Great Falls Rogue: Power of Five Collection Book 6

by Alex Lidell

  Tye doesn’t move, his muscles bunching. I can practically see the thoughts sprinting across his face. Don’t do it, Tye.

  Han sighs. “If I need to make the wench less attractive to you, I will,” he says, lifting the back of his hand. The intended trajectory of the blow is clear enough to make me press back into the stone. Han snorts. “Personally, Tyelor, I believe my expertise would be best used on the training pitch, directing your actions. But we can approach this any way you want.”

  “Leave her alone.” Tye’s words come out in a snarl that he checks with visible effort. “I am at your full command, sir. There is no need for further clarification.”

  “Good.” Turning his back to me, Han waits for Tye to exit the chamber before following him out, the grated door left swinging open in their wake.

  I wait until the pair’s footsteps fade before letting out the breath I didn’t know I held. Then I use my free hand to open the manacle.

  It stays closed. I frown at the latch, realizing the damn thing was constructed to click locked without a key. Wonderful. With a frustrated growl—and too little thought—I yank at the metal with all my strength.

  Click.

  The sound comes from inside the mechanism, like a metal tooth snagging a new hold. The band around my wrist tightens, digging into my skin. The manacle may need a key to open, but apparently, it needs nothing to tighten down on itself.

  Uncertainty slithers down my spine. “Guards,” I shout, despite knowing the chamber is designed to contain sound.

  No answer. No steps. Only the slight creaking of the open door, still swaying on its hinges.

  Right. Forcing my breath to slow, I lean back against the cold wall. River knows I’m here. However mad he is, however little he may want to lay eyes on me right now, he won’t leave me inside forever. In truth, it’s only been a couple of hours since the riot and someone has already come to get Tye. If River intends to come for me himself, it might be a couple of hours more until he has time for it.

  My chest tightens at the thought, but this time, I’m smart enough not to pull on the metal again. I’ll deal with River when he comes, and when that happens, he won’t find me whimpering and cowering.

  Minutes tick by with agonizing slowness.

  An hour.

  More.

  I memorize the entire stone wall in front of me, every crumbling crack and patch of moss. I close my eyes and tune my hearing, waiting for a single sound of life beyond these walls—another prisoner, a bird. Hell, I’d even take a mouse.

  Nothing.

  My stomach lets out a disgruntled rumble, my muscles starting to cramp. Ripping the hem of my dress, I stuff the soft fabric into the little space left between my skin and the manacle’s cold metal. The satin cushion helps protect my skin, but nothing can be done for the height of the restraint, which keeps me from sitting unless I want to badly strain my shoulder. A shoulder that’s already strained from long minutes of being bound overhead—though, then, I didn’t feel it through my haze of arousal.

  Dong. Dong. Dong. More hours tick by, the sound of the Academy’s bell barely seeping through the dense stone.

  Dong. Dong. Dong. My shoulder screams. Despite the padding, the metal eats into my flesh, especially where it presses the bone. The slits near the top of the cell darken with the setting sun, the temperature plummeting—and my last reserve of calm with it.

  “Hello?” I can’t help calling, hating the tremble in my voice—the weakness I can feel creeping in with the dark. “Hello? How long am I to stay here?”

  The words echo off the stone but there is no answer. Nothing. Not even a shout to keep down my voice. It isn’t fair. It was a fight, River. It was just a damn stupid fight.

  For Coal’s sake, I hope he is far, far away from here by now. That he isn’t having to watch the last rays of sun arc across the wall, the dungeon’s damp cold crawling under his skin.

  Maybe River has simply forgotten about me, relegating the little lying cadet to the back of his mind. That thought sends dread spiraling through me in new waves, the ceiling pressing lower, the walls closing in. Crushing me. The dark chamber suddenly feeling less like a cell than a crypt.

  I wait another long hour, counting off the seconds with barely moving lips, then bellow for the guards again, this time with all my might. My lungs fill and empty until I’m too hoarse to keep going. The last one ends in a harsh sob. My chained wrist has gone numb. My head pounds now with hunger and thirst. I hear a steady drip in some corner of the cell, and even that taunts me.

  No one comes. No one is going to. Despite the growing night, neither food nor water have appeared, only a darkness so complete that I see nothing but the vague outlines of chains and shackles. Finally, I close my eyes, the need to sleep so profound that it transcends the pain.

  That’s when the images start.

  A clank of metal tools; a crack of a whip slicing through the stench of pain, my grunt echoing off stone walls; a melodic voice of a woman who holds my soul before abandoning me without a word; a swirling darkness waiting to choke me each time I dare try to sleep.

  I shove myself free of the nightmare, panting against my arm. Coal. Coal must still be locked up as well. Somewhere close. Stars. It’s an effort of will to force my lungs to accept a full breath of stale air. I knew the male’s nightmares were spiraling—I felt it during those few intense moments when we touched in the past month. But I didn’t realize just how bad things had gotten.

  After being shut for a day in a dungeon, Coal’s horrors are spilling with enough force to breach the gap between us. I jerk against the chains, not caring how the manacle tightens and cuts into my skin. My vision swims once more, though this time, it’s different.

  My face presses into a stable wall, Zake’s rank breath tickling my neck. There is no sound but the horses’ soft nickering, the hammering of my racing heart, and the tap-tap-tap of a wide leather strap against Zake’s thigh. There is no escaping the coming whipping. Not now. Not ever.

  My back will soon be a map of angry bleeding welts, fresh wounds over old bruises. The leather strap traces my bare back almost gently as Zake seeks his first target. No matter how often it’s happened, how prepared I am, the agony is always fresh. The paralyzing helplessness of it. I bite my knuckle to suppress a moan. The terror of how much worse it will be if I fight him.

  “Everything you are, you have, you’ll ever become is because of my good graces,” Zake snarls into my ear. And then it starts.

  8

  Coal

  Coal little blamed the guards who threw him into the cell for ensuring he fell face-first against the rough stone floor. He had, after all, cracked the bones of five of their comrades. Or maybe six. He’d stopped counting sometime after the grunts and screaming began to bleed together into nothing but white noise.

  “Maybe I’ll just forget to take these off.” The larger of the guards yanked the ropes binding Coal’s hands behind his back, making his shoulders stretch painfully.

  Getting his knees under him, Coal rose to his feet. He could already see how a spin kick to the man’s temple could lay the guard out. Maybe for an hour. Maybe forever. The man’s partner was so young and nervous that he’d more likely piss himself than interfere.

  Coal’s gaze found the large guard’s dark eyes. “Maybe.” It was all the self-control he could manage, with all his being still screaming for violence. By the time Coal had finished destroying Kreger’s lewd art collection and room and—very likely—wrist, enough of the guards’ friends had arrived at the barracks to risk rushing Coal.

  They’d had no idea how much he welcomed the assault. That they’d been doing Coal a favor.

  “You’re insane.” The man shook his head, slicing through Coal’s binds before backing out of the cell. “Like a rabid dog.”

  The sound of the closing lock ricocheted through Coal’s body. Yes, the guard was right. Coal was rabid. But the image of Lera’s naked body turned into fodder for a bastard’s cock still mad
e murder spill into his blood. He didn’t know why, and he didn’t care. All he knew was that some deep-down part of him screamed not yours and planned to make sure the bastards knew it.

  Coal rubbed his wrists, pacing the small cell. Had he had his wits about him this morning, he’d still have ensured Kreger never drew another cadet—much less Leralynn—for as long as the man lived. However on the edge of darkness as Coal had already been, the whole mess had happened without his control. Which would make for an unpleasant conversation with River later.

  Leaning back against the cold stone wall, Coal felt the adrenaline begin to drain out of him by necessity. The body could only hold on to battle’s sharpness for so long. He knew what would come if he let go of his mind in this dark, foul place. Knew what it would trigger—and was too exhausted to fight it.

  Time passed. He had no idea how much. He’d spent enough time in cells to know not to count the seconds.

  His lungs tightened as the sun sank below the Academy’s walls, as the air cooled. His breath, harsh now, came out in puffs of condensation.

  His hands were shackled, his shoulders screaming from the strain. The taste of blood and fear choked him, blood from his last beating crusting along his skin. The islanders who’d held him for the past year never intended to let him leave. Never let him take his life either, no matter how he tried.

  A noise scraped against Coal’s hearing. He shifted, the sores beneath his shackles sending lightning bolts of agony down his skin.

  “You aren’t alone.” A feminine voice sounded behind him, soft steps circling until a young woman with intelligent brown eyes came to stand before him. She was small, barely reaching Coal’s shoulder, yet she filled his world with a lilac scent that drowned out all else. One of the islanders he’d not seen before.

  With a gasp, Coal roused himself, scrambling against the damp floor for a link to reality. The woman, whose name Coal never learned, had kept the shards of his sanity together—only to destroy them all in a single blow when she disappeared without a word. Coal knew the wound was his own fault for having entrusted himself to her, but that made it hurt no less.

  It was the woman’s scent that Coal remembered most. A lilac so clean and crisp, it could drown out the stench of fear. Coal never expected to breathe in such a lilac scent again—until a cadet named Leralynn of Osprey walked into his world, grabbed a blade, and ripped every abscessed memory wide open.

  A cadet. And yet when Coal took her in the cave that month ago, his soul had woken. For the first time since escaping the islanders, he had felt alive, the scents of the forest’s pine and rain-wetted earth so potent, he tasted them with each breath.

  Coal strode to the bars, his hands wrapped around the iron. Staying away from so much as touching her for a month had stressed Coal’s self-control to the limit. He was too honest with himself to pretend that the growing nightmares had nothing to do with the strain. He had slipped once. Just once, when he chose Lera for a choke-hold demonstration because he could not bear the thought of another’s arm at the girl’s throat.

  Spinning, Coal struck his fist against the metal, the pain singing through his bones and flesh. Physical pain was easier to endure than the one gripping his chest. Even now, days later, he remembered every second of that exercise. How anxious Leralynn had been, how little she trusted him. Standing so close to Lera, her small, tight body pressed against him, Coal had breathed in the lilac with the hunger of a starved man.

  Yet the moment he had, the woman from the islands appeared, the vision of her melding with the cadet in Coal’s hold. Fury had risen in Coal’s chest, the pain of abandonment spurring a flash of chains and questions. And then…then Lera had fought him like a cornered animal. The same girl who, a month ago, had stood up to River—despite the threat of a whipping that terrified her—all to protect Coal, now couldn’t bear to trust him in broad daylight before a class of others.

  Lera’s fear of him, the breach in her trust, had unraveled Coal at last. Yes, the guard who’d brought Coal here was right. Coal was rabid. And the sooner he was put down, the better.

  Sitting on the hard stone floor, Coal listened for the tower bell marking the passage of time. He little expected River to come for him today—the man liked to be in control before doing anything and would take time to calm down. Plus, it now fell to the commander to clean up the mess Coal had made, which—had the positions been reversed—Coal would have eviscerated River for.

  The walls of Coal’s cell closed in on him, the edges of his vision blurring in preview of the too-familiar terrors. Knowing what was to come made Coal’s heart race no slower, however, his lungs stretch no less with bit-back screams. Pressing himself against the wall of his cell, he settled in for a long night of seeing chains and whips and heated iron. His mind did not disappoint.

  Not until full dark settled and Coal suddenly smelled the scent of sweet hay and the lathered sweat of hard-worked horses. Felt helpless dread fill him as a large man with dark coiled hair loomed over him, blocking out all the light of the stable, twisting him as easily as if he were a child.

  “Everything you are, you have, you’ll ever become is because of my good graces,” the man’s voice snapped along with a deafening crack of his belt. The strap ends wrapped around Coal’s ribs, making him scream loud enough that the horses whickered in discontent. Terror clawed at his throat—terror and a strange sort of resignation. “When I order a horse saddled, you saddle a horse. You don’t lie. You don’t pretend he’s lame to save yourself a bit of work.”

  The whip fell again, and Coal screamed again, unable to stop himself. Tears blurred his vision of the rough wooden stable wall.

  Each hiss and crack of the whip felt stamped upon his mind as much as his body. The whip fell again, again. Until the pain made darkness close around him.

  9

  River

  Striding down the stairs of the dungeon corridor, River breathed in the damp air, the keys in his hand clanking with each step. His head pounded, the ache pressing on the back of his eyeballs and pulsating against his skull. He’d barely had time to piss since the brawl yesterday morning, much less eat, sleep, or wring Coal’s neck, as he was desperate to do.

  The six guards still laid out in the infirmary—a dozen others falling into the walking wounded list—made unscrambling duty schedules alone a nightmare. That was before even considering who disobeyed whose orders, and how command needed to be restructured. Adding to that, the Academy’s top healer had chosen this time to bloody disappear, and Sage was in a rightful fit. At this point, River little cared for how the problem started—he’d gotten a mix of explanations ranging from cocks to women—a well-trained regiment of soldiers didn’t have a right to degenerate into a mob.

  Which brought River back to Coal. And the cadets. River paused, running a hand through his hair. He’d forgotten to send word to Leralynn canceling the morning tutoring session, but she’d hopefully work out the reason for his absence from the study. More likely than not Lera would be glad for the reprieve—given that her disobedience of his direct orders to stay in the study was another matter to be dealt with. Another issue he was looking forward to very little.

  One problem at a time. River started walking again, reining in his focus. In the shadow of what the islanders had done to Coal in captivity, leaving the man in lockup overnight hadn’t been ideal. But Coal had been in the heart of the mob, and anything less would have had the guardsmen revolting. How much further River would need to take discipline was dependent as much on Coal himself as anything else. Which meant River had to be very, very careful, especially when he opened the door, lest Coal did something to get himself into hotter flames.

  Drawing a lungful of moldy air, River coughed loudly before turning the final corner, small empty cells lining both sides of the wall, the damp ceiling less than a foot from his head. The Academy had been a fortress once and still had the facilities to hold more prisoners than it could ever see. With Coal having no line of sight to the corr
idor, River little wanted to surprise the man who might well have spent the night punching stone walls to ward off nightmares.

  River braced himself for that too. Braced himself for many things.

  None of them included finding Coal kneeling on the floor, his hands braced on his thighs as if it took all his concentration just to keep breathing. Sweat glistened on his arms and tight face, matting his loose blond hair. Stars. The whole cell stank with acrid fear.

  River paused to collect himself, hiding away the self-loathing he felt for making this happen. Then his cool voice rang through the bars of Coal’s cell. “Good morning.”

  Coal stayed still, his gaze locked on the floor. “Let her go.” His voice was rougher than usual, as if he’d used it up talking—or screaming.

  “Let who go?” Had Coal actually lost his mind overnight? River swallowed a curse. “Coal.” Shoving his own frustration aside, River spoke softly, as if soothing an anxious stallion. “I’m going to open this door now. Then we are going to walk out of here. Do you understand?”

  Coal’s face snapped up, his blue eyes so dark, they seemed tinged with purple. “Leralynn. Let her free, and then you can deal with me as you wish.” Coal’s voice was strained but fully lucid despite the absurdity of his words. “She was caught up in the fray, nothing more. Punish me, not her.”

  “Leralynn and Tye were released yesterday,” said River, a shiver running along the length of his spine. “They were left to sit a few hours in the questioning chamber, but no more than that. I assure you.”

  “She is still here,” Coal snarled, uncoiling smoothly to his feet. His hair hung loose to his shoulders, matted with the same splotches of blood that covered his torn black tunic and bare arms. The knuckles on both his fists were raw and bleeding, as was his lip. His chest rose and fell with quick breaths.