The second of relief is dashed to pieces. My body tenses, every nerve on edge as Rholker's face contorts with a mixture of confusion and fury.
Those yellow eyes trail to the side of my neck, now clearly visible. My hand flies to cover the scabbed-over bite marks I know that I’d find there.
“Estela,” he starts, his voice rumbling through the tension in the room. “What have you done?”
His tall, powerful body reaches for one of the room’s chairs, picks it up, and throws it against the wall. I flinch as it splinters into pieces. My eyes track them as they fall to the ground, and I am painfully aware of how he wishes that chair was my body. Under his calm, obsessed exterior lies a predator.
Mikal.I need to findMikal.
"Tell me how to get the stone out of her chest so I can touch her again," he growls, reiterating the lie I told him when I first arrived.
He steps close to my cell, and I crawl toward him, body aching. I grab my sharpened piece of wood again.
The women pause before they answer, and I find myself holding my breath as I stare at Rholker’s large ass. He’s too tall to stab in the heart, but a bleeding ass is still painful.
“We require more time to sift through her thoughts,” they say in almost perfect unison.
Blinking back hot tears, I stab through the bars. The sharpened wood punctures his left thigh.
He makes a strangled noise.
“What the hell?” My tormenter whips around. He looks at me like I have stabbed him in the gut and forcefully torn out each of his organs, not merely given him a flesh wound. If only he knew how much I would’ve enjoyed the former.
“You are a memory slicer,” he says darkly, no longer addressing me but still holding my gaze as he pulls out the stick and throws it across the room. “Slice apart that memory for good. Leave it until it is nothing more than threadbare ribbons in her mind. I never want her to think of it and find pleasure again.”
Each word is slow and perfectly articulated.
The women communicate with only the slightest shift of their faces, hidden in their deep hoods. The snake, curled almost gracefully around one of the bars, slithers to its mistress's outstretched hand.
Pierced with a new level of fear, I fight the tears welling up, and I push into the grip of cold metal.
I close my eyes and try to focus on the memory, memorizing each detail so that it feels like it's carved into my very being.They won’t touch it. They can’t. It would be like trying to remove the scent of humidity from a room after a thunderstorm, nearly impossible to erase. The memory is a tangled web of emotions, desires, and sensations, all woven together in a tapestry of love.
Mine and Teo’s tapestry. Our matehood.
The memory isn't just a snapshot in time, but an experience that is alive, constantly shifting, and forever imprinted in my consciousness. How could they ever steal that?
But then, as we reach the moment where his fingers touched my back, something new slides into the image. The dark eyes, watching, analyzing… insidiously probing.
My eyes fly open once more, and I find the women watching me. The leader, Dahlia, turns to Rholker.
“We will return this evening to finish. This time, you will not come, Giant King,” she speaks for the first time. Her voice is as silky, dark, and cold as a snake's.
Rholker frowns, the twisting of his lips mostly visible in the near blackness. Then, the women leave.
The door shuts, with Rholker remaining. He sucks in a deep breath.
Slut.
Bitch.
Little Flea.
Whore.
All the titles that I’ve been called over the years pass through my consciousness, and I shove them all away.
“You shouldn’t have let him touch you,” Rholker says, his eyes dropping to the floor as if he could feel anything approximating sadness.
