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  THE PRINCE’S SLAVE

  P.J.

  Fox

  This novel is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed herein are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to places or events existing within the world as we know it is purely coincidental.

  THE PRINCE’S SLAVE

  Copyright © 2015 by Evil Toad Press

  Previously published in serial form by Evil Toad Press/Amazon Digital Services, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Evil Toad Press

  Cover design by Evil Toad Press

  Published by Evil Toad Press ISBN: 978-1-942365-34-1

  First Edition: December 2014

  BY P.J. FOX

  THE BLACK PRINCE TRILOGY

  Book One: The Demon of Darkling Reach

  Book Two: The White Queen

  THE HOUSE OF LIGHT AND SHADOW

  Book One: The Price of Desire

  Book Two: A Dictionary of Fools

  The Prisoner

  The Assassin

  THE PRINCE’S SLAVE

  Part One: Captive In His Castle

  Part Two: Bound In His Bed

  Part Three: Collared In His Care

  The Prince’s Slave Omnibus Edition

  COLLECTIONS

  I, Demon

  NONFICTION

  I Look Like This Because I’m A Writer: How To Overcome Sloth, Self-Doubt, and Poor Hygiene to Realize the Writing Career of Your Dreams Self Publishing Is For Losers: The Evil Toad Press Guide To Self Publishing

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This isn’t an entirely pleasant story. No retelling of Beauty and the Beast should be. The original Belle, too, was kidnapped. Hideously taken advantage of by those whom she most had reason to trust. She worked through her own problems, on her own, and carved her own happy ending. She was–in her own time and after her own fashion–a feminist, too.

  But that light, it came from darkness. Happy endings aren’t handed to us. And the issue at hand in The Prince’s Slave isn’t some abstract statement on the evils of human trafficking but, rather, its effect on each individual. As the author, the research involved in crafting this book had an effect on me. On so many levels. I am an adult survivor of childhood abuse. And, as such, know judgment: from others, who wonder what I, as a child, must have done to bring that situation onto myself and, indeed, from myself regarding my own process of healing. Although I’ve also learned that where we do, and do not find redemption is a matter beyond judgment. We simply are, like our path. And hopefully that path—whatever form it takes—is a healing one.

  I felt compelled to write this book, both because Beauty and the Beast always spoke to me and because I wanted to deconstruct my feelings about my own experiences and, hopefully, transform them into a message of hope. I couldn’t have done that without my best friend and partner, my Ash, the man who saved me: my husband. I owe him everything and it was his example, and his support, which first gave me the courage to be myself. He rescued me ten years ago, and our life together has been my own happily ever after.

  P.J.

  For everyone whose Charming is a dark prince of ice and snow, a creature of night

  Table of Contents

  Captive in His Castle

  Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten | Chapter Eleven | Chapter Twelve | Chapter Thirteen | Chapter Fourteen | Chapter Fifteen | Chapter Sixteen | Chapter Seventeen | Chapter Eighteen | Chapter Nineteen | Chapter Twenty | Chapter Twenty-One | Chapter Twenty-Two | Chapter Twenty-Three | Chapter Twenty-Four | Chapter Twenty-Five | Chapter Twenty-Six | Chapter Twenty-Seven | Chapter Twenty-Eight | Chapter Twenty-Nine | Chapter Thirty

  Bound in His Bed

  Chapter Thirty-One | Chapter Thirty-Two | Chapter Thirty-Three | Chapter Thirty-Four | Chapter Thirty-Five | Chapter Thirty-Six | Chapter Thirty-Seven | Chapter Thirty-Eight | Chapter Thirty-Nine | Chapter Forty | Chapter Forty-One | Chapter Forty-Two | Chapter Forty-Three | Chapter Forty-Four | Chapter Forty-Five | Chapter Forty-Six | Chapter Forty-Seven | Chapter Forty-Eight | Chapter Forty-Nine | Chapter Fifty | Chapter Fifty-One | Chapter Fifty-Two | Chapter Fifty-Three | Chapter Fifty-Four | Chapter Fifty-Five | Chapter Fifty-Six | Chapter Fifty-Seven | Chapter Fifty-Eight | Chapter Fifty-Nine | Chapter Sixty | Chapter Sixty-One | Chapter Sixty-Two | Chapter Sixty-Three | Chapter Sixty-Four | Chapter Sixty-Five | Chapter Sixty-Six | Chapter Sixty-Seven | Chapter Sixty-Eight | Chapter Sixty-Nine | Chapter Seventy

  Collared In His Care

  Chapter Seventy-One | Chapter Seventy-Two | Chapter Seventy-Three | Chapter Seventy-Four | Chapter Seventy-Five | Chapter Seventy-Six | Chapter Seventy-Seven | Chapter Seventy-Eight | Chapter Seventy-Nine | Chapter Eighty | Chapter Eighty-One | Chapter Eighty-Two | Chapter Eighty-Three | Chapter Eighty-Four | Chapter Eighty-Five | Chapter Eighty-Six | Chapter Eighty-Seven | Chapter Eighty-Eight | Chapter Eighty-Nine | Chapter Ninety | Chapter Ninety-One | Chapter Ninety-Two | Chapter Ninety-Three | Chapter Ninety-Four | Chapter Ninety-Five | Chapter Ninety-Six | Chapter Ninety-Seven | Chapter Ninety-Eight | Chapter Ninety-Nine

  About the Author

  THE PRINCE’S SLAVE

  Captive

  In His

  Castle

  P.J.

  Fox

  ONE

  What saved her from being birdlike was the sense about her, an almost ineffable aura that clung to even her smallest movements: grounded, almost ponderous as she sat in her chair and surveyed the room. She didn’t slouch, but she was relaxed. She’d rested her back against the uncomfortable wood and her arm along the back of the chair next to her. In front of her was a cheap green folder filled with articles she’d printed at the library.

  Incongruous, in a nightclub.

  Belle had been named for the selfsame character in Beauty and the Beast. Not even the fairy tale; the Disney classic that had been a classic for some time when she was born. The film had been a brainchild of her mother’s era, and Donna Wainwright had been determined to pass along the sense of adventure and sheer escapism that the heroine’s journey had given her. She wanted, she’d told her highly serious child, for Belle to have an exciting life.

  And Belle had excelled at school, and in ballet, but so far Belle had not had an exciting life. Unless excitement could be measured in grades and scores. Belle had, at twenty years of age, done little except study.

  She’d approached ballet as she approached everything else: with intent. And she was as graceful as the wind bending the willows. Talented enough for Juilliard. Or so her teachers—and her mother—had told her. Belle didn’t accept compliments easily, and tended to reject their veracity simply because they were directed at her. They embarrassed her, a girl who preferred to be invisible. Her innate desire to recede into the walls might have eventually conflicted with her chosen career path but at seventeen she’d suffered an injury that made further dance impossible.

  And so, always a gifted student, she’d turned to academics with the same fervor with which she’d once approached ballet.

  She’d succeeded. Again. Although she’d hardly seen either success as success. Ballet, because she’d been cursed with a weak knee, and academics, because they weren’t her passion. But Belle was also keenly aware that she had to make a living for herself. The best education possible—or at least the best grades possible—from the best university possible opened doors. Or so she lectured herself in the wee hours, when the papers swam on the desk before her and she was dangerously close to propping her eyes open with toothpicks because coffee had long ago lost its efficacy.

  Which was how she
’d come to be sitting in a nightclub in Prague.

  Belle had left her prestigious Boston-area university for a study abroad program in Dresden. She was a month into a semester-long program and had so far managed to make one friend. The friend who’d brought her here, to this smoke-filled hellhole. She glanced down at her folder and then up, and out at the crowd—mostly below her, from where she sat on the balcony—without really seeing anything. Dresden had been a good choice because, as the woman had explained when she’d stopped into the study abroad office, there was no competition.

  Because Dresden was part of East Germany until Germany reunified in 1990, five years before Belle was born and twenty-three years before she’d enrolled in college, Dresden hadn’t had time to build up the kind of study abroad cachet that attracted students to programs in places like London. Better students, in her mind. People who, with scarcely two decades under their belts, had more confidence than those twice their age. Belle sat in class with future presidents and present revolutionaries, people who already spent their weekends volunteering in free legal clinics and saving the whales. They lectured her confidently on how they planned to change the world. They had the answers.

  Belle, herself, had no answers. Only a vague sense that she was doing something wrong. She rolled out of bed and dragged herself to class in her pajamas and sat next to girls who’d somehow managed to affect perfect hair and makeup at eight in the morning. She solved differential equations and debated the causes of the French Revolution and each separate activity was interesting enough but when viewed on a longer timeline…for her, they led nowhere. It wasn’t that she saw no purpose in education for its own sake. Unlike her mother, she’d never eschewed learning about the French Revolution because what are you going to do with that. Her mother had suggested becoming a dental assistant.

  Belle had had some trouble locating the university’s study abroad programs office, a surprisingly dusty corner of the campus that advertised adventure with a yellowed sign in the window. She’d picked Dresden almost at random. Nobody else wants this? Good. Some weeks later she’d been surprised, even so, when she’d gotten an email telling her that her that she’d been accepted. Starting the next semester, Belle would to be a proud student of Technische Universität Dresden. Charmingly known to all who attended as TUD.

  There are humanities courses, one of her professors had told her. In a tone that was meant to be encouraging. And, Belle supposed, there was running water as well.

  The city described in brochures as “charming” and “off the beaten track” was an unappealing mix of buildings that looked like left-over sets from The Illusionist and the sorts of concrete cubicles that had defined life under communist rule. There were also a few halfhearted attempts at modern architecture, although with no real viewpoint as far as style. She hated going to movies at the so-called Modern Cinema Building, a name that belonged in Dresden’s communist past if ever there was one, because she felt like it was going to tip over. If she never saw another oversized horror of plate glass and poured concrete, it would be too soon. She’d remarked on this fact to her rather intellectually moribund roommate, who’d just stared at her.

  Cubism, Belle had said patiently.

  What?

  And so that had been the end of that.

  Belle had no particular interest in international relations, which was what she was studying, but at least she was out. Of Cambridge and Boston across the river and the bad vegetarian food and the yelling and the smells and the sense that the walls were closing in on her. Boston smelled like concrete and fumes from a thousand different outlets and even the trees in the city’s famous common didn’t seem all that green. Once, Belle had taken her lunch to a shaded spot under a tree and a squirrel had stolen her chicken nugget. It ran right up her leg, wrenched the tiny breaded patty from her fingertips and chattered at her indignantly as if to scold her for being so stupid in the first place as to eat in public.

  She had, in the intervening time between that first week in Massachusetts and her eventual escape, discovered that the squirrel had been right. She’d had her food stolen from her by other squirrels, geese, small children and homeless people. She missed home, which was Scarborough, Maine.

  She hadn’t wanted to go back there—the University of Maine was entirely full of people who wanted to get good jobs being dental assistants—and she’d needed to escape. So she’d picked the program most likely to accept her and signed her name on the dotted line. Her scholarship covered it; and, indeed, she’d been one of only two other applicants from the whole school. Her advisor had offered that getting to other cities from Dresden is quite easy.

  The thing was, though, that when you didn’t know what you wanted all places looked pretty much the same. There was food and there were things to do and there was a place to curl up and read a book. And there were people, and there were lines, and there were a thousand and one petty annoyances: the kind of thing you ignored when you were happy but found exceptionally grating when you were not. Belle found herself standing in line, fuming at the fact that some underpaid sales clerk had printed up a sign that said day old “bread” because whatever cut-rate high school he’d gone to had taught him that quotation marks were merely pretty little decorations that could sometimes be used for emphasis. And the fact that milk was five cents more expensive here than at the other market but when she went to the other market she had to take the scary bus with the man who barked like a dog and the prostitutes who were mean to her.

  The side of Cambridge that the tourists didn’t know existed, and that her mother refused to believe existed.

  The articles she’d printed out were all on ancient Sumeria. Her assignment was to write a paper either supporting or refuting the theory—championed by two men named Barry Buzan and Richard Little, who were now dead—that the interaction between various ancient Sumerian city-states in fact functioned as the first “fully fledged system of international relations.” Alternatively, she could argue that the modern concept of international relations dated to the Peace of Westphalia. She should have, she realized now, printed out something detailing policy changes in the Holy Roman Empire—which was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire—between the Treaty of Westphalia and the Treaty of Utrecht so she’d have had something to read on the way home.

  She was, rather optimistically, planning on finishing the contents of her folder at this very table.

  Even though she hadn’t started yet.

  She had, instead, been woolgathering. She tapped her fingers against the tabletop, which was sticky. Dresden offered a full-year program; perhaps she should inquire about staying on. Her German was improving rapidly; she might be able to transfer out of the English language program for the next semester. Then she could avoid Easter and Honey Baked Ham and her mother’s probing questions about what exactly she was going to do with a degree in international relations. She’d tried to explain that Ivy League schools didn’t offer degrees in things like Information Technology. And, even less successfully, that she wasn’t even sure she was majoring in international relations.

  And she hated ham.

  She sighed. The water in her glass tasted like aluminum and the lone ice cube it’d come with had melted. She opened her folder, pulled out the first of the articles, and laid it carefully down on top. Then, rooting around in her purse, she produced a highlighter and a pen.

  She tried to concentrate. She really did. But the club was so loud.

  It reminded her, vaguely, of a coffee house she’d frequented in Harvard Square: a place called Café Algiers. Café Algiers was part of a building that looked alright on the outside but appeared to be falling apart at the seams inside. The space that the café occupied was tall and thin, with a mezzanine level that could be accessed by a canted spiral staircase. There were decorations replete with the sort of inlay that could be found at bazaars all over the world and at Disney World. And at places that advertised things like authentic Egyptian handicrafts. Above the sandalwood
and mother of pearl, most of which was imitation and produced in India, hung pressed glass lanterns in various garish colors. But the coffee was good and there was a bathroom that hardly anyone ever threw up in.

  The balcony, she decided, was what reminded her of her old haunt. Nothing else looked the same. But at Café Algiers, like here, she could sit in the shadows, ignored for the most part, and peer out at the rest of the world. Nobody ever used the balcony, or so it seemed, at either place. When Belle studied at Café Algiers, she did so alone and before the oncoming rush of the nighttime crowd. She could sit and read for hours and be the only customer, a situation which suited her just fine.

  Here, she’d been abandoned shortly after her friends—who couldn’t believe that she’d brought homework with her—found the table. Well, friend. Charlotte, who went to another Boston-area school and who was in a sorority and who had opinions on such issues as whether the coveted thigh gap was a tool of feminine oppression.

  Belle, who still ate like a ballet dancer, had never considered the issue. She was no athlete, not now, but she still ran five mornings a week and did calisthenics to strengthen her knee. Which, annoyingly, still gave out on her at the most inopportune times. Had given out one time in particular, causing the injury to her ankle that ended her career.

  She put down her highlighter. She’d read the same paragraph over five times and still had no idea what it was about. Her eyes reflected the glow of the club lights, even as she sat in shadow. It was so dark on the mezzanine level that she could barely read; the other tables were mostly empty, in stark contrast to the undulating press of bodies down below. Belle’s eyes were large for her face, a mass of planes and angles just on the edge of being beautiful. She had blue eyes, like her mother, eyes that flashed gray in some lights and almost black in others. Her shoulders and ribcage, like her face, were thin. Her wrists were thin, too, as thin as twigs and looked like they might snap just as easily but her fingers were long and graceful. And strong, from years of sculpting.