“Please,” I choked out. “I’ll do anything.”
“Anything? Why? Tell me.”
“Because—because I love him,” I said. “And because he saved me. And now it’s my turn to save him. I know he—he thinks I’m not ready for it. That my life hasn’t prepared me. But,” I said louder, just incase, “it has now. Here.”
I stepped forward and tossed the knife from my inner jacket pocket down to clatter on the stained stone. My heart raced. My breath hitched. And I said:
“I’ll—I’ll be your slave instead.”
Resi looked from Noam to Obadiah, incredulous. “Uh, honey?” she said. “I’m not really sure you understand what slavery really means.”
“No,” I said. “Thanks to him, I understand perfectly.”
He was struggling in the muzzle, thrashing, gasping, screaming noiselessly now like a hooked fish, the acid still eating through him. In a minute or so, give or take, he wouldn’t just be tattooed. He’d lose the hand. Maybe the arm. Maybe more.
And, fuck. What could be worse than being unable to touch him when he was just centimeters away?
Well, nothing.
But we’d been there before.
Keep acting. Keep breathing.
“Burn me. Rape me. Or have them do it. I don’t care.”
Resi laughed. High, warbling, deceptively pleasant. Like the high school mean girls whose cruelty had been almostbeautiful, glittering diamonds.
But even diamonds could shatter if struck in the right place. Chemistry told me so.
“Well, come on,” she said. Before she could beckon Noam to drag me forward, I darted toward them myself, hands outstretched to accept the set of chains Noam produced from the seemingly bottomless pile. I even lowered myself to my kneeswithout being ordered to, inhaling sharply as he locked my wrists in the cold iron cuffs.
Noam yanked on a lock of my hair, forcing me to look up at my newmistress, at the red harlequin smile painted in flecks of blood and tissue across her face.
I was inches away from him now. Right where I wanted to be. Because just as Noam hadn’t thought to check me for the knife, he’d forgotten to check me for the master key, too. Which was good because I’d had it in my hand the entire time, having found it in Gerald Langer’s ownwhisper room, after following the red-veined arrow. Sure, the mining slaves had never gotten the chance to use it, and most of them had paid for it with their lives, but they sure had given it their best shot. Left it, I liked to think, for the one person smart enough to give them credit for it.
My only regret was that I’d needed Noam to take me here. Otherwise, I would have shot him in the head.
“Your boy fucked me, you know.”
What?My heart turned a traitorous little somersault, but I shoved it down as I slipped the key into the tiny lock, breathing only when I heard the tumblers move once, then again. “I don’t believe you. I mean”—my face flushed—“ma’am.”
“Show her.”
The bald goon grabbed a cell phone, an app cued up to a video feed from a camera mounted somewhere on the ceiling, and shoved the screen in front of my face. I looked away and shoved down my gag reflex as if the thing were emitting some kind of toxic miasma.
But I turned back. Because I couldn’t look away from what she’d done to him.
“God, see how fucking huge and hard he was?” she purred dementedly as I stared, nauseated, at the pixelated images. “When you were trekking through that goddamn desert trying tosave him, he was moaning for me, begging to taste me, begging to come inside me.”
My stomach churned, but I kept working the lock. Fucking hell. How could this pathetic, perverted woman possibly think any of this meant anything to me, other than proving it was actually possible to hate her even more than I already did?
“So, Louisa—oops,” she taunted, creeping nearer. “I forgot.Slave.Any regrets yet about your noble sacrifice? I mean, besides the fact that I’m still going to kill both of you, but I figured that went without saying.”
My eyes flicked to him. He writhed, barely conscious. Could he hear her? Could he hearanything?
Like it mattered. I’d feel the same, say the same. In silence, in noise, in darkness, in light, in night, in day. Whether anyone could hear or whethereveryonecould hear.
And that was exactly what Resi would never be able to understand. Because I did love him. And hehadsaved me.
