Sold To The Cruel Prince

The beast’s shadow swallowed Aveline whole.

She bowed her head at once, bracing herself for the final horror of it; the crushing bite of its jaws, the tearing pain, the terrible end she had been trying not to imagine.

But the pain never came.

Only the stench.

It thickened around her instead, foul and rotten and suffocating, so strong it made her eyes sting. Aveline waited, trembling so hard her teeth nearly chattered, but the beast did not strike.

Then, all at once, the air shifted.

It was as though something invisible had been loosened, a pressure lifted from the cave and the forest together. A faint breeze moved past her face, startling in the stillness.

Then came a heavy thump.

Aveline blinked and slowly opened her eyes.

The monster was moving away from her... Toward the cave....Toward Helena and the newborn.

Her breath caught.

She tried to stand, but her knees had turned to water beneath her. Her legs would not answer. Panic surged through her again as the beast lurched closer, enormous and relentless, its bulk blotting out what little moonlight remained.

Another thud.

It reached the cave mouth.

And then it opened its mouth.

Aveline’s stomach dropped.

Something dark spilled from inside it. It was not blood, not flesh, but shadow. It slid out in writhing currents, thick and wet-looking, like smoke given a mind of its own. It seeped along the ground, spreading fast and low, swallowing the light where it touched it. The cave entrance vanished beneath that darkness, as though the beast were unmaking the world one swallow at a time.

Aveline’s eyes widened in horror.

Helena and the baby were both exposed.

She tried to force herself forward, but her hands shook too badly to help. Her body would not obey. Terror held her in place while the creature swallowed the cave in darkness.

And then Helena moved.

Still weak from childbirth, still unsteady, she rose with a violence that belonged only to desperation. She was immense, larger than a horse, maybe as tall as two, but beside this thing she looked suddenly smaller, almost mortal, almost fragile.

Helena did not hesitate. She lunged.

With a snarl that tore through the cave mouth, Helena slammed into the beast and clamped her jaws around its leg. The force of the bite stopped it for a heartbeat. The creature lurched, its body jerking as Helena dug in harder, kicking and clawing, trying to hold it in place with sheer rage and maternal instinct.

The beast twisted.

Helena bit down harder.

Aveline could hear the struggle now—wet, furious, brutal. The scraping of claws against stone. The guttural growls. The shuddering impact of those massive bodies colliding in the dark.

The creature did not bleed the way a human would.

That was somehow worse.

Something black seeped from the wound instead, not blood exactly, but a formless spill of darkness, thick as oil and just as wrong. It slid from the body like spilled shadow, and before Aveline could understand what she was seeing, it wriggled back toward the beast, sinking into its flesh once more.

The wound closed. Healed.

Aveline stared, frozen.

It looked wrong. Impossible.

No matter how many times Helena tore into it, no matter how hard she fought, the darkness simply gathered itself again and stitched the monster back together from the inside, like a body that refused to die, like a nightmare that remembered how to rebuild itself.

Helena snarled again and hurled herself forward, but the beast only staggered for a second before it reformed, the blackness crawling back into place as if death itself had been denied.

Aveline’s heart hammered painfully in her chest.

This thing would not bleed. It would not break. It would not stay down. And Helena, already exhausted and already spent, was still fighting it anyway, because the baby was behind her.

Because she would not let the creature reach her child.

Aveline’s throat burned.

The cave shook with the violence of their struggle, and in the middle of it all, the monstrous thing stood like a living shadow, ancient and starving and endless, as though it could keep tearing itself apart and stitching itself back together forever.

As the battle raged on, Aveline noticed something odd.

The beasts did not disturb the ground the way living creatures should. The grass did not flatten beneath them. The trees did not tremble at their weight. Even the bushes remained strangely untouched. She could feel their impact through the tremors under her feet, and she could see the way the larger creature swallowed matter into shadow, but it was as though they did not truly walk the earth at all. As if they belonged to some other place, some other law.

And then she saw it.

The larger creature was not interested in her or Helena.

It wanted the baby.

Helena fought with everything she had, and in that desperate fury, Aveline saw something painfully familiar. It was the same kind of love she had seen in her mother that night—the same raw, unthinking courage of a parent protecting a child with no regard for herself.

Aveline did not know why Helena had brought her here, or why she had thought Aveline could help against something like this. She did not even understand why this thing wanted the newborn so badly.

But she could not just stand there.

Not while Helena struggled for her child.

The larger creature finally tore Helena off and flung her away. Aveline’s eyes widened in horror as Helena’s body seemed to pass through the trees as though they were smoke, as though she were being thrown through the air instead of wood and bark.

Aveline stared, stunned, unable to tell whether what she was seeing was even real.

Then the beast turned toward the baby.

Helena screamed. The sound cut through Aveline so sharply that her heart seemed to sink all at once.

Something in her shifted. She forced herself upright, found a stone on the ground, and hurled it with all the strength she had left.

It struck true... just enough to distract the creature.

The baby seized the moment and scrambled behind a bush. Helena, still far away, was struggling back to her feet.

And now the creature’s attention had turned to Aveline.

"Uh-oh," she whispered, the word barely a breath. She had done exactly what she had not meant to do. She had drawn it toward herself.

Now what?

The beast lunged.

Aveline froze.

She did not know where to run, or whether running would even help. Her body locked in place, every muscle gone rigid with fear.

And then...Out of nowhere, there was...

Light.

It spread across the forest in a vast lattice, brilliant and precise, cutting through the darkness like a net cast from the heavens.

Aveline stared, breath caught in her throat.

What is that?