Page 32

“Bitch.”

“Oh, aye. And more too. But at least I know how to suck a dick.”

“Are you planning on harassing me to death? If so, grab a knife and make it quick.”

She chuckled, the sound of it strange, like two pieces of porcelain clinking together and grinding against itself. “I would be right next to you on this slab if I tried that. Oh, no, dear little Cricket. Someone is obsessed enough with you to keep you alive. And when I tell you the state of your injuries, you will know that was no easy thing. I would say that if you were back in Human, you’d have been dead ten times over by now. Don’t rightly care how good the medicine has gotten in my absence. I was watching your brain think your dreams for a few days there. If you ask me, a person should be wise enough to think their thoughts quietly enough that their little brain doesn’t wiggle about with it. No human, not even one such as us, should have to be privy to watching another’s thoughts be thought.”

She was talking too much, and with every new word, I was being pulled further and further away from the handy disassociation with my body. We had made a tidy little peace, where I would keep myself all nice and tight in the black den my mind had created, and it would keep its yucky pains away from my bubble and experience it all on its own. I didn’t need to be pulled back down the eternal thread that connected us and seated straight into the heart of the agony it was experiencing.

I wished Violet would shut up, but instead, I heard the telltale creak of a wooden stool being dragged a few feet over the stone floor, and I heard her ease her doll body into it like she was feeling all two hundred and fifty of the years she had lived in that tiny little girl’s body.

“We were worried over you, Cricket.”

She was back to whispering again. This time, I could almost hear the tears in her voice. Unshed and unrelenting, nonetheless.

“Sorry.”

My voice was trembling as the aches seeped into my bones and into my psyche. I could feel each blow that my body had experienced all over again. Some of them, I didn’t even remember. Hell, most of them, I didn’t remember. But my body remembered, and it would remind me even if I begged it not to.

“I assumed for a while there that you had mouthed off to the King. I was proud of you. That bastard could use a peg or two taken out of him. When the Laundress never came back, we assumed maybe you’d killed her. Or she, you. But then that damned kin’tha of yours came and kept pestering us. We were ready to write you off, you know, but it came and snatched me up and brought me here. Remind me to kick your ass for that, by the by. I saw that bastard of a king was kicking the shit out of you. You weren’t even awake. How can someone mouth off by flopping about like yesterday’s fish? Can’t. I got the measure of it from there.” The chill of her replacing the rag on my eye slithered through me and kissed me. If being on drugs was like that sensation, I suddenly understood the appeal. “I sent Green Man and Emerald in to keep watch from the rafters when I couldn’t be here. They reported back to me everything they could. We watched over you the best we could, Cricket. I promise it to you we did.”

“You don’t owe me anything, Violet.”

“I’m matriarch in those warrens. That might not mean much to daora—especially not a warren that doesn’t remember when this land was ruled by the greatest of Queens—but it means something to me. You’re one of mine now. You hadn’t earned it the last time you saw me, but you’ve earned it now.”

“All it took was nearly dying.”

“Not entirely convinced you didn’t die a few times there.”

The pain was worth it to chuckle along with her. It split my cracked lips, and I tasted my own blood blooming on my thirsty tongue.

“But, yes, you could have done or said anything to earn that beating, and any single one of us would have said that you had earned your place in the warrens. None of us have gotten through this life without catching a beating or two. None of them have been as bad as yours, though.”

“What can I say? I’m an overachiever.”

“That, you are, Cricket. That, you are.”

I felt the chill of her glass-like hands slide under me, one at my hip and one at the center of my back. “Now, overachieve in letting me roll you over and clean you. None of the Fae fuckers are going to do this, and you’ll get sores if you lie in your own piss and shit for too long. Nursed my nan into the grave back before this place. Learned quick how what comes out of us can eat through skin and bone while trying to crawl back in.”

“I’d prefer not to be in a grave when you’re done.”

“Not properly sure you can even fit in one at this stage.”

Misery rippled through me as she pushed me onto my side and slid something out from underneath me. I felt weak. I felt disgusting. I felt anger that the most I could do to help her was not fight against her. I could barely move the body that had been given to me, though I imagined that, even if it had been my own body, I would not have fared very much better in the effort. I would probably be more dead than she had proclaimed me had it been my actual body.

Through the entire ordeal of her cleaning me, I cried silent, angry, frustrated, bitter tears. I had never been wounded enough to require someone to tend to me like this. It was humiliating. It was more dehumanizing than having Rictus shove his fingers inside of me and rearrange my most intimate of parts. I thought I had known humiliation when I had learned that Rook and Cypress had been able to see that entire thing happen. I had not known true humiliation until this moment.

I wanted to choke on it. I wanted to bury myself in it and let it consume me from head to toe.

When she was done, she sighed softly as if to apologize and then covered me in a fresh blanket. This one didn’t reek of my own bodily fluids leaking into it. This one smelled like a crisp spring day. Somehow, it was worse than the one I had been bound into.

“My arms? And legs?” I asked when she was done tucking the blanket in around me, delicately folding the top of it under my chin like she was tucking in the most precious child.

“Both legs shattered in multiple places. Emerald overheard them saying that, when someone comes in to pay for your healing, that will be the next thing taken care of. Not entirely sure which one of the bastards is paying, but someone is. As for your arms? The left one, the joint was shattered by an anvil. Twisted fuck dragged an entire fucking anvil into the temple and dropped it on your shoulder a few times. The other one? We think it has to do with your back. He was damned near jumping on that for a while there. Once the legs are done, the back comes next.”

“Why?” I asked through a racking sob.

The accounting of my wounds was shocking. All because of a bad blow job? And not even a bad one! It was one of the better blow jobs I had ever given in my life.