Three of Clubs (War and Suits Book 2)

by J. A. Armitage

  “Oy!” screamed the guard, running down the stairs toward us. He’d not turned the lights on, but as the guard reached down to pull me off Ruby, I saw a small bird fly out of the room.

  “She started it!” I said petulantly.

  “Cow!” replied Ruby. “Just ‘cos you’re a princess doesn’t mean your shit stinks like petals.”

  I tried to pull myself out of the guard’s arms on the pretense of going for Ruby. In truth, I just couldn’t bear to be so close to him. I could smell the cologne on him, and it made me want to gag. I longed to bring my elbow back hard under his ribs, but I knew in doing so, I’d only cause more trouble for myself and everyone else.

  “You really are a scrappy little bitch, aren’t you?” he said putting me back down so my feet touched the floor, although he still held me roughly around the arms. I winced at his term for me.

  “You are coming with me. The rest of you better be quiet because if I have to come down here one more time, I’ll do away with the lot of you. I won’t even have to tell the queen about it.”

  When the others realized that I was being taken away, they began to shout at him.

  “It’s fine; we’ll be good. She can stay down here,” shouted Ruby.

  “I don’t trust this one. She’s going in the cages.” He pushed me through the door and closed it behind us. Fear ran through me as I remembered what had happened the last time I was in this room with him. This time, I didn’t have the shoes with me, so I was pretty defenseless. He opened the barred door to the cell he’d thrown me in before, and I held my breath, waiting to see if he would follow me. The sound of the door closing made me turn around, and I was thankful to see that he was still standing at the other side of it. Now that I could see his face up close, I saw a black bruise that covered his eye and in the center, just above his eyebrow, a red mark the size of a shoe heel.

  I had to try hard to hide the smirk at the pain I’d inflicted. Even though it would heal shortly, he wasn’t so pretty now. The other guard was standing by the door that led to the main part of the castle, and when the first guard moved towards him, he opened the door to let him through. I’d already noticed Gale perched on the top of one of the cages, and as the door opened, she spread her wings and took flight. It didn’t matter if the guards saw her as once she was in the castle she could fly out through an open window. I watched as she flew over the first guard, but as she tried to fly over the second, he reached out and grabbed her. I will never know if he knew that was one of his prisoners or an errant bird having flown in through the window, but once he’d grasped her in his hand, he threw her to the floor and brought his foot down hard. There was a sickening crunching sound, and then he kicked her body to one side, shutting the door behind him.

  For a few moments, I couldn’t move. Gale’s body remained lifeless on the floor, a wing crushed and spread out to the side at an awkward angle.

  “Gale!” I shouted and brought my hands up to the bars. I could feel the wetness on my cheeks as I tried to pull the door open or squeeze through the bars.

  She didn’t move. A small puddle of blood had formed beneath her lifeless body. I turned to the corner of the cage and threw up. Everything I’d eaten came out in a disgusting mess, splattering the floor.

  When I looked back, Gale had started to change back into her human form. At first, I thought it was a sign that she was ok, but halfway through the transformation, when she was neither bird nor person, it stopped. She was nothing more than a grotesque mess of broken bones, skin, and feathers. Her face, with human eyes but still sporting a beak,faced me and stared out with unblinking eyes.

  I lay on the bed and cried. It was of no surprise to me that I didn’t see the guards for the rest of the day.

  13th January

  I didn’t sleep much. Every time I did manage to doze off, my dream followed the same pattern. I would be sitting downstairs with the other women, and I’d tell them of this great plan I had to escape. Without fail, every time we tried, they all got killed, and the only thing I could see were the dead eyes of their broken bodies staring up at me. It didn’t help that every time I awoke in a sweat, the exact same nightmare greeted me in real life. The guards had left the lights on throughout the night, and it was impossible not to see Gale, still lying there, unmoved from the previous night. I knew she wouldn’t move. As soon as I’d seen her partly transform, I knew she was dead. I spent the night under the thin blanket trying to blot everything out. Gale’s dead mangled body, the horrific stench of my own vomit.

  Just like the blanket couldn’t keep out the nightmares and guilt, it didn’t keep out the sounds of the women calling my name. I could hear them through the door calling for hours. They were all worried about me, about what the guard might have done to me. They probably assumed that Gale had escaped. I couldn’t bring myself to answer them last night because I’d have had to admit that Gale had died, and it was my fault, but when their calls started again in the morning. I had to tell them the truth. I could have let them hold on to some false hope, but when the guards showed up or didn’t show up as was more likely, they’d figure out the truth.

  I took a whole ten minutes trying to muster up the courage to call down to them and to work out exactly what I was going to say.

  In the end, I only shouted out Alice’s name. I picked her because it was she who had spent the longest calling me.

  “Star!” she replied straight away. “Are you alright?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Thank goodness,” someone else yelled out. It sounded like Cass “We’ve been worried about you.”

  “Gale’s dead. The guard caught her and stomped on her.”

  There was a silence that seemed to go on for a hundred years. I thought I might have heard someone sobbing, but it could have been my imagination. It probably was, as they’d have had to be sobbing pretty loudly for me to hear them. Maybe they were.

  Eventually, Alice spoke.

  “We’ll get out of here, Star. Just you hold on, ok?”

  It was not the reaction I’d expected. I thought they would hate me, blame me after all, it had been my idea to have Gale fly up here. Fly to her death. Instead, they were worried about me. I didn’t deserve it.

  I napped for a little while in the afternoon, mainly to calm my pounding head and to blot out the pain I was feeling.

  I woke up thirsty and desperate for water. I ignored my need. I didn’t deserve to live, to drink. People had died either as a direct result of something I said (Gale) or my total failure (Ash). I had no doubt that Ash was dead by now, his body as lifeless as Gale’s. They’d said he had twenty-four hours left, and that had been, how long ago? Three days? Four? Five? All the days since I left our castle had merged into one long day of hell, and I could barely remember one day from the next.

  Lunchtime came and went without the guards showing up. Not that I cared about me, but the women down there must have been feeling hungry. Then I remembered that they had put a little food to one side, and I felt better. They would have eaten something, no matter how meager the portions. Plus, they had fresh water from the river to drink. My throat was dry, and a sticky film had coated my tongue. I tried swallowing a few times, but my mouth was so dry that there was nothing to swallow. The smell of my vomit, combined with the smoky, sweaty clothes was horrific, and I began to wish I was back down with the other women just so I could strip off and swim in the river.

  At some point in the afternoon, I heard the door to the castle click. I sat up quickly on the bed, bringing my knees to my chin and wrapping my arms around them. As defense mechanisms go, it was pretty feeble, but aside from throwing vomit at anyone coming in, I didn’t have a lot of options.

  I was surprised to see a pretty young girl being roughly pushed into to the room. I was less surprised to see the guard following behind her. The girl screamed when she saw what used to be Gale on the floor.

  “What the fuck?” said the guard, letting the girl go for a second. Such was the shock
of the poor girl that she didn’t use his momentary lapse to try to escape. Instead, they both stood there, mouths open, gazing at the half-human, half-bird on the floor. The second guard appeared behind them.

  “What are you doi…What in God’s name is this? What is it?”

  “What is this? What did you do?” The first guard turned to me as if it was something I could have put there. I was behind bars about fifteen feet away from the body.

  “I don’t know,” I lied. I had no intention of enlightening him. Let him figure it out.

  “Get rid of this, whatever it is,” he said to the second guard.

  “And you can go in here.” He threw the girl into a cell about three away from mine on the same side. She immediately ran to the back of the cell and sat on the bed in a similar fashion to how I was doing.

  I watched the two men try to figure out what to do with Gale’s remains. They talked in undertones so I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it was apparent they didn’t have a clue what they were dealing with. Obviously, the bird the first guard had crushed had been forgotten.

  Eventually, they disappeared and came back with a wheelbarrow. They unceremoniously threw her body in it, and the second guard took her away.

  “Now that that is over and done with, we can have some fun.”

  He leered at the young girl. She whimpered and brought herself even closer to the stone wall behind her.

  “No!” I cried out, jumping up from my bed and grabbing the bars. I’d managed to defend myself from the brute, but this girl was defenseless. She didn’t have the heels I’d had, and although she was quite a bit taller than me, she was still tiny compared to the guard.

  “Shut up, you!” The guard looked at me through evil eyes. “Just because you didn’t want to play…”

  He grabbed the girl by her dress and pulled her toward him. She wore the white robes synonymous with The Diamonds, and her long white-blond hair fell behind her, almost blending in with her clothes.

  “She looked even younger than me, about fourteen or so. I wondered what her supposed crime was. She was extremely beautiful, which could have been her crime if the queen had caught sight of her. She was sobbing now, tears coursed down her face as she unsuccessfully tried to fight him off.

  “I’ll play now!” I shouted out. The thought repulsed me, but the thought he’d hurt this young girl was somehow even worse. I tried my best to look sexy, but it was not a skill I’d ever needed. In a world full of Hearts where sexiness was second nature, I must have looked ridiculous in my filthy ripped clothing.

  “You had your chance, love” he sneered before turning his attention back to the girl.

  She screamed as he pulled her dress up to her waist and pushed her back down to the bed.

  “Please, don’t do this!” I shouted, crying myself now and banging on the bars as though that would make them magically bend to my will. My voice was drowned out by the young girl's screams. I tried to replicate the tiny amount of magic I had shown down by the river, although beyond summoning fish, I wasn’t sure what else I could do. I concentrated as hard as I could, but nothing happened.

  The girl was still screaming, and I couldn’t even see her face as her skirts had now been pushed up and covered it. To my shame, I was glad; her screams were enough to haunt me for the rest of my life.

  I could hear him grunting away on her, over the white mass of robes she wore. In time, she became silent and still, which was even worse. I had never felt so utterly helpless in my entire life nor so full of hatred for another person. I fell to the floor, closed my eyes, and covered my ears. There was nothing I could do for the girl, so I had to do what I could to help myself, and that meant blocking the whole thing out.

  When he had finished, he left her exactly as she was, splayed out on the bed, her bottom-half exposed, her entire top-half covered. As the main door to the cells closed behind him, all I could hear were quiet sobs.

  I wanted to ask her if she was ok, but she so obviously wasn’t that it seemed pointless. To tell her that everything was going to be ok was also ridiculous in the circumstances. Nothing was ok, and for her, nothing would be ok ever again. Words of comfort floated through my brain, but nothing seemed adequate. In the end, I just said, “I’m sorry.” There was no response beyond the continued sobbing.

  We both stayed like that for hours. I lay on my bed, wondering what I could do for her. She lay out on hers in silence, neither of us knowing what to say to the other.

  At some point, the sobbing stopped, and it was completely quiet. I looked over to her briefly. She’d pulled her skirts down, so I could see her face. There were streaks of red on her robes. She lay on her back, staring at the ceiling, her arms to the side of her, almost as though she was dead and in her coffin. I could see her chest moving rhythmically up and down the only movement, but, at least, I knew she was alive.

  I had just finally gotten up the courage to speak to her when the main cell door opened again. She moved quickly now, like lightning. She pulled herself up into a sitting position as far back on the bed as she could, arms wrapped around her legs and with the pillow on top as if it could protect her. I stood and held onto the bars again. If he was coming for me, I wasn’t going to cower. I couldn’t win against him, but I wasn’t going to go down without inflicting some damage.

  He had a leering smile on his face, but he also had a tray of food. Another guard came in after him and another behind that one. They laid out food next to the bars of the girl’s cell and then did the same to mine. He actually winked at me as he placed a tray on the floor. I was repulsed by it, by how smug he looked. The rest of the food was taken downstairs for the women in the cellar. They were quiet, and I wondered how they were doing. The three guards then left. I could hear the first one whistling as he closed the door behind him.

  Although I’d barely eaten in days, I wasn’t hungry at all. The girl was still in the fetal position at the head of the bed, and it looked like she felt the same way. She needed to eat and the only way to get her to was to eat myself. The food on the tray was actually pretty good. The bread was freshly baked, and there was a selection of meats, cheeses, and jams. Better yet, there was a bottle of water. I pulled it through the bars and drank it down all at one time. Then I pulled each bit of food through bit by bit and laid it out on the bed.

  “You should eat,” I said to her. She didn’t move, her eyes staring straight ahead of her.

  “It’s good. The food is fresh.” I continued. I took a bite and made yummy noises as though I was trying to get a fussy toddler to eat his dinner. Still, she didn’t move.

  When my food was gone, and I was all out of yummy noises, I sat back and thought about what I could do for her. My options were pretty limited.

  “I’m Star.”

  Nothing.

  “I’m from The Club Kingdom, my father is the king.” I didn’t tell her to boast, just to elicit some kind of response. It didn’t work. I guess she wasn’t as easily impressed by royalty as Alice had been.

  “I hit the guard that hurt you with the heel of my shoe and kicked him in the balls a few days ago. You should have heard him cry like a baby.”

  “You did?” She turned to me, a look of amazement in her eyes, although they had an underlying haunted look as if her soul was broken.

  “Yeah. He wasn’t too pleased. He didn’t bring food for days. Where are you from?”

  “I live in the mountains by the diamond mines in the Diamond Kingdom. My father oversees the miners there.”

  I was surprised at her answer. Why would the Queen of Hearts care about a miner’s daughter?

  “So how come you ended up here?”

  “My father brought me to Urbis. He has a trade contract with the Hearts. He let me come with him for the first time when he went there for contract negotiations. We’ve been trading with the Hearts since before I can remember, but this time, for some reason, they weren’t happy with what my father was charging. He hadn’t raised the prices in years,
and they’d always been happy before. This time, though, they wanted a thirty percent decrease in price. When my father argued, they brought me here.”

  “So you are being held for ransom?” This was a new low, even for the queen.

  “I guess so.” She was quiet for a while, and then she spoke again, this time sounding angry.

  “I hate the Hearts.”

  “Don’t hate the Hearts. It’s the queen you need to hate. She’s got plenty of Hearts down in the dungeon through that door there, all on meaningless charges.”

  “There are more of us?”

  “Yes, there are eleven others downstairs…ten” I corrected myself. I’d counted Gale. I lay back on my bed, feeling lost. I’d seen one innocent woman murdered and a young girl raped all in the course of twenty-four hours. How was I supposed to alleviate the fear of someone else when it was all I could feel myself?

  I let the girl talk. It took both our minds off our situation, and she ate her food as she talked. She told me her name was Allaya, and she’d never left the mountains where she had grown up before. The way she described it, it sounded beautiful, and when I told her that I’d never even been to the Diamond Kingdom, she invited me to her house. I also found out that she was an only child, but she had plenty of cousins who lived near her. Her childhood sounded idyllic, and I struggled not to cry with the way it had ended so abruptly. She told me that she wanted to be a healer when she was old enough as she often helped her mother tend to those injured down in the mines. I would have asked her if she could perform some magic to get out of here, but I could see the same inhibitor bracelets on her arms that Helena wore.

  I, in turn, told her about my own childhood in the castle. How I was taught to be a lady and a princess, how I attended many royal functions and parties and how, at the age of eighteen, I would be expected to find a job of value. I told her that I wanted to be a vet and look after animals. She told me that she had two pet minekins and a dog called Spot. When I told her that I didn’t know what a minekin was, she explained that they were creatures that lived down in the mine, a cross between a cat and a squirrel but smaller and with black fur.