Free Tempted by a Rogue Prince by Felicity Heaton Page A

the lure of sleep. Sleep didn’t bring her the rest she needed. It only brought her pain, a horrific replay of the war and a parade of the souls she had destroyed in that single dark night.
    Rosalind held her knees tighter and rocked, trying to focus on other things. Her garden would be overgrown by now. She would have her work cut out for her when she returned to her cottage. Many of her clients would be angry with her too. They were waiting for the potions they had ordered. She would have to apologise to them all.
    Perhaps the demon king Thorne had been kind enough to somehow tell them what had happened to her, if he didn’t think her dead that was. So many had died in the war. So many lives snuffed out. Rivers of blood had run across the black ground.
    Her eyes slipped shut again and the nightmare swallowed her, devoured her with sharp teeth that tore at her flesh and crunched her bones. Broken hands grasped her, missing flesh in places, and she fought them as they pulled at her clothes, tearing them from her body and leaving her exposed. They clawed at her, lacerating her flesh, leaving long red marks criss-crossing her body.
    They grabbed her wrists and pulled her down into the endless darkness, into a vivid replay of the battle that had left a terrible scar on her soul. She saw herself killing, saw the faces of her victims this time, witnessed how her magic tore them to pieces and shattered their bodies, killing them in the most painful ways imaginable. She clawed at her hair and screamed for it to stop, but no sound passed her lips. With every death she dealt, her heart grew blacker, the darkness in it spreading.
    Until she called on all that death and darkness, reaching beyond the grave to the other side.
    Rosalind shot awake, her heart racing and breath sawing from her lungs. She ran trembling hands over her matted blonde hair, pulling it back from her face, and forced herself to take in her surroundings. Tears blurred her vision and she blinked them away. She was in her cell. It shouldn’t have been a comfort to her, but it had become one. She was in her cell and her power was locked inside her, beyond her reach.
    She couldn’t kill anyone without it.
    She couldn’t destroy another life.
    She couldn’t take another step closer to the darkness.
    She rocked back and forth, slowly purging the effects of the nightmare. How long had she been unconscious, trapped inside a twisted replay of her past?
    There were five clay bowls outside her cell. Five feedings of disgusting and questionable slop meant two and a half days.
    It had been two and a half days and the demons hadn’t come for her. Because she had threatened that the elf could heal himself next time?
    No. The demons didn’t care about such things. If they had wanted him healed, they would have forced her to do it.
    A dark-haired demon stopped outside her cell and curled a lip at the five bowls and then at her as he preened his dusky grey horns, stroking their curved lengths from the root behind the top of his ear to the tip near the lobe. His emerald eyes shifted to her, he rolled his bare shoulders, and then unlocked the door.
    “Out,” he grunted.
    Rosalind dug her fingers into the gaps between the thick stone blocks of the wall beside her and slowly pulled herself onto her feet. She straightened and did her best to walk confidently across her cell to the door, unwilling to show weakness in front of the huge demon male glaring at her. She wobbled at times, the drain of her nightmares combining with her lack of sustenance to make her weak. She felt sure that without the elf’s blood in her body, she wouldn’t have managed to walk at all. She would have been crawling to the demon.
    He grabbed her arm in a bruising grip the second she was within reach, scooped up one of the bowls and shoved it at her.
    “Eat.”
    She eyed the unappetising slop that matched the colour of his horns and considered refusing it, her stomach rebelling at the thought of eating