Page 246 of Coal Hearts

“Yes, Sir V.” Peter staggered to his feet, flinching beneath bruises slowly blooming on his throat. Bruises Victor had given him or another Master before Ily and I found him in the corridor?

Either way, my heart didn’t skitter like it used to.

The hero inside me didn’t rise to save the day.

That motherfucker was dead.

Good riddance.

“Come along then, mon ami.” Victor strode to the door and cracked it open. He shook his head just once at the guards—guards who’d been briefed to kill me if I’d failed. Immediately, all four bowed and siphoned out into the night.

Looking me up and down as if he still didn’t trust me, Victor said, “I’ll wake the chef and celebrate with you. After all...it’s not every day I have a hand in freeing someone who was so determined not to be freed.”

I smirked and strode past him.

I walked on fucking sunshine and rainbows. “Guess I owe you a thank-you.”

“Guess so.” Victor laughed softly as he slipped beside me.

The door slowly swung closed, blocking off the dead zoo, my past life, and the girl who’d been the crux of my transformation.

I didn’t look back.

Chapter Three

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Ily

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I MANAGED NOT TO CRY.

I didn’t cry as Henri cut me.

Didn’t cry as he fucked me.

Didn’t cry as Peter gently unbuckled and unshackled me, shoved off the tatters of my torn negligee, or when he slipped his kind arm around me and guided me, ever so tenderly, to Dr Belford’s private rooms. The same rooms he’d been slipping out of when we’d found him an hour or so ago.

God...has it only been an hour?

Eager dawn did its best to lighten the midnight sky, quickly glimpsed in the arrow slits along the corridor as we moved like ghouls in the dark.

It couldn’t have been a single hour.

I felt ancient.

A time-worn antique that no longer knew how to walk or talk or breathe.

Peter didn’t say a word as he knocked softly on the door and waited for an equally soft voice to grant us entry.

I didn’t cry as he guided me inside just as Dr Belford clicked on a lamp and shrugged into a pink fleece dressing gown. Didn’t cry as she took one look at my naked, cum-smeared, blood-letted state and patted the operating table shoved against the wall of her private sitting room.

Everything about her space scrambled my head.

She was as much a prisoner here as us. Once a slave and now the tending physician to a hundred more, she’d invoked Victor’s generosity enough to warrant clothes that weren’t see-through and rooms with locks on the doors. Yet even in her quaint lounge with its grey couch and normal-looking glass coffee table, the large metallic cupboard with neatly typed labels on its many, many drawers screamed surgery.

Trembles found me as Peter helped settle me on the white-sheet-covered table. He didn’t speak as he went to Dr Belford’s couch and snagged the thick yellow-and-cream knitted blanket that looked homemade.