Page 10

He watched his thumb trace small paths along my bottom lip, transfixed at the way my flesh parted for him. The moment stretched out around me, and he whispered something too soft for me to hear over the sudden stampeding of horses that took up residence within my rib cage.

He snatched his hand back as if I had offended him and shook it out before shoving it into a black leather glove.

“Get your daoire in order, Rictus. The Ard Rí would shit himself if he had to listen to her wailing.”

Gone was the sensual pitch of our stolen moment. And in its place was the reminder that four men, massive stacks of muscle, pinned me angrily to the grass.

His eyes met mine once more and then he was retreating, nearly running from the scene. Fires ignited on torches around us, and the last glimpse I had of him was the flash of orange against the burnished metal back of his breastplate.

“Fucking Raven. Cocky bastard. Belongs at the end of a knife and not skulking about our Ard Rí,” Rictus spat before turning to our gathered picnic on the grass.

Coldness slithered behind the oil slick of his eyes.

“Get her up,” Rictus barked, an arctic whistle in his voice. “Now, listen, little sun, I’ll forgive this one outburst because you’ve been a good girl for me up until this. But you must be punished. Be a good girl, take your punishment in silence, and do as I say. Shine on the block. And when you come back . . . I will give you something of yours back. Whatever it is you wish.”

He was bargaining with me? Did he think he had anything of mine I wanted back? All I wanted was the ability to punch him square in the face.

I considered it, examined it from every angle, then nodded, satisfied the deal was simple enough. “I’ll take my punishment like a good girl and go up on the block without any fuss.”

The goons holding me down lifted me effortlessly from the grass, as if it hadn’t taken all of them to get me there. I was gently placed on my feet, and Rictus patted my ass like one would pat a dog on the head. The urge to bite made my teeth itch, but I didn’t have time to act on it before I was swept into one of the massive canvas tents and led to one of the tent poles.

I’d been beaten before. It wasn’t an unfamiliar experience. The humiliation of being whipped in front of others had, long ago, fled me. One can only be hit with an extension cord or smacked around so many times in front of your peers before you stop being ashamed of the deeds of others. Sonny’s Rule #4: never own someone else’s actions. What someone else decided to do about something wasn’t my fault, and I wasn’t about to hold the shame of it for them. I was no one’s daoire . . . or at least I hadn’t been then.

The Sonny who had written that rule into the journal of her mind probably would have been ashamed of unbuttoning the gauzy burgundy gown and letting it pool at her feet. She probably would have hidden burning cheeks behind her hands and tried to shrink into the grain of the wood. It was hard to be ashamed of people seeing your body when you hadn’t come to terms with the ownership of the body they were gawking at. It felt like another costume that I wore on a night out. It might as well be Halloween.

I had expected a whip but I was not treated to the grace and simplicity of one.

“Kneel,” he barked behind me, and when I didn’t perform swift enough for his liking, he merely kicked my knees from under me and forced me into it.

His clawed hand ran a line down the cut of my spine as if testing the flesh before sinking knuckle deep into the base of my back and unzipping my flesh like an old pair of jeans. I tried to wail, but the sound stuck like a golf ball in my throat as the skin was pulled away from my ribs and left to hang like obscene curtains at my sides.

Silence lived between the molecules of misery as those claws scored marks into the raw, previously undisturbed nerves and meat of my bones. I did not survive the torment tethered to my flesh. By the time he got to the third rib, I was violently kicked free of it and floated like a vapor cloud above my suffering, watching as he worked.

When he was done, he knitted me together as simple as spreading icing over a cake, leaving not a single mark. Not a drop of milky blood slipped free to mar the perfect expanse of my flesh. I was a prisoner in a ball of razors that shredded with every breath my newly returned consciousness demanded.

Rictus had warned me on the ship that if I displeased him, he would make my makeover a summer’s dream.

He hadn’t lied.

He hadn’t spoken a single mocking word the entire time. That was at least a change from my shitty foster parents. All he had said before leaving me kneeling in a puddle of lantern light was that he would be back for me when it was my time—and to clean up.

I was doing up the last of the buttons that ran from throat to foot on the gown with shaking hands when I felt the presence of the others. Turning on my heel, chin held high, I took in the people around me.

Every one of them had a golden plate mask that looked like a troupe of Venetian carnival players had been raided. Some were like I imagined mine, half masks that only covered the brow to the middle of the nose. Some were beaked or pointed. Only a few were full-face masks, though.

A man with a bauta mask stepped toward me, his arms open wide to show he meant me no harm. His pace was slow, giving me the opportunity to evade him if necessary.

“Easy, Cricket,” he purred. He came within five feet of me before bowing at the waist and looking up to me as he rose. “I am The Rook. We spoke while you were in the cage.”

I canted my head from side to side, taking in his hair, which was the same length as the man with the forest eyes and wicked grin. I took in the elegant point of his ears, wholly unhuman. I assumed they mirrored my own. He was well built and strong, with broad shoulders.

As I took better stock of all the people around me, I noticed all of them had the same build, the same body style. There was no deviation, as if they were all base model robots.

The women were all about the same height I was, tall for a human woman, around five feet ten. Long limbs sported false healthy muscles, a decent set of breasts—though nothing obscenely large for their frames—and thick, wide hips.

The men were taller, only by a few inches, but built well, with thick cores, broad shoulders, and densely muscled thighs. All of them looked crafted for manual labor but also moved with a grace suitable for a ballroom. Every single one of them had hair pulled back to show off their artificially pointed ears. All of them had eyes twice as large as a human’s.

I shivered with disgust. It wasn’t normal to see the same human cut and pasted onto nineteen bodies with the only deviation being their eye and hair color. I wanted to rail against the injustice of it all for them. Every single one of us had been stripped of our individuality, and in its place, a uniform blank slate had been issued to us. All except me and the man who stood behind Rook, whose mask covered his eyes.