Corroded

by Karina Cooper

  Zylphia’s tone did not change. “Does it matter?”

  “It matters,” he said darkly. Apparently not one for farewells, the man said nothing else. He was simply gone, no trace of footsteps or sound.

  The door moved. Zylphia beckoned, shaping a few halting words with care. The servants bowed to me, collected my discarded clothes—damn and blast, not at all what I’d wanted—and left the room.

  I met steady blue eyes across the small expanse. Gratitude, anger, accusation all congealed into a wordless knot of emotion I could not process quick enough. The door closed again, leaving me in the room with black bathwater, my own dread, and the attire I would not put on.

  They had taken my opium.

  Terror demanded my capitulation.

  I could not acquiesce.

  Chapter Nine

  The door handle rattled. I marked it, as I’d marked all the others in the past untold hours, with a deliberate counting. “Twenty-three.” Or was it twenty-four? I could not be sure; counting had not done my peace of mind any favors.

  I sat in the farthest corner of the room, huddled over my knees. I clasped them to my chest, rocked because I had no choice.

  How angry Osoba had been when he’d returned to find the door blocked. I’d fitted the chair beneath the knob, then obstructed that with the heavy trunk I found behind the folding screen. With some effort, I’d laid the screen between the trunk and the wall, finding just enough room to angle it in a secure brace.

  It wasn’t sophisticated in any way, but it had provided its service without fuss. There were no windows in this room, no other entry but that door that would not open, no matter how many times it was rammed from the other side.

  On the other hand, there was no other exit.

  I was sweating profusely. It had set in an hour after my self-induced incarceration. With it, nausea swirled and my head ached like a pounding drum. The ague I’d worried about earlier this morning had returned three-fold, and I felt as if I’d been beaten solidly with sticks and left to rot.

  I chewed on my thumbnail as I rocked. Blood had long since welled from the ragged edge I was creating, but I did not stop.

  Back and forth, I rocked. Back and forth.

  I wanted to pace, but it seemed a nightmare to even sit up straight, much less walk.

  How long could I last in this cell? How long until the pain sitting like a rock in my gut turned to blistering agony?

  I blew out a breath that shuddered free of lungs too full of phlegm.

  The doorknob went still. So did I.

  Did anyone wait outside? I had listened for some time through the panel, heard a bitingly angry Ikenna Osoba order men to stand guard for my inevitable defeat.

  It did not escape me that he would be punished for my actions. Although the girls had done their bit, I wagered the Veil would not let them escape unscathed, either.

  I could not summon the will to help them. Guilt paled beside the depths of my illness now. My efforts to help would only demand my surrender, and that I would not allow. Not for all the coin in the world.

  Fresh blood filled my mouth as my teeth found a torn edge and sank deep.

  The pain did not distract me for long.

  I breathed as if I had run for hours, gasping for air as I rocked once more. My backside ached from the wear, but everything I was had become a terrible knot of panic and fear and pain and illness.

  I wanted to laugh, but could not understand why.

  “One miller, two millers,” I whispered. “Three millers, four.” The term was Ishmael’s, interchangeable with hang-in-chains for the name of a murderer. “How many millers to open a door?”

  Two that I knew of, each demanding justice. Revenge. Rivals with each other, rivals with me.

  The dead haunted my every waking breath. Feminine laughter, a woman’s screams. The wide, shocked eyes of an earl’s dying stare—foggy green, and never again to fill with warmth when he looked at me, or delight when I surprised him.

  I saw in red and breathed the metallic reek of fresh spilled blood. Mine, perhaps, from the wound I would not leave alone between my teeth.

  The earl’s, perhaps, from the wound I would not leave alone in my heart.

  I do not know how much more time passed before a sound at the door earned my manic attention once more. It was a tap. A polite sort of sound.

  I smothered an inane snort before it blasted through the vicious ache behind my forehead. “Go away,” I croaked.

  A masculine voice trickled through the panel. I could not make it out, but it was not Osoba’s. Nor was it the nasal evenness of the Veil’s—not that I expected that one to tend to the likes of me himself.

  “I am not leaving this room,” I said tightly. “Leave me.”

  Was that my name I heard? A two-syllable decree?

  Much to my surprise, I found my legs unfolding. I rose, clinging to the wall as my knees threatened to spill me headlong into the angled screen.

  “Open this door, Miss Black.”

  Hawke. The nascent threat inherent in every word was unmistakable, as was the all-too-familiar tones of command. Yet there was something else. Something that tugged at my inflamed mind and plucked from within a memory I had struggled so hard to bury.

  Are you with me, Miss Black?

  No. No, I wasn’t. Not this time. Did I want to be?

  Would it matter so much when I had so little else to bargain with?

  Oh, heavens. What was I saying? What was I thinking?

  “No,” I replied sharply. Too much fear colored the denial. Too much uncertainty.

  Hawke must have heard it. I could never accuse him of being dull-witted, not in my wildest of fancies. His voice came again, neither sharp nor loud. “You have been too long locked away,” he said, and would I in my right mind, I would never have called it gentle. Yet that was the very word I thought of.

  Gentle. What madness was I mired in?

  I climbed over the trunk, hiking the bulky folds of my borrowed robe over my knees as I did so. My palms slid over the wood, as if by doing so, I could see through it to where Hawke waited beyond.

  Would he be clad in his working togs? Would he cover his scars once more?

  Or would he stand outside this door, cloaked in the steely authority of his mantle? Glaring at this door as if it dared have the temerity to obstruct his aim.

  I would be that aim. Reckless, obstinate, foolish Cherry St. Croix, the collector who could not collect.

  “Cage,” I whispered. Some part of myself had the wherewithal to be shocked, but I could not summon the mask of cool derision I needed to maintain distance. If I saw him—if I saw his face, would I have the strength to turn away again? Now? Here?

  I could not. More than half out of my senses and too hungry for something to fill this terrible ache inside me, I did not dare risk it.

  The door creaked faintly, the lightest touch. My fingers shook against the smooth surface. Had he laid a hand atop it? Were our palms separated only by a bit of carved wood?

  I wanted to weep for the pain of my body, the ache of my heart, and could not.

  “Open the door, Miss Black,” came his voice, so low that I could imagine him murmuring against the panel I leaned against. So close. “Your lot is already difficult enough. Do not force me to make it the worse.”

  A threat. Or a warning? Were they all that different?

  “Cherry.”

  My name in a rich, masculine command—on Hawke’s own lips—was my undoing. I am not certain when I made the decision, but I scrambled over the trunk before I became fully aware of my own intent, kicked aside the screen, and shoved away the heavy chest with a strength I did not know I had. The chair came next.

  The door did not open.

  I waited, fists clenched together under my chin, but it remained still. Quiet.

  I would be forced to open it myself.

  Trembling so hard as to clench my teeth against the chattering, I reached for the door knob. I turned it slowly, o
pened the panel with such effort, I could not imagine where the strength came from.

  There were no curious eyes to stare as cool air wafted into the room. No servants to gawk, no angry lion-prince to threaten and snarl. Only Hawke, clad in the exquisite perfection of his ringmaster attire—black and brilliant blue, the same color as the bit of devilry in his left eye. He wore no gloves this time.

  He crossed the threshold, very gently disengaged my clenched hand from the door’s edge, and shut it behind him.

  It seemed as if all the air left the room upon his entry. He filled what I now realized was too small a space for the two of us. I had no oxygen to breathe, no room to maneuver.

  My knees buckled—everything swayed as if I were on a net, a swing; yawning oblivion on each side.

  With the agony of failing dignity, I collapsed.

  But I did not fall. An arm banded across my lower back, warmth pressed from breast to hip to thigh, and a bare hand smoothed back my sweat-damp hair from my forehead. Surely I imagined that much.

  Surely, Micajah Hawke—the ringmaster of the Midnight Menagerie, Gypsy-blooded bastard and bloody-minded authoritarian—was not cradling me on the bare floor in a cramped, cluttered room.

  “What fools you make of my house,” he said, the words a harsh, if quiet, accusation. Yet the arm supporting me was gentle, the muscled press of his thigh against mine only marginally softer than the hard floor beneath me.

  I shook my head, over and over as if by doing so, my point would be irrefutable. “No,” I said, pleading it. I had no pride left. Not here, with pain ravaging my body and a need clawing at my belly, my mind. That the robe had opened over my legs, exposing my knees and ankles, seemed unimportant. My modesty, what was left of it, did not matter. “I will not. I won’t.”

  A rough hand seized my jaw, captured my face between thumb and fingers with unbreakable force. “Proud, ignorant, reckless creature.” Each name an insult, yet his voice was as music to me—a salve, a sweet harmony.

  I did not understand it. I could not fathom why.

  All I knew was that I hurt in ways I would do anything to end.

  “Tù zi wĕi ba,” he murmured, “cháng bu liăo.”

  The refrain lodged within my senses, echoing, underscored by mocking laughter that was not his.

  With what seemed to be effortless strength, he rearranged my body to lay completely against his, enfolded by his arm, trapped by heat and power and iron will. It freed his other hand, but for what, I did not know until the fingers at my jaw tightened to painful degree.

  “Open your mouth,” he ordered. His gaze burned into mine—darkness torn by azure radiance, too bright. Too knowing.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, appalled when a tear leaked from the corner of my lashes.

  His fingers dug in to my cheeks. “Open it.”

  I had no choice. Parting my lips relieved the tension of his grasp. The sound I made was both anger and despair, a terrible noise I had only ever made at my dying husband’s side—so much blood, everywhere. It painted the backs of my eyelids now, a ghostly reminder that seemed as real as the man who held me.

  Something passed between my lips. Before I could spit it out, turn away, Hawke placed his hand beneath my chin and forced my mouth to close.

  My lips sealed over two of his fingers. I tasted the shock of heated flesh, the salt of callused skin.

  The acrid burn of tar as it touched my tongue.

  I gave myself no order. As if bearing a mind of its own, my tongue twined about the fingers enclosed in my mouth, dragged over calluses and warm skin.

  A strained sound seemed to fill Hawke’s chest beneath my lolling head, but I paid no mind—opium’s sweet lure eased the ache inside me, calmed the chills and fevered sweat battering at my senses. I whimpered as he withdrew his fingers, my teeth closing over the rough pad of his index finger.

  His other hand fisted in my hair. “Let go,” he ordered, so quietly it was nearly a growl.

  I did not want to. I wanted to be sure to lick every bit of the tar from his fingers, to suck the very flavor of it from his flesh.

  The fingers in my hair wrenched hard. I cried out, and he slid free of my lips with a rough sound.

  I fell back as the tar melted in my throat, burned a path to my belly. Hawke did not let me touch the floor. As all the world softened to a swift, gentle blur, as the pain and fever left me so much faster than I would have thought possible, his grasp in my hair eased.

  “Foolish child,” he said over my head.

  I could not summon the anger to reply.

  A tentative knock did not even raise my anxiety. With my cheek pillowed against Hawke’s shoulder, it seemed a matter of course when he called, “Enter,” and rose to his feet, cradling me as though I weighed as much as a feather.

  “How is she?”

  Zylphia’s voice, so familiar as to be welcome. How the harmonies of each tone seemed to play like liquid gold, like sunshine and sweet flavors in a dish of delight.

  Hawke shifted, and when my feet touched the floor, I knew enough to keep them there. “She will mend.”

  “What of the Veil’s orders? She’s to be in Ikenna’s ring come midnight.”

  I watched as if from a distance as Hawke turned me, his features shrouded in implacability—none of the gentleness I had imagined, nothing of affection or kindness. Foolish, indeed.

  Yet, as I looked upon Zylphia’s worried face and allowed her to wrap an arm around my shoulders, I could not summon the will to disturb the dreamlike quality of the bliss I now enjoyed.

  I leaned against her—the woman who had once been my friend, and possibly would still be my friend, if I only asked—and watched Hawke draw on azure gloves with precision.

  “Leave the Veil to me.”

  Zylphia’s mouth turned down into a dire frown, the shape of it clearly obvious as I looked up at her dear face. The signs of such dislike—for me, for Hawke, for the situation, I didn’t know—were not enough to lessen her appeal.

  Poor girl. One might consider that she’d be well used to the whips of the Menagerie and their high-handed ways.

  Her hand tightened on my shoulder. “Why do you take this on?” Zylphia demanded. I could feel the tension in her body, a line of worry against my side.

  I stirred, but I could not will my leaden limbs to pull away.

  When Hawke said nothing, acknowledged nothing, I watched something painful slip beneath Zylphia’s lovely, furrowed features. “Cage—”

  “That’s enough.” Hawke’s mismatched gaze touched mine. “Get her out of my sight.”

  Chapter Ten

  I believe I slept, a brief hour’s remedy lost in opium-induced dreams that made no real sense upon waking.

  As I returned to my senses—shaped as they were by the warmth of the medicinal tar—I remembered only that I felt a puppet trapped in dreaming, the glint of ruby threads, wrapped snugly about my wrists and ankles, and a woman’s gentle laughter.

  “Get Nye on the fires,” said a feminine voice whose tone briefly spanned my waking awareness and the foggy dreams I left behind. “Ginger, mind the south fog-pushers. Kelly says they’re sparking.”

  “Aye,” piped up a young voice.

  “On with it,” said the first, and I was suddenly aware of a noise that was not subtle so much as inoffensively present—a dull rush, an indication of constant motion, of force and power.

  I opened my eyes to find a colorful spread hanging overhead; beautiful shades of burgundy wine, starlit blue, beaded black. The mattress beneath me was not soft, but my body did not ache—for that, I was grateful.

  Where was I?

  A dry, gentle hand pressed against my forehead. “Your fever is broken. Thank the heavens for small favors.”

  “Zylla.” Hers was a voice, husky and familiar, that I would recognize anywhere. A terrible pain gripped my heart, but it was not the same as that I’d only just experienced. This was deeper than any physical symptom. It made me feel fragile in ways illness co
uld not.

  I did not like the feeling.

  The hand left my forehead, and I turned my head upon the thin pillow beneath it to see my once-friend stand, shaking out a cream-colored skirt that tumbled from the back in a ruffle of peacock blue. Her corset was blue, and her beautifully thick hair wound in a tight crown.

  She’s to be in Ikenna’s rings...

  I struggled to sit up. “No,” I said abruptly.

  “Nye!” That other voice again. “The pulleys on the cages need a look-over, get to it.”

  “He’s on the fires,” replied a deeper voice, older and roughened. “I’ll see’t.”

  “Cheers, Linus.”

  “Rest,” Zylphia counseled, her back to me as she reached for the divide in the hanging curtain separating this small sleeping nook from what appeared a greater room beyond. “You require more sleep, cherie.”

  I studied the expanse of her smooth, bare shoulders the color of my favorite tea and saw no signal, no sign that I could grasp in my confused state. She simply spoke her advice, and stepped out through the curtain.

  “Ginger?” called the voice I could not wholly place.

  “Out on the fans,” said that rough voice.

  “Right. I’ll do it—Oh, Zylphia, ma’am. How is she?”

  I could not hear the answer, but I could imagine what it was Zylphia said. Rest was the last thing I required. I kicked my bare feet over the mattress, pulling the edges of the worn robe together over my bare legs.

  I could not afford to take the time to feel guilty for my lapse. That Zylphia would be in the lion-prince’s performing ring this night was not my doing. The Veil was to blame.

  And Zylphia willingly worked the part.

  Saying this to myself did not ease the guilt fluttering in my belly. How much of that was I carrying, of late?

  Not nearly enough. Perhaps too much.

  The curtain twitched aside. “You’re awake!” Maddie Ruth stepped inside before I could do more than nod my assent, a bundle of clothing folded over her arm. I realized then that it was her voice calling orders. “I’m so glad. You had us worried.”