by C. R. Jane
“Dana,” Seth croaked.
I swung back around and stiffened, having no clue who Dana was. Could she be his wife or sister back in the fae realm?
“Is that you?” He titled his head up, eyes squinting in my direction, and for those few moments, a fae with hope and kindness lay before me. I wanted to remain quiet and make time stand still for him. To bring him some semblance of peace, because whoever Dana was, she had to be important if she was the first name that came to his mind.
When I didn’t respond, he squinted past the shadows. “Who are you?”
“It’s me, Selena,” I answered, my insides squeezing at how he’d respond.
He groaned and dropped his head back to the mattress.
Well, on the bright side, he hadn’t screamed at me yet.
I found my bravery and moved over to the side of his bed and dragged the seat out of arm’s reach. It made a horrible screeching sound, and I cringed.
Seth huffed, his nostrils flaring, as if it took every inch of strength he had left to not yell at me.
I flopped down onto the seat, pressed my knees together, and put my hands in my lap. My mind ran over what I should say.
Hey, how are you doing, was out of the question. So was, the slop at the cafeteria sucks, since I’d never seen him there. Gods, I was horrible at this. The warden expected me to sweet talk information out of Seth, yet I couldn’t even form an initial sentence. This was going to go down in flames, and I’d burn in this hellhole for the next ten years.
“What do you want?” he snarled.
Okay, I could work with that conversation opener.
“I wanted to check on you.”
“Don’t lie. Nobody checks on anyone in this place without a motive.” He groaned as he strained to turn onto his side. “What’s yours?”
I shifted uncomfortably, convinced I couldn’t do this. He’d suffered enough, so who was I to take from him whatever secret he held onto? I didn’t trust the warden, yet he promised me my powers back. Disobey him, and I would be stuck here. But when I looked into Seth’s pale blue eyes, at the agony in his face, my heart bled. Maybe I didn’t need to make that decision now.
He stared at me, waiting for my response. “Guilt,” I admitted, which was partially the truth.
His eyes never left me. “Are you alleviated yet of your guilt so you can sleep better at night?” His spitefulness didn’t surprise me, but it also grated on my nerves.
“Fine, you’re upset with me, but I never meant to take your crystal away,” I whispered.
He rolled onto his back. “Just leave.”
My insides squeezed as guilt ate away at me. Instead of being here to help the warden, I ought to find a way to aid Seth. Maybe that was the better option.
I stood when I noticed the cut on his bicep, blood rolling over his arm and onto the blanket underneath him. He didn’t seem to notice or care.
I glanced around and a small towel near the sink caught my attention. With quick steps, I grabbed the towel and soaked a corner before wringing out excess water.
Three strides took me to his side, and I pulled the chair so I sat closer to his bed. “Will you let me clean your wound?” I asked.
He stared at me, his brow furrowed, and I expected the worst. It took him a long pause to respond, which came in the form of a nod. My fingers lay gently over his bicep while I patted away the blood with the damp cloth. He flinched at my touch, and I paused. “Sorry.”
How long had they been torturing him that a small tender touch made him react in such a way? Gingerly, I continued, and he let out a pain-filled groan when I did cleanse his cut.
With the dry end of the fabric, I pressed it to the injury, helping to stop the bleeding and allow the blood to coagulate. Though I understood little about fae anatomy to know if their blood worked the same way as mine and what I was doing would actually help.
I wiped more dried blood from his forearm and even the side of his waist with soft strokes.
His lips thinned, gaze still on me. The stale air in the room wrapped its arms around me, and the metallic smell of blood teased my nostrils. I looked down to the blanket over the mattress, stained with too much blood. Seth and I were strangers, forced together out of pure accident, and every inch of me screamed to get out of here. Yet a sliver in my heart hurt to witness such brutality against him.
“Seth, I’m really sorry I took the crystal.” The faint words escaped my lips again as I bowed my head down and cleaned him.
No response.
When he didn’t answer, I asked, “Who is Dana?”
He never answered and closed his eyes instead. I wiped more dried blood from him, feeling like some of this might be from a day or two ago.
“Why are you in here?” I asked an obvious question, changing the topic of conversation, hoping it might get him to talk.
“My father,” was all he said. No indication if he had killed him or that he was framed.
Silence followed.
I looked over to the door and the guard’s shadow no longer lingered. Though I doubted he’d be far. Instead of leaving, I remained by Seth’s side and kept him company. I stared at his chest, the muscles under my towel as I wiped more dried blood away. He didn’t deserve this.
They said he killed his father, the king, but when I studied his face, he didn’t look like the killing kind. I almost laughed out loud at myself. How would I know what a killer looked like?
I mean, I ended up in this place, and I hadn’t hurt a soul. Unless I counted Julian’s ego. Fucking vampire asshole needed to rot in this penitentiary, not me.
The lines on Seth’s face etched the story of a hard life, the light creases at the corners of his eyes spoke of stress. The story of sorrow was written over his face, and belonged to someone who had lost so much, it left him desolate. So what is your story? Did you kill your father or are you protecting something or someone else?
He was rugged, but he had ivory skin like he didn’t spend a lot of time outdoors. Long silvery white hair spread out around his head, bits stained by blood from his shoulders.
The more I studied him, the more I struggled to believe he would kill his father. I felt it in my gut, in my bones, in my soul.
His breaths grew heavy and deep, and it wasn’t long before he’d fallen asleep. If my company had brought him peace for a short while, then I’d be satisfied my visit didn’t bring him more tension.
A speck of blood stained his cheek, and I reached over to scrub it away when his hand clasped my wrist.
I jumped in my skin, stiffening all over.
He drew my hand to his chest where he held it. He still slept though, his exhales long and raspy. “Stay with me,” he murmured under his breath.
I didn’t move. His hand looked so much bigger than mine, his fingers curled around mine, like holding me was the most cherished thing in his world.
Agony choked me that such a powerful fae had been broken down to where his mind retreated to the past. How long before he couldn’t distinguish between present and past? How far would the warden keep pushing this fae? At this rate, he’d kill Seth before he gained the information he needed on the scepter.
The air suddenly turned bitter and chilled my skin as a shadow fell over the room. I lifted my chin to find the guard standing in the doorway.
Looking back at Seth, he looked so peaceful, so I tenderly removed my hand from under his touch and climbed to my feet. On soft steps, I left his cell. The guard backed away as I stepped out, then he shut the door with a bang, making as much noise as he possibly could.
Asshole. I seriously hated the guards and the warden more and more with each passing day.
I turned away from him and made my way back toward my cell. My throat thickened each time I remembered the sorrowful look on Seth’s face, the layers of wounds. What was being done to him sickened me.
Inmates passed me, some knocked their shoulders into me on purpose as I passed. I ignored their attempts to start a fight. I’d seen
enough to know how people in this penitentiary dealt with boredom.
I rushed forward, and all I could think about was Seth. My eyes stung with tears. By the time I reached my cell, I darted inside and threw myself into my bed. Hugging my pillow, I curled in on myself and the tears fell.
Torment ripped through me, and as much as I told myself to be strong, to not take on other people’s feelings, I failed miserably. My heart kept shattering over and over at seeing how far they had broken Seth.
Chapter 3
“Get up!” a gruff voice barked, stirring me from a fitful slumber. It had taken me forever to fall asleep last night, and I didn’t appreciate being woken up early. That was about the only thing you could count on in this hellhole—there was a schedule that was rigidly kept.
I reluctantly opened my eyes, but evidently, I wasn’t quick enough. A bucket of filthy, ice-cold water was flung on me, soaking my entire body and my bed. I sat up, sputtering. I was furious enough to leap out of bed and toward the guard leering at me from the foot of my bed. My hands curled up into claws as I strained to hold myself back from ripping into him.
The smug-looking blond guard held my gaze, just daring me to attack him. Taking a deep, shaky breath, I tried to come down from the bolt of adrenaline coursing through my body at my rude awakening. I schooled my features into what hopefully looked like a blank face.
The guard’s face dropped. Evidently, he was looking for a fight this morning. Just like every jerk living under this roof.
“Can I help you?” I asked coldly, trying to act dignified as I shivered there in my soaking wet clothes. I didn’t even want to know what was in the water he’d just thrown at me, or where it had come from. It stunk so bad, my eyes were watering.
“You have a visitor. You have five minutes to get yourself together, and then we’re going…” He paused for dramatic affect. “No matter what you’re wearing.”
The gleam in his eye told me he hoped that I was wearing nothing at that point.
The second he stepped out of view of my cell—although I was sure he was hovering right outside of the periphery, watching my every move like the perv I knew that he was—I sprang from my bed, rushing to the rusty sink in the corner, my mind racing as I thought about who my visitor could be. In the time that I had been here, I hadn’t had a single one, not that I was expecting one really, so this was quite the surprise.
Turning on the faucet, I collected the water in my hands and tried to give myself a hasty bath. After a few useless splashes across my face, I stopped my efforts. It was most likely Julian here to gloat. He was the person I cared the least about impressing.
It would probably make him delighted to see me like this. Maybe he would forget all about punishing me because he wouldn’t want me anymore.
Of course, him wanting me was probably the only way I was going to get out of here. My stream of thoughts were interrupted by the guard marching into the cell and grabbing my arm. I guess my five minutes were up.
I’m sure I looked like a drowned rat as he dragged me out into the hallway, but at least my smell was keeping him from groping me. His face was scrunched up in disgust, and he looked a little green around the gills from being this close to me.
Maybe I should start dumping that sludge on me every day to serve as some sort of repellant to the rest of the prison population. The little smile on my face seemed to infuriate the guard, because he made sure that he scraped me against the stone wall a few times.
My smile faded quickly after I started bleeding. I would probably get some sort of deadly disease from having open wounds in my current state of filth.
I was a painful mess once we got to a part of the prison I’d never been to before. The guard waved his hand in front of the door, and it opened. I could almost hear him saying some sort of spell in his head as it did so.
The guard’s antagonistic scowl faded quickly the second we stepped into the non-descript grey room that I quickly realized must have been the visitor’s room, based on the tables set up around the room filled with prisoners in jumpsuits and normal dressed people.
I knew why the guard’s attitude had changed as soon I saw her sitting there.
It was my mother.
Fuck.
Rosalind looked as beautiful as ever, if a little more gaunt than I remembered her looking before. Her face didn’t change as she surveyed me, it was a cool mask, the kind of look that I’d been trying my hardest to adopt during my stay at Nightmare Penitentiary. She pulled it off far better than I did. You could barely see the disgust over my appearance in her eyes.
That alone got my hackles up. To the rest of the world, she might be like ice, but with me, she had never bothered to hide before how much she hated me.
The guard’s grip on me loosened as he adopted what I was sure he thought was an attractive swagger as he led me to the table where my mother was sitting.
“Ma’am,” he tried to say seductively as he did a little nod with his head.
I snorted, and he shot me a look of rage that promised that my trip back to my cell would be even worse than the one I’d just experienced.
“Thank you, Officer,” my mother cooed in that affected voice that had always sent her suitors and clients swooning.
This time, I resisted laughing at her use of the word “officer.” I didn’t want to die on the trip back.
The guard stood there staring at my mother silently for a long, awkward moment as Rosalind turned her attention back to me. It was a bad habit of mine that her interest immediately made me doubt everything about myself. It was like she had the power to peel back the layers of my skin to unleash every insecurity I’d ever had in my life. Although I guess she knew where to look for them. She had been the one to give me all of them in the first place, after all.
“Do you think I could have a minute with my daughter?” Rosalind asked in that same breathy voice. The guard literally seemed to melt into a puddle next to me.
“Of course,” he answered quickly. “I’ll just be right over there if you need me,” he said, pointing to the wall where a few other guards were standing, surveying the room closely as they waited for any of the prisoners to step out of line.
I didn’t bother looking around the room to see who else was in here, the most dangerous creature in the room was sitting across the table in front of me.
As soon as the guard had gone far enough away that he couldn’t hear us, my mother’s pleasant façade dropped.
“I can see this place isn’t doing you any favors,” she sneered, her lip curling up in disgust. I kept my spine straight as I attempted to let her cruel words bounce off me. I’d long ago stopped expecting, or wishing, that she was someone different. Rosalind was a pretty monster, she would never be anything else.
“Hello to you too, Rosalind,” I replied calmly. I dragged my gaze off her, staring at my dirt ridden nails as if they were suddenly the most interesting thing I’d ever seen.
“You need to beg Julian for forgiveness. I don’t care what it takes, if you need to offer your virginity on a silver platter—” she began, cutting off suddenly by the way my face must have twitched at her use of the word “virginity.”
Her face almost looked panicked. “You didn’t,” she seethed in a voice laden with fear and hatred. “You stupid, stupid girl. You might have ruined us all.”
“What’s going on?” I asked, neither confirming nor denying her suspicion about my V-card.
My mother looked frazzled at the question. She looked frail in that moment, like whatever Julian was doing was so terrible that it had crushed her spirit.
I didn’t feel sorry for her. I wasn’t capable of that after everything she’d done to me and every other innocent girl under her care.
“He’s gone mad,” she hissed urgently, leaning towards me as her hands clenched at the table like she was holding herself back from grabbing me. “He’s killed five of my girls just in the last week.”
My heart dropped. I may have hated my moth
er, but most of the girls were like me, victims of the vampires’ tyranny. “Why?” I asked in shock. Julian had always been a cruel taskmaster, but he knew that his siren sex workers were priceless. He never would have done anything actually fatal to them in the past.
She pulled away and studied me again. “We aren’t sure. But it happened in the days after he brought you here. There are rumors that he’s become addicted to you and his violent mood swings are some sort of withdrawal.” She huffed as if that was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard.
“Was he feeding off you?” she suddenly asked in disgust.
I scowled at her. That right there was proof of the kind of mother she had been to me. She was disgusted at the idea of me letting Julian feed off me rather than worried and upset about the fact that he could have been feeding off her underage daughter right under her nose.
“No, he wasn’t,” I answered coldly. She stared at me as if she didn’t believe me.
“He probably just has some business deal that’s gone bad or something,” I offered unhelpfully.
I tried not to flinch in front of the hate she wore on her face as she looked at me. It was difficult for me to comprehend how you could carry someone inside of you, be there when they came into creation, and then hate them forever after that.
“Listen, you little bitch,” she seethed, trying to keep her features calm in the face of the guards who were watching us. “This is what you’re going to do. I’m going to get you a meeting with Julian. And then you are going to beg on your hands and knees for his forgiveness, give him whatever he wants, and make him happy again. Or I’m going to make sure you rot in this place for the rest of your existence.”
I tilted my chin up, rage surging through me that she would dare make any requests from me after everything she’d put me through in my life. Maybe Nightmare Penitentiary needed to change its name, because compared to the prospect of a lifetime of servitude to her and Julian, I would take my dank cell, the abusive guards, the threats, and the shitty food.
