I emerged from Dimmon’s tent ten days after my torment began. The sunlight of the morning—the first I’d seen of its warm face the entire time I’d been kept away—brought an instant blur of tears to my eyes.
Though I was human, I felt how a vampire might when stepping into the light of the sun’s rays.
Diplomats scuttled out of their hidey-holes to watch Dimmon march me from his hovel to a wagon he had procured. He made a show of it, exerting his power over me by pulling the rope that held me like a leash.
I kept my eyes downcast, shuffling forward. At least he had given me clothes to wear, not suffering the humiliation of a nude withdrawal.
Most of the Diplomat boys and girls had their heads bowed. A few bit their lips nervously, seeing their unwashed, debauched peer being dragged and hauled into a wagon led by a single scrawny horse.
Then there was Baylen, whose eyes I never met. Out the corner of my vision, I noticed his face was a ruin—two scars stretched from his jaw to his nose. He was missing his left eye.
Seemed Jeffrith’s bottle had done a number on him.
He watched me with arms crossed over his chest, clamping his jaw as I scuttled past him, staring at me like I was a creature from a bog. I heard his feet carry him away once I had passed, his gait plodding and broken.
I did not know if he pitied me and the beast I had become, or if he was simply dismayed at seeing me in such a state.
It didn’t matter. Baylen Sallow had brought me here.Hehad caused this, far as I was concerned. He did nothing to stop it—never stealing into Dimmon’s tent in the night to try and rescue me or plunge a knife through the bastard’s throat. Just as he had hesitated to stop Jeffrith, his apprehensiveness to my situation showed his true character. It solidified my fate.
Baylen was as dead to me as Jeffrith was to the rest of the world.
It was Taclo, Koylen, and Dimmon himself who rode the wagon with me. Dimmon and Koylen stayed at the front bench, while Taclo sat in the bay with me, where I was chained to a spoke.
After giving me a pitying look, he threw a bag over my head, making everything dark again.
Then the wheels of the wagon creaked, the skinny horse whinnied, and we were off to my new future.
The shouting and yelling would have overwhelmed me if I wasn’t lost in my own broken mind.
I stood on a raised platform made of wooden pallets stacked on top of each other. My hands were tied behind my back, and my ankles were bound. I was clothed in only rags. I kept my eyes downcast.
Below the platform, hard men yelled numbers at each other. Their voices rose as they argued my price.
Dimmon stood in the back with a smug smirk behind his beard. He was pleased with how the bidding war was going over my freedom.
I was the only woman in a cramped back-alley room full of a dozen men. And I wasn’t even a full woman yet. Not by age, anyway.
My moon-cycle had started early, years ago. Dimmon had crudely pointed that out a few days before, when he wasn’t sure if my bleeding had been caused by him or by my natural progression.
My body was allegedly that of a woman’s, though I suppose it depended on who you asked. It was mymindthat was that of a child’s. It had regressed over the past few days—I could feel it, inching toward ruination that might never heal.
The shouting match died down after a time. Dimmon shook hands with a hooded man and departed without a single glance over his shoulder at me.
The bag was thrown over my head and I was led off the platform, now with complete strangers around me.
The hooded man pushed me forward, torchlight showing in flickering rasps through the weave of the wicker-latticed hood I wore.
I walked blindly until I was turned around and plopped down on a bench. Minutes later, the telltale sign of creaking and the wobbliness of my body told me I was moving again, inside another wagon.
When the bag was torn off my head an hour later, I blinked rapidly and scanned my surroundings. I was in a dark room, seated. Two torches were lit on sconces against a crudely hewn wall of stone. A dripping sound of leaky water nearby informed me I was underground.
The most horrifying part? I was not the only prisoner here. Six other souls, my age and slightly older, were similarly bound to chairs, looking frightened and lost as newborns.
The heavy thudding of boots snapped everyone’s attention to an arched entry of the room and the tunnel beyond. A tall, cloaked man walked toward us with a lantern in hand, guiding his path down the darkness.
My skin prickled with vexing anticipation. A few of the other prisoners writhed in their seats, trying fruitlessly to escape.
The man stopped at the archway and pulled his hood back.
