Two Thousand Years | The Empire Saga #1

Chapter Three

Alex's words hung in the air between them, and suddenly being so close to the stranger made her uneasy, uncertain, and incredibly uncomfortable.

As the haze of her panic subsided, her defenses kicked back into high gear. This was the same man who kidnapped her, took her from her home, and wasn't telling her why. Regardless of what her heart may believe, despite how safe he may make her feel, she wanted to be as far away from him as possible.

She gathered herself up off the floor and out of his arms, but forgot her injured foot's searing pain, and managed to hobble away before collapsing on the edge of the bed. She looked down at her bare foot, where the skin looked red and swollen, and she cringed as she tried to move her toes.

"You really should let me look at it. You may still have pieces of ceramic in there."

She knew he was right, and soon he was kneeling in front of her at the bed.

"May I?" He motioned to her injured foot. She nodded and gently lifted it out for him, resting her heel on his extended knee.

His hands were soft as he gingerly handled her foot. She let out a sharp yelp here and there as his fingers tested and pried at various spots along her sole and toes, and when he seemed satisfied with his examination, he gently placed the extremity back on the ground and stood up, walking over to the wall of cabinets and drawers across from the bed.

Taking a breath to calm her nerves, she decided now was as good a time as any to open up a line of communication. "Okay..." She struggled to remember his name.

"Treyan."

"What?"

"My name is Treyan," he reminded her from over his shoulder.

"Treyan," she sighed. "Please, tell me. I need to know what's going on."

He continued to rummage through the high cabinets along the wall. For a moment she wasn't sure if he had heard her on not.

"Okay, never mind. You can just bring me back to my apartment now and we can pretend this whole encounter never happened. We can both go along our merry little ways and continue on with our mundane lives."

He turned back to her then, a small tweezer-like tool in one hand, a roll of gauze and bandages in the other, and he knelt back in front of her, gently lifting her foot to his knee again.

"I can't do that," Treyan said softly, his focus wholly on her foot.

She winced as he began to work, pulling the broken pieces of the pitcher from her foot. "Oh, yes, I think you can."

He shook his head and sighed, his eyes focused on her foot. "If you haven't figured it out by now, Alex, I know you. Doesn't that give you reason enough to want to stay and figure out why?"

Alex bit her lip as she watched him. "Yes. Yes, it does. Of course, it does," she said quickly. "So, tell me, and then I can go home."

"Do you truly think if you returned home, you could forget any of this ever happened?""

She peered at him. "Denial is a powerful force."

He snorted and continued. "The denial you mention would undoubtedly drive you insane. Of course, you could try to figure it all out on your own, but eventually you'd make yourself crazy because no matter how hard you tried, you would never be able to place my face."

He glanced up and her wide eyes met his careful gaze. There was no humor in those blue eyes. Not even as he said, "It would destroy your last bit of sanity to the point where you would begin to claw the skin away from your fingers while you worked at the bricks of that fireplace in your apartment, just hoping for the glimmer of a chance that I would again appear."