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I wasstarving. A fathomless hunger that dug a pit deeper than my frail form could hold.
But I was free.
Maggie sighed, and her shadow loomed and lurched across the cobblestones as she crossed to my little corner of the alley.
"Dolly…" she started.
"I heard them," I rasped, looking up at last.
Maggie had found me. After the fire. After the house cracked. After I'd run screaming into the night, taken my first breath of a world I didn't recognize, found myselffreeof Birsha's shackles.
"I'll get you sometin' to eat. Just go back to the flat, why don' you?" Maggie said gently.
I'd heard the women whispering to each other. Maggie found broken birds, tried to nurse us, mend us. She'd bring me half a pie at dawn and comb my hair and pat my back. It wouldn't fill the massive void inside of me, the twisted, corrupted hollow of craving, rotted and wrong after centuries in the worst company, the darkest pleasures.
"I'll find work," I whispered, stumbling away from the street lamp. The light did me no favors. The other women were right—I'd looked weak and ill the night I escaped, and it'd only gotten worse in the weeks of my freedom.
Pleasure on the streets was cheap and brief, perfunctory. There was no joy in the minutes of grunting and pumping from the human men who stumbled out of pubs and gaming hells. As crooked as the meals Birsha delivered to me had been, they were the appetites and satisfactions of far greater creatures than human men.
I trailed in my path away from the whores who'd taken me in, away from the bright corner of safety, into the darker shadows. Someone would find me. I may not take a coin out of the exchange, but at least it might feed me a little. The night was muggy and foul, but a chill had started to eat away the feeling in my fingers and toes weeks ago, my blood sluggish.
A blessed woman, wasting to nothing but hunger for pleasure.
Pleasure made me sick now. I was a perversion of the woman I ought to have been. Centuries in the cold, barren cage of Birsha's grip had bled me dry.
The wheels of a carriage clicked and ground over the stone street, hooves clopping to a stop, a still groomsman sitting high and silent like a sentry. I kept my eyes ahead on the swimming darkness, but stopped to let the gentlemen have a look at me. He would move away soon. I was not a tempting sight.
Except the door opened silently, a white glove extending out, a silver coin pinched between thick fingers.
"Come into the carriage, and there's another," a low voice offered.
Two silver coins and I might buy my passage to the grave, I thought, blinking at the coin as it tipped and shivered in my eyes. No, it was me that was tilting and weaving and trembling.
"Come out, and you'll only need the one, mi'lord," I answered.
His voice grunted and the hand withdrew and the door closed softly. It would drive away again, which was good, because the men who paid too much often asked too much in return. I started to move, to almost fall forward into motion again, when the door opened fully.
Out stepped a mountain of a man, dressed in gleaming black and shining white. I looked up, but it made me dizzy, contorting the handsome face and setting the liquidy dark eyes spinning until I ducked my head again. He was too big, too beautiful. I backed away, but one of those pristine white gloves reached for me.
"There's better fare down the road," I gasped, twisting out of the way.
The hand clenched on air and then opened again, held out flat in invitation. "Not ones who need so much as you."
I blinked and froze. He was the most alluring trap, his voice thick and low and sweet, like a tongue lapping over my weak pulse, trying to bring it back to life again. He was even more perfect than the pair Birsha had drugged me with centuries ago when I was a spoiled and innocent child. And I wasstarving.Dying, probably, although it might take years more of this withering life before it was over.
His other hand lifted, still holding the silver coin. "Take it, at the very least."
The coin would buy me food, but it wouldn't feed me. No matter what this man wanted from me, I had survived worse already.
My hand shook as I reached for his, my skin dirty and ruining his perfect white gloves with one touch. His grip was gentle, and it was strange to be touched so.
"Come closer," he said.
I swallowed, and my throat scratched itself, dry and aching. My steps were unsteady, and his arm circled around my shoulders, a shelter or a cage, but his warmth soaked through my thin rags of clothing.
"You look tired," he whispered.
Does he mean to kill me? I wondered.
