing his bare chest and arms, and cutting deep grooves in his thighs. His head bounced off another gap and lolled towards her, his firm bloodied lips parting. She stared at his mouth in horror.
    His fangs.
    Mother earth.
    They had ripped out his fangs.
    Rosalind reacted on instinct, stretching her arms between the bars towards him, her fingers barely brushing his before he slipped beyond her reach.
    She sagged against the steel bars, her right temple pressing into them and her arms laying on the floor of the corridor, one in a smear of his blood that also coated the chain between her cuffs. She would make the demons pay for their cruelty. He had done nothing to deserve such punishment. Mother earth, she would make them pay.
    One day.
    But for now, all she could do was sit and wait, and plot.
    She shuffled back into the corner, as far from the bars of her cell as she could get, and huddled into it. She smoothed her tattered black dress over her knees, hugged them to her chest with the chain between her cuffs dangling across them, and rested her chin on them. The guards would come for her. They would bring her to heal him. Until then, she would wait in silence, saving her energy, the strength he had given her with his gift of blood.
    She would bestow that same gift upon him.
    She wasn’t strong enough to fight these demons without her magic, but he was strong enough to fight them without his psychic powers. She would make him strong.
    Her eyes slipped shut and she forced them open again, unwilling to succumb to