I can almost guarantee she’s right.
If Elison and I are going to get out of here, we’ll need our strength. We’ll need to appear weak enough that they won’t want to limit our rations.
“They can’t do this!” Elison’s teeth are clenched as she stands from the bench. “We need food. We need—”
It’s not until her words falter that I realize the placement of her hands, the way they’re clawed over her belly like a wild mother bear defending her cubs.
Her choice of words had seemed innocuous before. NotI. Butwe. Not in the collective sense that I’d mistaken them for earlier. Not referring to those of us who find ourselves prisoner down here. Butweas in her and her unborn child.
Rowland’s unborn child.
My stomach writhes like a nest of coiling, hissing snakes.
Elison’s instinct is to protect and defend.
Mine is to strike with lethal precision.
Venom has always been in my blood. My mother used to tell me that I should be careful with my sharp tongue, or I might just cut myself. In truth, she always seemed more worried for everyone else. Some parents teach their young that words cannot hurt. Mine seemed to understand the opposite, and she seemed to believe that my tongue could become my deadliest weapon.
Second to having Sable locked and loaded in my arms, she would’ve been right.
I have always had an eye for weakness. Elison makes it easy.
Her fears exude from her like black smoke billowing from a pyre. A young mistress-turned-mother. Someone who is imprisoned in a noctis lair and knows their days are numbered. If she is sacrificed to the Hunt, she will never get to meet her unborn child, nor will she return to the arms of the man who’s apparently been keeping her bed warm at night. All her hopes for the future, gone before they can even come to fruition.
My vipers are hungry.
They want blood for the way they’ve been treated.
But even as my lip begins to curl back, venomous tongue ready to strike, something stops me from releasing my viper. All I can think about is how I lost my own mother too young. How I never got to see her again. How all our hopes and dreams were torn away from us in one terrible instant.
For all my anger toward Elison, toward Rowland, I know that’s all it is. Anger. Not hatred. Not malice. Just heartbreak over a bitter betrayal that I don’t want to admit because that would imply that I actually cared about something outside of myself.
Uncoiling the snakes in my belly, and digging my nails out of my palms, I take a shaky step toward her and press my clammy hand over her belly.
“I won’t let you starve,” I tell her, staring straight into her eyes to make sure she knows I’m telling the truth. I wonder if she can see the jagged rocks lodged in my throat when I swallow and amend my statement. “Eitherof you. I’m going to get us out of here.”
And I’m not sure what possesses me to say what I say next. Perhaps I’m just pissed off and determined to make the noctis rue the day they trapped me in this nightmarish place.
Whatever the reason, I turn to where the meek Mira is crouched and say, “All four of us are escaping.”
14
A CASTLE AND IT’S KING
When we lay down that night, something has changed between the three of us. We don’t lay in our separate corners like we did the night before, but lined up beside one another, finding comfort in each other’s presence and warmth.
It’s strange to think that other than Rowland, this is the first time I’ve slept next to someone in ten years. Stranger still that one of the people beside me now is a girl who has also shared his bed. But honestly, strangest of all, is how quickly this arrangement feels…natural. When they’d gathered up next to me, I hadn’t even thought twice about it. I hadn’t wondered if it was a bad idea to allow myself to feel close to them. I certainly hadn’t thought about what it would be like to lose them.
Of course, in the dark, silent hours of the night, those thoughts assault my restless mind now.
The longer we stay here, the closer the Hunt approaches. But it’s not the Hunt I’m worried about. I’ve escaped worse nightmares than this place. If I survived Hulbeck, I can survive the Castle of Nigh.
But that’s the problem.
We might be relatively safe while we’re here, but once we escape, once we return to a world where we have to run for our lives from a predator that fills their bellies with our blood, then we return to a world where I can’t afford to care for anyone but myself. The bond that might be forming while we’re here? It’s only temporary. Once we escape, Elison will return to Rowland, Mira will return to wherever she came from—or perhaps she, too, will seek out the safety that Rowland’s people can provide—and I will return to my life of solitude, and be all the wiser for isolating myself for another decade.
That’s the way it has to be.
