“Whatever,” I shrug, still trying to play it cool. “What is it you want me to do?”
He looks around. “I think our area is dirty. Get on your knees and clean up the??????,and all the rest of the detritus.”
So that’s what happens. I crawl around the bleachers, picking up sodden cigarette butts and trash from the cracked concrete. My knees quickly become raw and bleeding beneath the thin coveralls, but I keep my face blank. I’ve survived my father, I’ve survived Thomas Crankshawe, I can survive this.
At least moving prevents me from being frozen to the bone.
My bodyguards make it obvious they are thoroughly bored—and pissed—but they do their job.
No one touches me.
When the claxon finally shrieks, signaling the end of rec, my legs are shaking so hard I can barely stand. I hobble back to the block, past the smirking face of Rice, and collapse onto my cot.
Traitorous tears leak down my face, hot and stinging. I hurriedly wipe them away before Taliesin can see.
It takes more than a couple of hours in the dirt to break Aurora Drakeward.
???
The next few days are a blur of gray concrete, threatening side-eyes, and the position of either being glued to Taliesin’s side, or out in the yard doing whatever “labor” the Guild can think up for their entertainment.
My neck muscles are in spasms from trying to keep my head held high.
Yesterday was a new low. Odessa, with a voice as sweet as poisoned honey, suggested to Dimitry that I’d make an excellent table. I spent an hour on all fours on the cracked concrete, the small of my back serving as a resting place for his half-eaten apple and his rolled cigarettes.
Odessa watched me with the focused intensity of a cat toying with a cornered mouse.
When my arms trembled, she’d let out a soft, mocking laugh to Dimitry. "Look, darling," she purred. "The furniture is sub-standard, what a surprise."
I have to keep reminding myself who she really is: a power-hungry, desperate scavenger. In here she might be the reigning queen, but I remember the headlines. The Westlund family wasscrubbed from Havengard society after her father was caught embezzling from Conclave-owned blue-chip assets. Idiot.
Odessa Westlund is nothing but the daughter of a greedy, inept little man. No doubt she did something equally idiotic to find herself in here.
And I’m not enjoying her lording over me. I’d leap and smash her fucking smug face, but I know Crow and Hauser would pull me off before I even got one decent hit in. It’s infuriating.
Fucking Taliesin.
To make matters worse, while I was being their “accent table”, Odessa encouraged the other gross Guild members to humiliate me further. There were a lot of comments, and disgusting stroking of erections through the dark blue jumpsuits.
Thank Gods for the “no touching” rule.
But still, Fuck you, Taliesin for allowing this to happen.
Adding to the shit that my life has become are the nightmares. Nightly nightmares have started plaguing me. More than once I’ve woken up screaming and crying. Taliesin sits on his cot, watching me through the bars.
He doesn’t ask what the nightmares are about and he also doesn’t enquire about my “yard duty” with the Guild.
And I don’t tell him.
Fucker.
But sometimes when he watches me, I’ll catch his eyes softening in a way that seems…almost as though he likes me.
Maybe the hands-off approach is him indicating that he knows I can take care of myself.
Which is true.
Other times all I feel from Taliesin Bevan is coldness, through and through.
