“Ignoring me?” The sound of the key jarring in the lock made me tremble. My instincts screamed at me to run and hide, but I was trapped.
My throat closed up.
I caught Nestore’s eyes. He sat up, his eyes reflecting concern. No,fear.
I swallowed hard. The guard opened my cell door with a jarring creak and stepped in. The way he scanned me from head to toe made me want to creep under the cot like a small child, as if that would protect me. It hadn’t in the past when Father had come to my room to punish me, and it wouldn’t now.
“Where’s my father?” I inquired, trying to sound confident. He smirked as he locked himself inside the cell.
My heart seemed to burst out of my chest as my eyes scanned my surroundings for a weapon I could use, even if I’d never done it before.
“Leave her alone,” Nestore snarled.
The guard laughed, a dirty sound from deep in his belly. “Watch and learn, boy. Not that you’ll ever get the chance to fuck a woman. You’ll die a virgin down here. If you’re lucky, one of the guards will at least fuck your ass one day.”
I shuddered, fear making my pulse rush in my veins. His shadow fell over me. My hand shook too much to keep writing, so I lifted the pen off the paper and peered up.
“What do you want?”
He cackled. “I think you know what I want.”
He gripped my arms and jerked me to my feet. I screamed, overcome with terror. Without thinking, I rammed the pen into his upper arm. He roared and ripped it out, then tossed it away.
He slapped me so hard I fell to the floor, my head ringing from the impact.
“Leave her alone! You’re a dead man!” Nestore roared, but the guard only sneered as he staggered toward me.
“I’ll rip your dirty cunt apart, you bitch.”
I scrambled backward, toward Nestore’s cell. The guard followed and bent over me, gripping my hair.
My scalp seemed to split open. The pain blinded me briefly, and I screamed.
A martial scream sounded. Not mine.
Nestore gripped the guard’s shirt and jerked him toward the bars. His face slammed against them, so he released my hair, and Nestore wrapped his arm around the man’s throat from behind, holding on to the bars for leverage.
The man’s eyes bulged as he struggled against Nestore’s hold, his arms flailing almost comically. I scrambled away, my heart slamming into my rib cage as I watched. Nestore pulled my pen from his trousers and rammed the tip into the guard’s eye over and over again. The man’s flailing increased, and the key chain flew out of his hand and past the bars into the aisle. Nestore released the guard when he hung limply in his grip, and he tumbled to the ground, gurgling as blood spurted out of his eyes. Nestore breathed harshly as the guard jerked, then stilled.
I was frozen in shock. Blood spread out around the head, and the stench of feces flooded my nose.
Nestore had killed this man in a horrid fashion. I wasn’t even sure why I was so shocked.
“The keys,” Nestore rasped, looking exhausted. I stumbled toward the bars and knelt, then squeezed my arm through the gap between the bars, trying to reach the dropped keys, but they were still more than an arm’s length away.
“I can’t reach them,” I whispered.
Nestore sank to the floor with his back against the bars, his chest heaving. I crawled over to him and touched his shoulder. “Thank you for saving me.”
“I’ll always save you,” he said fiercely.
I sat against the bars, so our backs were touching, and regarded the corpse with trepidation. “I hope they’ll bring us food tonight, so someone takes away the body.”
“He’s dead. You don’t have to fear the dead. Fear the living,” Nestore murmured. He was right, but the idea of spending the night with the dead body terrified me. His face was disfigured from the pen and would definitely feature in my nightmares.
“I’m worried they’ll punish you if they find out you killed him,” I whispered. “I’ll tell them I did it in self-defense.”
“They won’t care if it was self-defense, Amelia. Let me take responsibility. I didn’t save you so you’d get punished for something else. You won’t take the fall. They can’t do anything to me that they haven’t already done.”
