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Niles and I don’t breathe. We wait for Helga Bee to tell us the good news.
“The prisoner gets blindfolded and placed somewhere in the prison to find their cage, like a rat in a maze. They don’t ever make it, though. Beaten until they’re bloody and dead.”
I release a slow, poisonous breath.
“Skylenna isn’t like the other prisoners,” Niles says, detached and exhausted. “She’ll make it.”
~
Skylenna
I want to show him my inner strength, but my teeth deceive me. They chatter endlessly. My muscles rumble under my skin from the biting frost. And I’m tightly hugging my arms to my waist, a feeble attempt to gather any heat at all.
“I bet my brother swoons at this sight of you. All wet and helpless.” Kaspias makes a fake attempt to hold back his laughter. He inspects every inch of me. Not with any sexual intent, but scientifically. Medically. The way an intellectual would study an anomaly.
Suddenly, a pair of rough hands grip my sopping wet uniform, tugging downward until fabric stretches and rips. I flinch at the gust of air sweeping over my nipples. My hands fly to my private parts, shielding them from his eyes.
He’s quiet for several seconds. Just staring at my naked, quivering body.
“You are pretty. And your curves are supple despite the way they starve their women in your country.” Kaspias lifts his chin with a pitying smirk, and it’s so similar to Dessin, I force myself to turn away. “I bet he thinks himself a real king for claiming you, hmm? Yet…you don’t do it for me.”
“Then why are you staring at me like every other man with an erection?” Provoking him is probably the single dumbest thing I can do in the face of a Vexamen Prison punishment. But I’m too cold to care. Too annoyed at his demeaning words to think this through.
Kaspias snatches the back of my head, fingers curling around a wet bunch of hair like he might yank it out by the root. “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to? I’m the fucking Commander of the Vexamen Breed! I’ve gutted men for less. I’ve beheaded mothers for defending their children. I’ve terrorized small villages on a whim. I could scalp you for the slightest bit of disrespect!”
Perhaps I’ve gone mad. Perhaps I’ve been mad this entire time. But I grin in his face, proud, taunting, and vicious. “So do it, little boy.”
For a single heartbeat, fear hangs over my gut. There’s a twinkle in his eyes made of coal and frost, an impulsive thought that tells him to prove a point. To scalp me right here. To parade my bleeding head around the prison. To make a spectacle, even though he’s supposed to keep me alive.
Instead, reason and logic win that silent debate. And that royally pisses him off. He settles for something less effective. I feel the world explode before I even catch a glimpse of his fist. Bone smashes into my jaw and mouth, and it blasts through my nostrils, eyes, skull, and spine like a shockwave. The quick punch makes me clamp down on my tongue, a slice through thick meat, and blood spills over my chin.
Kaspias laughs.
The void wants to bring me back to the moment Aurick hit me in his bedroom. How I crawled away from him, shielded myself from another beating. Cried and cried and cried. As the blood trickles past my lips, as the splitting headache zaps behind my eyes, I mourn her. I silently hold her in my arms, and tell her she doesn’t have to be afraid anymore.
Because unfortunately for Kaspias, that little girl is dead.
I move faster than the magnet in my ear can send me into a whirlpool of distorted gravity. Leaping into his arms, I use my last bit of strength to chomp down on his ear, aiming for that piece of metal, the dull earring. The room spins, piercing through my sense of balance, and as I fall from his shoulders, I yank, clamping down on that earring until I hear a tear.
Kaspias grunts as my back hits the floor and the walls tilt around me. I can’t focus on his movements, can’t even seem to think straight. But the feel of his boot slamming into my ribs is how I know I’ve made him hurt.
“You’ll pay for that!” he bellows as he continues to kick and bruise and knock the air from my lungs.
But through the gnawing pain, I smile up at him. With bloody teeth and tears gushing from my eyes.
I smile.
~
Ruth
Dessin paces the length of his small cage, hands flexing at his sides, jaw working as his mind caves in on itself.
“He’s no brother of yours,” he growls to himself—or to someone in his head.
We’ve never seen him talk out loud before. It always seems like he has those conversations silently. Even Warrose watches him with concern pinching his brow.
“We have to do something,” Niles begs from his cage, face pressed between the bars.
