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Rough hands pin me down and a knife runs through the leather harness and collar more swiftly than I imagined was possible. As the bits of leather are pulled away, I feel naked even though I still retain the remnants of the dress. They’ve taken the mark of Avel’s protection, and I am as alone as I have ever been in this or any other world.
They’re panicking. Now they’ll just want to kill me and stash me somewhere. Make it so I’m never found. This is worst case scenario. I hope I can talk them out of it.
“It’s too late to get rid of me, and it will only piss Avel off more. He will know who took me. He will hunt each and every one of you down, and he will extract the kind of revenge you could only dream of.”
“Shut up!”
A boot cracks me in the ribs. There we go. That’s another injury. Now breathing hurts, and being moved is going to be excruciating, so I settle into my place on the floor and just hope like fucking hell someone in this room has more of a brain than the two cells slamming into the skull of the idiot who just took hold of me.
I’m glad I’ve been hurt before. I’ve taken worse injuries than this, and I know I can survive them.
I also know if they keep hitting me this way, that might change.
“We’re not going to tell Wrath. But we’re also not going to get rid of her. We’re going to keep her down here and we’ll see what Avel does. We’ll see how close he gets. We’ll see if he can find her or not. It’s been a long time since we tested the alpha’s capacity. We let them humiliate Torin. We need to strike back one way or another.”
“Then we should get out there, see if there’s any extra patrols. See what the chatter on the radio is,” someone else chimes in.
This whole room is just a mass of random someones. I should be doing my best to observe all of them. Get their names. Observe their appearances. Right now they’re kind of a blur of rainbow scales. There’s green and blue and orange and red and… no. Not purple. The only saurian I’ve seen with that incredible hue is Avel.
I miss him. And not even just in the obvious sense of hoping he rescues me. I assume he’ll do that. I just miss him. I miss being around him. I miss having his arms around me and feeling more safe and contained than I ever had before. I’m out on my own again now and being reminded harshly how fucking nasty the universe can be.
The saurians are done with me for the moment. As I lie aching on the floor, I hear them filing up and out of the cellar, heavy boots stamping up wood stairs. This has to be a very old building. My feeling that it’s in the part of the city not all that far from the Hall of Bones is growing. They’ve probably got me stashed away in some kind of rat hole right under Avel’s nose.
It’s smart that they’ve got me underground. That’s really not his domain. He might not think to search below the surface. Or maybe he’ll have a sense of who took me…
“Oh fuckkkk…” I groan as realization hits me. In spite of what I just said to that pack of dumb saurians, there’s a very real chance he doesn’t know I’ve been taken. He’s going to think I’ve escaped jail. And then he might even think that my crew came for me. If he thinks that, he’ll think that I’m beyond his reach. He might stop looking before he’s even started. And that might mean that I end up stuck in the clutches of these brutish, murderous monsters until my demise.
5 A PAINFUL ESCAPE
Avel
“How did this happen on your watch!?”
Even as I dress the unfortunate guard down, I know that I am being unreasonable. There should never have been anybody else on watch. I should have stayed on guard. I cannot believe I allowed this to happen. I let her out of my sight and lost her immediately as a result.
The guard is cowering, head bowed in shame and fear. He is no doubt worried about surviving this incident. He very possibly should be. I am struggling against the urge to strike him down where he stands — though I know that my anger is largely directed at myself.
I should have taken her home. I should have whipped her harder, and longer. I should have never allowed her to goad me into leaving her without supervision among others. I have clearly trusted in the integrity of this facility to an extent I will never accept again.
Before I can continue my dressing down of the unfortunate night guard, I hear someone shouting for me in extremely disrespectful tones.
“Wings! Back here!”
That voice makes every bit of my body rankle at once. I know that voice.
“What the hell is he doing here?”
“He was brought in late last night, sir. Disorderly conduct. We were going to hold him for you. Thought you’d be pleased, knowing who he is. He’s been evading justice for years, sir.”
I am not pleased. Hearing that voice in my prison is like finding a scaly egg-eater in a clutch of freshly laid eggs.
I walk back into the cells, where one other prisoner is held.
“Wrath?”
“The very same,” he laughs, leaning against the bars comfortably, as if the cell is his — as if this entire building is his and he meant to be here.
“What are you doing here?”
