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He kept me hidden because he said he wasn’t ready to tell the world who I was, even though he’d made it very well known to his generals. He said he wanted to keep me for himself before letting me loose as his heir.
But I guessed there was another reason.
I suspected that year was a test. A test to see if I meant what I said and wasn’t faking what I did.
Each night we spent together in some library in some expensive home, drinking expensive liquor and discussing his expensive tastes, I felt him watching me, studying me, trying to see if there was a part of me that wasn’t shattered.
A part ready to rebel.
But I didn’t care.
There was nothing to watch, nothing to study.
If he wanted me to smile, I smiled.
If he wanted me to kill, I killed.
I’d sunk willingly into surrender and had done what my body forced me to do.
I healed.
I grew strong on the outside, but on the inside, I was riddled with weakness and wrongness. I had nothing left. No fight. No free will.
I was his perfect plaything, and as long as I remained in that listless numbness, I was safe. As long as I forgot the siren of my past and ignored the dreams of moonlight on turquoise sea...I wasn’t hurt, wasn’t tortured, wasn’t chopped into pieces or flayed alive.
I would rather be adrift with none of my own convictions than be strapped into the chair again, so I let his warped education convert me. I forfeited who I’d been for the new man he’d made me.
That fourth year was a blur of disillusion and merciful disinterest. Just because I no longer existed unless he told me how to exist didn’t mean I’d suddenly been implanted with his wants and desires.
His empire was his.
I would run it if he wished, but I didn’t care why or for how long.
How could I?
How could I care for anything when I was impervious to everything?
“That’s what happens to traitors,” Cem snarled, yanking me back to the murder I just committed at his command. He shoved his pistol back into the holster beneath his immaculate suit. “Steal from me and it’s not a matter of if you’ll get caught but when.”
The thirty or so workers in the coke factory kneeled in their underwear.
Men and women.
They all trembled and bowed with their foreheads kissing the concrete floor. In the back of the warehouse, where the windows had been blackened and the walls reinforced, bright lights shone on massive trays full of white powder. Workers wore masks to prevent inhaling the potent dust, and crates of little plastic baggies to be filled and sold were delivered daily to keep up demand.
I knew the weekly cost of those baggies.
I kept tallies on the many overheads and expenses of running so many different enterprises in this empire. The drug trade was the most lucrative after the payoffs to politicians and police, lobbying for lesser laws, and the ‘donations’ Cem gave to shopkeepers to ply our product over anyone else.
“Get back to work,” Cem snarled. Spinning on his heel, he marched forward, always so bold, always too quick.
I struggled to keep up, limping beside him, the click of my cane loud in the echoey warehouse.
By the time we reached the exit, Cem had slowed his pace and visible annoyance pinched his eyebrows. “I don’t know why you don’t let me get a proper leg made for you. Money is no object, Aslan. You could have the finest titanium or carbon steel. Fuck, you could probably have a robot limb fashioned that could make you fly if you wanted. Why do you insist on hobbling around on a piece of unfitted wood that was only ever meant to be temporary?”
Because the pain keeps me subservient.
Because the cane reminds me of what I had to give up to be accepted.
Because without the constant discomfort and hobble, I might start to remember that I’m not a cripple and I’m not your pet and that would not be good...for either of us.
Cem believed that the moment I’d snapped and surrendered to him, I was ‘cured’.
Unfortunately, that submission had only lasted for nineteen months and had been slowly fading ever since.
When he’d locked me in the cave again for my two-weeklong reminder, just before officially naming me his successor, I’d come face-to-face with how many lies resided inside me.
He’d electrocuted me, like before.
I’d endured, like I always did.
I submitted, like I’d been trained.
But a fractured part of me, a carefully hidden and hating part, tasted the first flavour of mutiny.
I didn’t like it.
I fought against the whispers slowly returning to my mind.
The daydreams of a girl I wasn’t supposed to remember.
The longing for a home that was forbidden.
I wouldn’t jeopardise my existence by letting myself wake up from this sleep he’d trapped me in, but...I also didn’t know if I could stop it.
