Enslaved Read Online Free PDF Page A

Unfriendly, searching eyes she’d seen peering down at her from a high window too many times to count.
    Gryphon. Orpheus’s brother. The guardian who’d mutilated those daemons today, who’d nearly killed one of his own in the process. The guardian, rumor ran in the colony, who was psychotic.
    Fear burst in the center of her chest. Arm outstretched, she moved backward, her boots echoing off rocks as she stumbled into the moonlight. The blade in her hand shook, and every instinct in her body said run, but she couldn’t turn her back on him. This close, she was afraid that if she did, she’d never even reach the trees. She wasn’t immortal like her parents, only ageless. And because she’d been cursed by Hades at birth, there was no afterlife for her. If she died now—before finding her way to Olympus—she’d simply cease to exist. No one to even remember who or what she’d been.
    “Don’t…don’t come near me,” she managed.
    He didn’t move a muscle, just stared at her with those haunted eyes, watching her as he’d done for months now from the isolation of his room. Except this time his brow was furrowed as he studied her, and a perplexed expression grew slowly across his features the longer he watched her.
    Her heart rate picked up speed. Was he going to kill her? Would she even see him move? Her puny knife was nothing against a warrior as skilled as he was.
    Voices grew louder toward the front of the tower again. As he turned to look, she knew it was her only shot. She tore off toward the darkness of the trees and ran with everything she had in her. If she could reach the passageway she’d found before he did, she could bar the door. She could still get away.
    Twenty yards into the darkness of the orchard, he slammed into her from behind, knocking her off her feet. The air whooshed out of her lungs. Her backpack went sailing. The knife flew from her fingers. She hit the ground on her side, her shoulder and hip taking the brunt of the impact. A grunt left her mouth. But even before pain registered, she scrambled to her feet, tried to push herself up, the flight instinct roaring in her blood. He flipped her to her back before she could find her footing, though, and pinned her hands easily with one of his. Then he slapped his free hand over her mouth and used his weight to still her struggling.
    “Stop moving, dammit,” he whispered. “They’ll hear you.”
    He outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds, and this close, she could feel the corded muscles beneath the thin, long-sleeved shirt he wore. He was warm where she felt cold, hard where she was soft, and his breath, mere millimeters from her ear, heated the skin of her neck and sent shivers of fear racing down her spine.
    And yet…the darkness inside her that was a result of her link to the Underworld vibrated with excitement. It pulled on something in her chest, drew her toward him—a pull she’d felt before but resisted because she didn’t understand it.
    Now she did. Now, the reasons he watched her made sense. Still to be radiating darkness like this, here in the human realm, he had to have been cursed.
    Hades had already tried to kill her numerous times. He could very well have let Gryphon free to finish the job. Her need to get away from him shot into the stratosphere.
    Her mind was a blur of frenetic activity. But when she realized he was listening to what was happening around them, she tuned in to her surroundings.
    The voices had separated. One seemed to be coming from her left, another from her right. From far off in the distance more shouts echoed, more voices heading this way.
    There were more than the two tower guards out here. Earlier, when she was with Skyla, she’d heard Nick say Gryphon was locked in his room, under armed guard. They had to be looking for him, not her.
    Hope resurged. If she could get away from him, if she could signal the guards as to his location, they’d forget all about her. He’d be locked up and she