“Elison,” I say softly, hoping none of the guards will hear me.
Startled and a bit confused, the woman’s deadly glare falters and flits to me. “Ch-Charlotte? What are you doing here?”
“Funny you should ask—”
Before I can tell her, Malachi’s voice echoes in the corridor.
“Rest up, everyone.” His voice is alarmingly resonate compared to the casual way I’d heard him talking with his companions for the past few days. Maybe it’s just the echo of the dungeons though, making him sound intimidating. “King Tor will arrive in another day or so.”
As he speaks, I glance around the rest of the dungeon. As far as I can tell, the cells are segregated, the men and women kept apart from each other—at least there’s that to be grateful for. Most of them have a dozen or more people each, which leaves me to wonder if ours will continue filling until the start of the Hunt.
“It won’t be long now until you’re released in the Hunt,” Malachi continues, addressing us all with his condescending nose held high. “If you’re wise, you’ll rest while you’re able.”
With the constant bobbing and jerking of the carriage, the last decent night’s rest I had was one of the nights Rowland came over, and I’ll be damned if the last good night’s rest I get before the Hunt will be one where I was in Rowland’s arms.
I saunter over to an unoccupied corner in our cell, the one connecting to the empty cell beside us instead of the male cell on the other side, and plop down to the ground a little too rough.
No matter how far I bury my face in my hands, I can feel Elison’s gaze upon me. I wonder if she’s pieced it together yet that I know. I wonder if she even knew Rowland and I were…whatever we were. Can I be mad at her if she didn’t? Can I even be mad at her if she did?
It’s even harder to drown out the sounds of our prison. The constant hacking and coughing. The sobbing. The imprudent shrieking for our release. The petty bickering.
In the cell beside ours, the men haven’t stopped quarreling since the new members arrived—one of them is quite young, perhaps my age if not a year or two younger, while the other is at least a decade my senior. I think I recognize him. We haven’t spoken much, if ever, but I’m almost certain I’ve seen him aroundBarretville, and always with that same sour look on his face.
When he notices me staring, the look in his eyes turns malicious. “This is all your fault, you bitch!”
“Lewis, no!” The young man who’d been captured with us grabs for his arms, but he’s no match for the belligerent bull. He’s flung backward, landing into a group of miserable prisoners and knocking everyone down.
Lewis charges for our cell—our cage—and clutches the bars. His cheeks dig into the bars, and for a moment I fear he might actually try squeezing through them.
“If you hadn’t brought those noctis to Valor’s Rest, we wouldn’t be here!”
The noctis he’s referring to must be Gregor and Boris, and I can’t imagine many people knew about my encounter with them, outside of Rowland, his archers, and the guard he spoke to about cleaning up the mess. As best as I can gauge, Lewis doesn’t have the discipline for archery, so I doubt he was one of the archers who helped guard the gates. Rowland had asked the guard to send a few men to clean up after the bodies, and suggested they use the men they’d arrested after some incident at a tavern the previous night. Lewis certainly looked like someone who could fit that description. Had he been cleaning up her mess when he was captured by the noctis prince?
He spits through the bars. Thankfully he’s a terrible shot because even standing still he misses me.
“You’re gonna have to do better than that,” I snarl, exhausted and with no patience to deal with the likes of him.
He just shakes his head, slowly backing away. “You better hope they kill you in the Hunt. You don’t want it to be me who finds you first.”
Every muscle in his shoulders is clenched when he returns to the young man he knocked over and hoists him to his feet.
“Th-this is it, then?” the kid stammers. “We just sit here and w-wait to die?”
The noctis guards who brought us down here haven’t quite finished vacating though, and the prince’s ear twitches at his sniveling. He turns around.
“Well, yes. I’m afraid so. And if you’re having trouble understanding what that entails, there are others you can look to for an example.”
The prince points to the woman in my cell, the one cowering in the corner.
Lewis scoffs. “Another worthless, whimpering bitch.”
“Leave her alone,” I hear myself say in a tone far deadlier than anything I’ve ever wielded.
“Oh yeah? Or what?” Scalding heat flickers behind his bright eyes when he returns his gaze to me. He crosses the small cell again, coming back to the thick bars that keep us separated. “What are you going to do about it?”
I’m on my feet and across the cell in an instant. We live in a world where human-like beings bite into our flesh and feast on our blood. He doesn’t scare me.
I grab the thin, pathetic braid dangling from his chin that he calls a beard and I yank it forward, his cheekbones slamming against the bars. “I’ll rip this pathetic excuse of a beard off your face, for starters.”
