When the cell door opened the next day, Sawny was feeling slightly more improved. His health had mostly returned, baring his starvation, and Addison’s extra food and the vermin in the cell were keeping his belly a bit more filled. Not full, but enough to give him strength.
He had made up his mind that he was done sitting in the shadows and feeling badly for himself. Kelso was going to let him rot or drag him away to his torture chamber, and he was not gonna make it easy for the man.
Sawny expected the servant lad, yet Addison was not with the guard. Much to Sawny's good fortune, the short, slightly built guard entered the room by himself.
Fools,he thought as he kept his head low and his shoulders slumped.
He kept his face hidden with his scraggly, matted hair and waited for the soldier to move close enough. When the soldier reached down to grab his hand, Sawny exploded off the stone floor like a tempest.
Using the guard’s grip on his arm for leverage, Sawny launched himself upright, bringing his knee up and into the guard’s lowered face. It was always a sound move, if a fighter could bring a man's nose in contact with a knee, and one his cousin Roy had taught him. And it was a hit that was difficult to come back from. Sawny’s strike was true and more powerful than he could have hoped for. The guard’s nose broke with a sickening crunch. The guard screeched and floundered backward, releasing his grip on Sawny as Sawny rose upright.
That was all Sawny needed. With the guard bloody and confused and Sawny steady on his own two feet, he moved in and punched the floundering guard under his jaw. His strike knocked the guard to the side where he slammed against the wall with both hands. Sawny took a step forward to follow through with his left arm when his right arm was grabbed in an iron grip before he could finish off the battered guard.
That grip spun him around until Sawny faced the slightly taller, enraged guard from the hall next to him.
“Feckin’ MacDonalds,” was all the guard said before the man’s fist made contact with a side of Sawny’s temple, knocking him to the ground.
Sawny was no stranger to dirty fighting and was not going to give up so easily. He’d been knocked on his backside before. Many times. And he knew exactly what to do once he was down.
While he was on the ground, he grabbed the guard’s ankle, pitching the man sideways. The unsuspecting guard, who thought he had the upper hand, slammed onto his ass, shouting and cussing as he tried to catch himself.
This guard, however, was not going to be caught as unaware as his partner. Before Sawny could scramble away like the spiders he’d been feasting on, the guard kicked out with his heavy leather boot, making contact with Sawny’s face, shoving Sawny to the ground. The guard got to his feet before he turned and spat at Sawny.
“Feckin’ MacDonalds,” he cursed again and with his foot, he shoved Sawny closer to the corner before attending to the other guard.
The other guard was groaning and holding his face. If Sawny was lucky, he broke the man's nose completely. The standing guard grabbed the injured man's arm and dragged him out of the cell.
The cell door slammed behind them, and the sound of the bolt clicking into place meant he was not going anywhere right now. There was a chance it meant he avoided Kelso’s torture chamber another day.
Sawny sat up against the wall, letting the cool stone calm his excited, heated skin, and spat across into the corner. A bit of bloody spittle, but nothing to worry about. His face, other than feeling sore and bruised from the kick, did not ache much at all. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
This fight probably also meant he was not going to get fed tonight, but it had been worth it.
Next time, he’d try to lift the keys off the guard when he attacked him.
That night when Sawny slept, instead of fevered dreams and dark shadows torturing his visions, he dreamed of Adaira. His body still thrummed with the excitement of finally being able to fight back, and that buzzing carried him into his dream land.
This time in his dream, Adaira did not turn from him. Instead, she sauntered up to him, an inviting smile on her lips and her fingertips skimming along the neckline of her gown that barely contained her ample keeping breasts.
No one had a bust like Adaira. Och, they were a bounty, round and full beyond measure, more than a handful with brownish-pink tips that begged for his attention. In his dream, she pulled on that neckline until those luscious tips were exposed in front of him, enticing him, and he surged forward, sealing his lips against her sweet skin. She tasted of salt, of heather, of freedom, of ecstasy.
She lifted her skirts and moved her leg so it wrapped around his thigh, settling him closer between her velvet thighs. As his lips caressed her breasts and moved to the other pinkish tip that begged for attention, his hand found her thigh and he slid his fingers over that smooth skin up under her skirts where her dark blonde curls whetted in their invitation.
A surge burst through Sawny, something raw and primal and animal, and in his dream, his balls clenched. And when he found his moment, it was so explosive, that he awakened with a jerk. Adaira and her luscious body were absent. He found only the cold stones and old peat, and his essence sticky in his braies.
He cursed and clenched his fists.
She had been so real.
He was almost certain that Adaira had been there in his bed with him, that she had been touching him and giving him a reason to go on.
He dropped his head back to the stones with a groan and let his spent essence dry in his braies.
They were already so stained and disgusting anyway — what did it matter?
Burning these clothes would be the second thing he’d do the minute he escaped.
Addison returned in the morning with a platter of food. Unlike the previous mornings, he heard the jingle of keys from the hallway, and Sawny’s stomach growled.
