It hit me in the gut, as it usually did when the truth came, that I didn’t function like a normalhuman being. Not really.
How could I when the wicked witch of France, Régine Nemours,held the keys to my freedom?
I pushed all that aside, though. Thinking about where I was and why only brought my mom back to me, and in certain company, it felt unsafe. Like the witch might be able to claw through memories and shred them on me. If I ever lost them, I’d be lost. Whatever connection I had to my mom kept me surviving.
Push the thoughts, the yearning, aside, Estella. Keep your focus on things of this world. Mind blank. Eyes straight. One foot in front of the other. Keep moving forward.
The voice in my head sounded like my mom’s. She was the only person who ever called me Estella. I’d decided early on that only people who were special to me had the right to call me Estella. People who had earned their place in my life. Stella was for everyone, special or not. The other name, Étoile, was for people who would never have a place in my life, like Régine, her people, and the Russians who were in tight with her.
The man walking me, just one in her huge army, stopped when we came to the massive oak door. He turned to me, and his eyes slowly took me in. A robe covered me, but it was old, the itchy material thin, and the château held a chill. The curves of my body could easily be made out, my nipples almost poking through the threadbare fabric. I’d had it for years, and I was pretty sure it was made from an ancient potato sack.
My eyes were in place to meet his head-on when he finally made it back to my face. He said something in Russian, and I had no idea what the words meant, but I knew it was lewd. I’d learned early on that tone was everything when communicating with people who didn’t speak my native language—English.
The solider, a man who would become a faceless memory once our second was over, was just one of many who tried to make me feel smaller by looking at me in a way that told me hewanted my body, but the rest of me was to toss like trash. It was always about the momentary want and nothing else.
This was no knight in shining armor, but a dud without even a horse.
Long ago, I programmed my head to forget these encounters. The moment was only that. A moment. In sixty seconds or so, he would follow in many others’ footsteps. He would take me in, a sickening smile coming to his face. Then he would sigh, or make a noise of frustration, and turn to knock on the door. A few seconds later, the wicked witch would tell the man to enter, and that…that would be my time spent with the revolving man.
If he dared to touch me, to touch what didn’t belong to him, he’d find himself without a hand, or even worse, his breath. She’d have him killed, no questions asked. I’d seen her do it before.
Sometimes it was because she was in a bad mood and didn’t seem to have the patience to deal with thestupidité. Or sometimes she did it because she was clever. If a man seemed like he was going to be a problem, she got rid of him. If it was life or death circumstances, and I was forced to say something nice about Régine Nemours to save my life, or someone I loved, that would be what I would say. She was smart. She never let any of these men get over on her. When she walked into the room, even the most dangerous man standing in it would be leery of her. She’d stick a knife, literally, in his back before he could get to the door.
In that regard, Régine Nemours was a bad bitch.
Too bad she was just overall a rotten human being, and she sent chills, the bad kind, over me when I even smelled her perfume. The revolving solider must have felt the same way. After he finished his perusal and knocked on the door, an invisible hand seemed to shake his entire body for a split second when she answered.
His body did the same when he stepped in before me, and she turned to him from her desk. Two well-fed rats with fat tails sat on each of her shoulders, cleaning her ears. Those rats didn’t bother me. It was the rats starving underground that did the damage. Those mistook a shivering girl for a cold corpse in the darkness.
As Revolving Man was dismissed with a wave of Régine’s hand, I could see his shoulders visibly relax.
My entire body did the same. It had to, or else.
She waved her hand at me, and that was my cue. I removed the sack and, gracefully, laid it over the plush sofa in her office. The sofa looked so soft, it almost made me whimper. I wasn’t sure what year my bed was made, but it was made from stuffing.
For her prized dancer, she said the state of my things only made me hungry for better. I could dream about all the luxuries I would one day have. For the first fifteen years I was here, I did. I dreamed about clothes that would fit, other than my costumes. I dreamed of a mattress and fabrics that wouldn’t itch. I dreamed of hands that wouldn’t crack from cleaning supplies, and feet that wouldn’t ache and bleed from rigorous dancing routines. I yearned and hoped for water warm enough to sooth the pulses that came from dancing in shoes that tore my skin open. If the doctor said the splits were not infected, and he gave me something to stop them from becoming that way, it was back to work as usual for me.
I’d learned to move past all the hurt and…keep hoping. Sometimes I felt like my mental and spiritual muscles were stronger than the ones in my legs.
As strong as my will was, that hope still died one day, and in its place, I started concocting stories in my head about a knight in shining armor riding a majestic steed, who would one day storm the castle’s gates and steal me away to a land wherewomen were revered, where he would love me until the day I died.
Not the time or place, Estella,the voice in my head shrieked.Right. Mind blank. Face and eyes forward. Be a space cadet.
Régine said nothing to me as I stepped up on the scale and she watched the numbers. I couldn’t be too skinny or a pound over my goal weight. That part of my life was the only one she was obsessed with getting right. If I didn’t meet her goals for my body,one, she’d have to pay more money to get the costumes she put me in remade, andtwo, her main attraction was supposed to look a certain way. I couldn’t change, in any way, or one of her patrons might notice and accuse me of beingreal.
Yeah, I was a fantasy that she’d caged. She created an illusion, and those people in her circle paid large amounts of money to believe the deception.
The guidable people with too much money to burn believed I’d traveled light years to get here, the soul of a fallen star that had somehow crashed into a body. With one touch, the toucher would be propelled into the sky, as if they were touching the cold burn of a star. The Nemours were known for creating these types of delusions, I’d heard, and were quite good at it. I believed the rumors.
Why else would they still have me chained if I couldn’t pull off the deception? Ivan Blinkov, Régine’s husband—well, he was, before he was murdered, and his heart was eaten by a wolf—made the mistake of underestimating me and would talk in front of me and to me at times. He’d once said that I was a draw, a money maker, one of the biggest Sub Rosa had ever had besides Scarlett Rose Poésy. There was an entire story there, one I’d learned bits and pieces of over the years, but I had no clue what had happened to her. Did she break free of the chains, or had she succumbed to them?
Régine pinched my hip, and I blinked at her, coming back to myself. It was important to drift at times in front of Régine, give her an almost drugged-up look, so she didn’t think I was breaking character too often.
“You are two pounds down,” she said in broken English. French was her first language. She would have preferred to speak French to me if I had been able to understand and speak it.
For as long as I’d been with her, and around the French, even the Russians, I had very little of both languages. It frustrated her. She called me stupid on many occasions, or implied it, but I was pretty sure it was a small, spiteful thing on my part. My brain was like,nope, not today, not after everything else you put us through. I refuse to learnbecauseyou want me to.
Régine never did anything to me in retaliation, so it seemed like a win on my part. An inconsequential victory that really made no difference, but somehow did to me.
