That room was the kitchen. It was perfectly ordered and not at all dusty. She stared around at it, remembering how often Jack would come into the house and leave her outside in that building. He would say that his parents wished to speak with him and that it was important. That they would not approve too awfully much of her being in their home because of her station in life. That one day they would accept her, but that day was not now.
How had she ever allowed him to make her feel so less than? Why had she put up with that? Why had she not questioned why he was allowed in the house, but she was not?
It was obvious that the kitchen had been used recently. Standing there in that kitchen, she understood something else, something that she did not want to know.
Jack’s parents were not there. They had not been there in a very long time. There was a very good reason why Jack did not want her in that house.
Blade dragged Jack through room after room after room. All the walls were blank but for a few family portraits of a smiling, younger Jack and his parents. But if his parents were there was no sign of them. She knew they weren’t there. He had even lied about that!
She was confused as to why they were in that house, and her bafflement grew when Blade kicked a rug to one side in the hallway to reveal a pull-up door.
Jack immediately flinched backward. As he did so, the knife went slightly deeper, and that time the blood that spilled was a thick and long stream. He shrieked, but Blade slapped a hand across Jack’s mouth to stifle it. Tara began to shake all over.
“Don’t kill him,” she whispered miserably. “Please don’t. I can’t…” Murder. She had no intention of being a witness to murder if she could help it.
Jack whimpered out, “You cannot do this to me!”
Blade said, “Oh, but I can. Open it.”
Tara shook her head. “No. Whatever’s down there, just leave it. Please. For pity’s sake, I cannot bear this.”
Jack seized the handle of the knife and twisted it away from his neck. He ran for his life, his feet pelting along the hall floor. He didn’t get very far. Blade tossed the knife as easily as if he had been blowing a feather off his palm. It found its mark, hitting Jack directly in the back of his neck. He went down. Tara’s feet took her backward and she crashed into a wall then slid down it, whimpering and with her feet kicking out in front of her like a puppet loosened from all of its strings.
Blade looked at her. His eyes were unreadable, and his face held an intractable expression. “He is not dead. Only paralyzed. It severed the cord between his neck and his body. He’s a murderer, and I am sure you are not the only woman that he has sold. Don’t pity him. He does not deserve your pity.”
She sat there, her bottom stinging from its sudden meeting of the floor and with her eyes both dry and itchy from tears that wanted to come but wouldn’t. She said, “Can we just leave him here and go?”
Blade shook his head. “I’m afraid not. We have to go down there. He may have another woman hidden down there. Or his parents may be chained to a wall or something. Tara, he’s clearly taken the house, which is illegal. This is a Federation home, and if his folks are dead, then he has to leave it. We need to find out if they’re alive, and if they are, we need to help them.”
Could he possibly be holding his folks prisoner? Tara managed to hook her elbows up against the surface of the wall behind her and lever herself into a standing position. Queasiness rolled through her stomach, and she said, “Why are you doing this? You said yourself that you had far too much to do and it’s far too dangerous for you to help me. Why are you doing this?”
Blade regarded her steadily. “I’m a bad man. I’m the worst. I’m an assassin, and I will do a lot of things for money. But I have never agreed with slavery, and I most certainly have never agreed with women being kidnapped and sold simply to fill the coffers of some man who has ambitions to be someone better than he is but not the willpower or the way to get those things on his own. Slavers make me want to murder them.”
Her eyes went to Jack. Piteous little cries were coming from his mouth, but he was not moving, and she had a feeling that he would never move again. “If that is what he was, then he is helpless now.”
Blade’s eyebrows rose. “If that is what he was?”
She cleared her throat. “It is what he was. You are right, and I should’ve believed you. I should have never come back here to him. I had to know for myself, I guess. But he is harmless now, isn’t he?”
Blade said, “It does not take a body to sell a woman, only the ability to talk. And there is the matter of his parents.”
How could Blade be so dark, so willing to murder and everything else that he did, but yet be so worried about the welfare of two people he had never met? And how did he know so much about the Federation’s rules and regs for its servants? She said, “Okay. We’ll go look.”
He reached over and hauled Jack up off the floor, cradling him like an oversized child. The trap door opened and they descended into the darkness below.
