Pale, thin fingers curled around the bar, and a young woman who didn’t look a day over twenty-five blinked at Cassandra. Her brown hair fell in matted clumps and purple bruises marred what was likely once a very pretty face.
But when Cassandra offered her an apple, she shook her head.
“The others,” the woman croaked. “Give them to the others in the back cells. They don’t… They are not called upon as often as we are. They rarely get a chance to eat.”
Cassandra laid her own hand over the woman’s fingers. “I am going to end this place. And free you. I swear it.”
The woman grimaced, then pulled her hand away and burrowed back under the ripped, threadbare blankets with her cellmates.
Cassandra strung the basket over her forearm and walked down the aisle toward the darker cells in the back.
Each step added another brick to the pile on her chest. There were so many humans. Men and women—but praise Anaemos, no children—growing older and feebler the further back she traveled.
When she reached the end of the aisle, it was so dark she could barely see—even with her Fae eyesight—and the scent of despair was far more concentrated.
She crouched before the final cell, and tapped her fingers on the bars.
An old woman with sunken gray cheeks and wisps of white hair creaked out from underneath a blanket.
Cassandra didn’t say a word—if she opened her mouth, she was sure she’d burst into body-wracking sobs. She held out an apple.
The old woman reached for it with wobbly fingers and wide, shining eyes, her tongue rolling over her cracked lips.
“It’s okay,” Cassandra whispered. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m here to help.”
The woman’s features twisted into a grotesque mask, and she slapped the apple from Cassandra’s hand. It went bouncing down the center aisle before rolling into another cell.
“I don’t need your charity, do-gooder,” the old woman rasped in a voice that sounded like it hadn’t been used in decades. “You preening Fae come down here with your food and your potions, acting like you’re kinder than the ones who did this to us. Theones who locked us up in the first place. And why? So you can feelbetterabout yourself?”
Cassandra scrambled back from the bars as the woman lunged for her, much quicker than Cassandra would have expected.
The woman barked out a breathless laugh. “Fuck back off. And quit peddlin’ your cruel hope.”
Oily shame coated Cassandra’s tongue as she saw herself as the woman saw her. The two feathered wings sprouting from her back. The sharp beauty of her ethereal features. The small fangs that, even now, pressed into her bottom lip.
She shuffled away from the cell, then emptied the basket into the next before fleeing down the hallway. She would come back here. Every day. Multiple times a day, if necessary, to bring these humans food, water, healing potions, whatever she could.
At least until she ended the fucking male who’d corralled them here in the first place.
Mireille materialized from the darkness. “They call it the Kennel.”
“This is horrific,” Cassandra said. “And so much worse than I could have imagined.”
Mireille’s head dipped. “I know. I visit as often as possible. So do many of the Fae you met in The Other Place today. A few decades back, two of them petitioned the Koenig to let the humans go, stop treating them like livestock.”
“Livestock is treated better than this,” Cassandra scoffed. “What happened to the petitioners?”
“What do you think?” Mireille said, her face a mask of cold fury. “No one has asked since. The Brethren come down toborrowthem sometimes. For feedings, and—” Mireille shook her head, as if shaking away some terrible vision. Cassandra didn’t want to know.
“This could have been me,” Cassandra whispered. “If I hadn’t… If Tristan hadn’t…” Rage hardened her voice. “This could have been me.”
Mireille did nothing but nod. What else was there to say?
“We cannot allow this to continue,” Cassandra said fiercely. “Not here. Notanywhere.”
Mireille placed her hands on Cassandra’s shoulders. They were about the same height, Mireille slightly taller. Their faces were in line as Mireille’s silver gaze bore into hers, reflecting the same fierce determination.
“We won’t,” she vowed. “But the only way to ensure that is to win your appeal and get out of here.”
