CHAPTER 18
“Listen,” the sleek man in the lumpy suit said. “They’re not stupid. They know the lizards needed help, and they know you provided it. There’s security footage of your moving their gold for them, making purchases, aiding and abetting them through criminal acts. There’s a stolen car…”
Aria was barely listening to the man. She was exhausted and miserable beyond what she had known her capacity for misery could be. She had been thrown into a cell, clothed, but stripped of all hope. The collar Vyktor had made for her had been cut from her neck and had no doubt been entered into evidence against her. It was strange, but she could still feel it in spite of its absence.
She sat in the tiny cell, with the light perpetually on, the walls so close she could reach out and touch them with both hands. Guards came twice a day to feed her, but not on any particular schedule. It would have been bad if they had called her names or judged her, but what they did was worse—they ignored her completely. The treatment was designed to break her spirit, a cruelty on top of the cruelty of her situation.
Aria did not know how long it had taken for this lawyer to come and see her. It could have been a day. It could have been a week.
Things have to get worse before they get better.
Vyktor’s words came back to her, floating through her memory. She smiled down at the table a little. She missed him with all she had, but parts of him were still with her. Even with her feet shackled to the floor, her hands shackled to the desk, there was a little tiny part of her that felt free in his memory.
“Listen,” her lawyer repeated. “If you ever want to see the light of day again, you’re going to have to explain how you were captured and tortured…”
“I wasn’t tortured,” Aria said bluntly. “I was… tamed.”
The lawyer’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “What do you mean, tamed?”
“I mean…” How to explain what she’d been through without sounding insane? Aria really didn’t know. These people didn’t understand. The matter was simple to them. Dragons = evil. The only reason someone would offer the dragons aid was if they were insane, or evil themselves. The government was making the latter case against her, looking for the death penalty.
“They confined you against your will?”
“I was a prisoner,” Aria said. “Right up until they attempted to make their retreat. They behaved with honor. We did not. We…”
“So you were held captive,” her lawyer interrupted her. He wasn’t interested in learning the truth, he was just trying to cobble together a narrative that would get her out of trouble. She supposed that was a good thing, but it wasn’t the truth. Thisclose to death, the truth of what had really happened suddenly mattered to her a lot.
“They wanted to know how to get along with humans,” Aria tried to explain. “They wanted to see if there was a way to… train us.”
Nothing she said made the process sound any better. Had she been brainwashed into thinking she loved Vyktor? Was it really as her lawyer was telling her it must have been? If so, why had it felt so different?
“In the beginning, yes, he was experimenting, I guess,” she said, trying to explain better. “But he did it because he wanted to find a way to stop the battle. The dragons didn’t really know what we were. They thought we were like animals.”
“So he trained you like an animal?”
“At first, yes.”
“Was sexual contact involved at any time?”
Aria nodded.
“So you were abused.”
“Not by him.”
“By who?”
Aria looked her lawyer dead in the eye. “You.”
“Me? I wasn’t there.”
“I mean you as in… society. I was a lost, fucked-up kid when I joined the service. They took care of me, and then they used me as a tool to get a job done. I was okay with that. But he taughtme what it was to be a woman. And they… the dragons… never wanted war. They wanted to retreat.”
Her lawyer didn’t seem to care about any of that. His face was bland and unsympathetic as he repeated himself yet again. “I’m trying to get you off a charge of treason, Ms. Thomas-Jones. It carries the death penalty.”
“Maybe I was meant to die,” Aria said. “In that desert, when my plane went down. If that dragon hadn’t been on my ass, I would have died there and then. He gave me months of a love hardly anyone gets to have. If I die now, fine. At least I won’t spend a lifetime missing him.”
Her lawyer gave her a long look. “I’m going to argue diminished capacity and psychological compromise,” he said. “Whatever they did to you, it changed you.”
