The floor rises too fast when she lets go. I hit it on my side, cradling the ruined arm before I know I’m doing it. My vision blurs. The brazier light smears. Somewhere above me her gown whispers across stone as she steps back.
I know, dimly, that this isn’t over. That there will be guards. A cell. More questions later. But the pain is enormous and immediate and my body has had enough.
The last thing I register before blackness takes me is her voice, calm as frost. “Be careful with him. I want him conscious next time.”
Then the room vanishes.
Consciousness comes back like a tide that can’t decide which way it’s flowing.
For a while, I drift somewhere in the middle, caught between the heavy black quiet of unconsciousness and the burning edge of pain waiting on the other side. Each time I surface, somethingdrags me back under again—exhaustion, shock, the body’s desperate attempt to hide from what it already knows is coming.
The first thing that reaches me is the arm.
It’s still broken.
My brain doesn’t need sight to confirm it. The injury pulses with a deep, nauseating heat that spreads from wrist to elbow, a slow throb that beats in time with my heart. Every movement sends needles of agony shooting up my shoulder and down through my fingers, the bones grinding in a way that makes my stomach turn.
I try to shift and immediately regret it.
My arm is bound to my chest with rough cloth strips, tied harshly enough that I can feel the pressure cutting into my ribs. Someone has wrapped the break crudely. Not well or kindly. Just enough that the bones won’t slip further apart if I move.
It’s the sort of treatment meant to keep someone alive.
Not comfortable.
Alive.
I force my eyes open.
The cell swims into view slowly, like a picture dragged through muddy water. The same stone walls. The same bolted cot. The same bucket sitting quietly in the corner.
But the light under the crack of the door is different.
Darker.
Which means time has passed.
How much time is impossible to tell.
My throat feels raw when I try to swallow. My lips are cracked and sticky with dried blood. I try to sit up, but the world tilts violently.
Pain slams into me in layers—my ribs, my shoulder, my arm, the back of my skull where the guards knocked me out in the street. My body protests so loudly, I almost give up and collapse again, but stubbornness is one of the few things I still have left.
So I sit.
Slowly.
Carefully.
My broken arm throbs with every breath, and memory follows right behind the pain.
Queen Serresta. Her hand around my throat. The casual, effortless way she had twisted my arm until the bones gave way like dry branches.
I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment.
She hadn’t needed to ask questions. That’s the part that keeps circling in my mind.
She didn’t ask. She didn’t threaten. She simply explained what was going to happen.
