Daughters of the King |✓|

Chapter Nine

"Olya!" His voice was sharp like a whip. "Olya!"

I smashed my teeth together, just as I heard another gunshot slice through the air, and that's when it dawned on me: the soldier hadn't been the shooter.

Panic slammed into me, and I flattened myself even closer to the ground. I heard the soldier land onto the forest floor with a thud, barely a couple feet away, and he yelled out upon impact, either from shock or pain or both. I had to slap a hand over my mouth and squeeze to keep from gasping audibly.

He'd been hit.

The savages came crawling out of the woodwork one at a time, materializing from the shadows until there were three of them forming the points of a triangle around us, their automatic weapons aimed.

Leaning forward on my toes and ignoring the pain that ignited in my ankles, I peeked through the foliage and spotted the soldier lying flat on a bed of pine needles. He was breathing loudly, and he was folded up in evident agony, while a spot on his left shoulder bloomed with fresh blood. It seeped right through the stiff fabric of his uniform and looked almost black instead of red.

He was alive, and he still had his gun at his side, but it was clear that it would be all over for him if he so much as tried to reach for it.

Wisely, he remained perfectly still, and I made no move to help him. If I did, we'd both be killed in seconds.

A second later, though, my precautions would prove to be pointless. I felt the barrel of a rifle pressing to the side of my head, ice cold. There had been a fourth savage, and he'd spotted me.

"Get out of there," the bearded savage ordered, with the kind of rough voice one gets from living a life in the wilderness.

I rose slowly, my eyes trained on my attacker.

When he took in my appearance, the pressure of the gun eased slightly off my head, and his dark eyes widened. "What are you?" he asked, which I thought was a ridiculous question.

What did he think I was? But I noticed his teeth were very sharp, like a wolf's, which made me the sheep at his mercy, didn't it?

Out of the corner of my eye, one of the other savages kicked the ground with his big boot. "I've never seen anything like it before," he said with disgust.

Were they surprised by my albinism? My blood-spattered hair and skin? For a long, suspended moment, nobody moved as these savages studied me, gawking and probing with their eyes.

"It's like she's made of lightning," one of them laughed.

Another added, "I thought these god-worshippers were afraid of women."

And then I knew what I had to do. I didn't even hesitate. I opened my mouth and said, "Not if she's his wife."

A hush fell over our assailants, and I used the brief, stunned silence to glance over at my soldier, assessing whether or not he was still alive. His eyes cracked open, a flash of gold in his dark face, and he met my stare. It was the first time he looked right at me, defying the rules of his religion.

And doing his part to prove my claim in the process.

We were taking a risk. Maybe these savages didn't know about the new laws. They lived outside of society, after all, what if they hadn't seen the recent reports?

But if they had, then they would know: if I was his wife, then this soldier was permitted to look at me. Those were the beliefs of the Wastelanders. And there was something else, too. Marriages were only permitted with Daughters of the King.