Gild (The Plated Prisoner, #1)

by Raven Kennedy

I try to keep a positive outlook on life, even if I am in my own person-sized birdcage. A pretty jail for a pretty relic.

Six is the king’s lucky number—since

I’m just the king’s favorite saddle. I wrinkle my nose at that term. I prefer it when people call me the king’s favored. It has a much nicer ring to it, though it still means the same thing. I’m his.

The king is a breast man.

Gold is a big theme here in King Midas’s Highbell Castle. Gold floors. Gold window frames. Rugs, paintings, tapestries, cushions, clothing, dishes, knights’ armor, hell, even the pet bird is frozen in lifeless shine. As far as the eye can see, everything is gold, gold, gold, including the entire infrastructure of the palace itself. Every stone and rung and pillar.

I really wish I had more wine.

I love when he smiles. It gives me the crawling caterpillars in my stomach—not butterflies. I’m jealous of those free-flying bitches.

Let me out. Touch me. Want me.

My skin is real, shimmering, satiny, gilded gold.

I’m an oddity, a commodity, a rumor. I’m the king’s favored. His prized saddle. The one he gold-touched and keeps in a cage at the top of his castle, my body bearing the mark of his ownership and favoritism. The gilded pet. I’m the darling of King Midas, ruler of Highbell and the Sixth Kingdom of Orea. People flock to see me just as much as they come to look upon his gleaming castle worth more than all the riches in the entire realm. I’m the gold-plated prisoner. But what a pretty prison it is.

It’s funny how he can make me feel both immense desire and crushing disappointment at the same time.

Does it really matter if your cage is solid gold when you aren’t allowed to leave it? A cage is a cage, no matter how gilded.

But memory and time aren’t friends. They reject each other, they hurry in opposite directions, pulling the binding taut between them, threatening to snap. They fight, and we inexplicably lose. Memory and time. Always losing one as you go on with the other.

If those stars really are goddesses waiting to be born, I should warn them to stay where they are in the safety of their twinkling light. Because down here? Down here, life is dark and lonely, and it has noisy bells and not nearly enough wine.

One should never decide something as serious as bangs when they have a bottle of wine in their stomachs.

ridiculously fun. You kind of have to be when the only person you hang out with is you. I wouldn’t want to bore myself.

“Of course she’s beautiful,” my king says smugly. “She’s mine.”

The man who promised to always keep me safe is giving me to another, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

You can pretend a lot of things in life. You can pretend so well that you even start to believe your own deceit. We’re all actors; we’re all on pedestals with a spotlight shining on us, playing whatever part we need to in order to make it through the day—in order to help ourselves sleep at night.

You can have all the gold in the world and yet lack everything of real worth.

“You killed a king for me, Digby,” I mutter. He just grunts.

Sail looks over at me, his blackened eye growing darker, puffier with every passing second. He looks tortured. Not for himself, but for me. That apple in his throat bobbing again. “I was supposed to guard you. To protect you—” “You did,” I say fiercely, cutting him off. I refuse to let him blame himself for this. “There was nothing else you could’ve done.”

Right now, the one person I want to talk to, the one person I know could make me feel better, is dead in the snow with a puncture through his heart. My only friend. Dead, because of me.

The commander with spikes jutting from his spine and arms isn’t cursed. The male who stops at the front of the group, so tall that Captain Fane has to tip his head up to look, isn’t some result of King Ravinger’s powers perverting his body. No, the man standing there, whose body basks in menace, is one thing and one thing only. Fae.

Saira Turley did the one thing that no others had—she walked the bridge of Lemuria, and came back to tell the tale.

My eyes can’t seem to leave him, and I find myself counting the black spikes that trail down his spine. Starting from between his shoulder blades to his lower back, he has six of them, each one shorter than the one above. They’re curved in a slight downward arc, popping right through his armor, a vicious gleam to them that reflects the red-burning lanterns.

“Commander Rip,” the captain replies

Men making deals on the behalf of women never seems to go very well for the women.

I might have ended the captain of the Red Raids, but we’re going from being the captives of greedy pirates to being the captives of bloodthirsty soldiers. I don’t know which is worse. But I’m about to find out.

He’s terrifying. He’s ethereal. He’s so very, very fae.

I’m vulnerable here at his feet, with the commander’s eyes locked on my weak ribbons that are still trying to help hold me up. His unwanted attention makes my heart gallop.

“I know what you are,”

“Funny, I was about to say the same thing to you.”

My favored. My gilded. My precious. She’s been stolen from me and is being held in an enemy’s clutches.

She’s mine. And I’ll destroy everyone in my path to get her back.