As they drag me past the farmhouse in chains, consciousness flickering like a guttering candle, I see her—Forla running fromsomewhere behind the house, screaming my name, reaching for me with desperate hands. Talia holds her back, both women weeping, but I only have eyes for the woman who owns my heart.
Our eyes meet for one devastating moment across the yard. In hers I see love, horror, and the terrible knowledge that her family chose her safety over my freedom. She knows. Somehow, she knows what they've done.
The understanding passes between us like lightning—she loves me, but she couldn't save me. They betrayed me, but they did it for her. The mathematics of survival are cruel and complex, and everyone pays a price.
"I'm sorry," she mouths, the words lost in her sobs but clear as thunder to my heart. "I'm so sorry."
I want to tell her it's not her fault, that I understand why they did it, that loving her was worth any price. But the chains drag me forward and the poison pulls me down, and all I can do is memorize her face as the distance grows between us.
The Dark Elves throw me across a horse like a sack of grain, my head hanging down so blood rushes to my brain in sickening waves. Through the haze of approaching unconsciousness, I hear their leader giving orders.
"Take him to Eelry," the voice says, cold and precise. "Gospar pays well for fresh gladiators, and this one should provide excellent sport."
Gladiator. Arena. The words hit like physical blows, bringing with them images of sand and blood and crowds screaming for death. I've heard stories of the fighting pits, places where slaves kill each other for the entertainment of their masters.
Places where strong warriors go to die slowly, one cut at a time.
The horse lurches into motion, carrying me away from everything that matters toward a hell I may never escape.Behind me, Forla's screams fade into the distance, but they echo in my mind like a curse and a prayer both.
This isn't how it ends, I swear to myself as darkness claims me. Whatever they do to me, however they break me, I'll find a way back to her. I'll survive their arena, escape their chains, and return to claim the woman who gave me her heart.
But first, I have to live through what's coming.
The charm she gave me burns against my chest where I've hidden it beneath my shirt, a small piece of warmth in the growing cold. As consciousness abandons me completely, I clutch that token like an anchor, holding tight to the memory of her love.
It may be all I have left in the darkness ahead.
The chains drag me toward a hell I may never escape, but they can't take what lives in my heart. They can break my body, chain my flesh, throw me into their killing grounds.
But they can't take her from me.
And someday, somehow, I'll make them pay for what they've stolen.
10
FORLA
Ireturn from the market to find Talia and Brom slaughtered in their own kitchen, throats slit, blood pooling on the floor I swept this morning. My screams echo through the empty house until my voice gives out, until nothing remains but the terrible silence of death and the metallic taste of copper in the air.
On the table: gold coins, still warm from Dark Elf hands. Thirty pieces of silver, scattered like fallen stars across the wooden surface where we shared our last meal together. The price of an orc's freedom. The price of their lives.
I hold Talia's cooling hand and understand the cruel mathematics of survival with crystalline clarity. They betrayed Thoktar to protect me—and died for their trouble. The Dark Elves left no witnesses, no loose ends, no complications to their neat little transaction.
My safety cost three lives: theirs and his.
The guilt threatens to tear me apart, but rage burns hotter. They're all dead because I was a coward. Because I chose safety over love, duty over desire, because I let fear make my choices for me. While I sat in my room last night drowning in self-pity, killers were already on their way.
I could have warned him. Could have run after him, shouted his name into the darkness, told him what Brom was planning. Instead, I listened to hushed conspiracies and did nothing, paralyzed by the terrible weight of impossible choices.
Now everyone pays the price for my cowardice.
Blood soaks into my skirt as I kneel beside them, my parents in everything but blood, the people who saved me from slavery and gave me something beyond freedom. They gave me family. Love. A home where I mattered to someone.
And I let them die for it.
"I'm sorry," I whisper to Talia's still face. "I'm so sorry I wasn't strong enough to save you all."
But sorry changes nothing. Sorry doesn't bring back the dead or free the captured or undo the betrayals that led to this moment. Sorry is just another word for helpless, and I'm done being helpless.
