Worn bytime.
In the span of a single heartbeat I went from feeling much too much to feeling nothing at all.
As if I were on a mission, I shut down my emotions.
“I need a curera too.There’s something very wrong with my prisoner.”
I called to the blood pumping through the guards stalking toward me.
No response, as if they had no blood at all, when I could plainly scent it flowing beneath their skin.
They were big and burly.Strong.Wearing wompa leather armor.
I allowed them to approach.To drag me off the dragort’s back.
When they flanked me and each went to grab an arm, I spun.
Drew a dagger from one’s sheath.Spun again.Sliced the throat of the other.
Sensed Empty Sheath leaping behind me.Shiiiing, drawing his own dagger.
When he sliced it in an arc, I dodged.Stepped toward his now unprotected throat?—
Another dart punctured my neck.
Pulling it out, I turned.The blur of Cosette flying away was all I managed to make out before I slumped to the ground.
I blinked a few times, but only postponed the descending darkness.
I no longer had Teo.
I no longer had my power.
Death, may I never wake up.
Chapter7
Where Is Crown Prince Mateo of Zaraga?
The door to my cell whined open near dawn, though I couldn’t be certain night was ending, nor which day this particular night followed.
I’d woken abruptly, feeling only slightly better than I had after waking in my underwater sarcophagus.I could have been out an hour, or it could have been days.I was still ravenous.
My cell—un-fucking-believable, yet another prison—had neither window nor any other light source.To mark time, I relied on the snores and disgruntled moans of the other prisoners—two hundred and twenty-one of them, assuming no guards were stationed within the cells that occupied the back three-quarters of the building.
The pungent stink of bodies—reason alone to want to ditch this place—suggested the prison wasn’t often cleaned, and neither were its involuntary occupants.If Misery had a signature scent, I was smelling it.
A lumoon floated into my cell, preceding a guard with a large head so shiny it reflected the golden light.He regarded me while I rose to stand with my back to the wall and blinked against the lumoon, seemingly as bright as the sun itself after such absolute darkness.
His fingers twitched along the handle of a weapon I’d never seen before.Like a thick, blunt sorcerer’s wand, but black, shiny, and faintly buzzing.
“You gonna be good for the curera?Or do I gotta restrain you?”
He drew closer, his eyes taking on a leering glint as they trawled along my bare legs, then jumped across my hips and breasts.I hated that my thin, plain dress didn’t conceal the outline of my nipples.
“Can always restrain ya now n’ leave you that way.”
He stroked his wand-weapon a few times—up and down, up and down—in case I’d missed his not so implicit threat.
