Gleam (The Plated Prisoner 3)

He’s alive.

He’s awake.

“I’m going to save you,” I vow, the words coming from a stripped and slivered throat, a bleeding tongue of slurring whispers.

But he hears it.

Our moment is cut short when the guards come in, and Midas lifts me up by my ribbons and hair, shoving me face-first against the wall, too fast to stop.

“Hold her.”

A collection of firm hands come up, taking over Midas’s grip. Prisms of rainbow light stretch across my vision, though the bright rainbows don’t fit here in this violent dimness. My bleary eyes take in a profiled face with a thick brown sideburn. Scofield. When did he get here?

I’m held against the wall just as Midas ordered, and I want to struggle, I want to scream, but I’m floating on a stream of lethargy with no way to cross the current.

“You brought this on yourself, Auren,” Midas says, making my heavy lids blink.

“Wha—”

That’s when I see the sword in Midas’s grip. A golden blade, so sharp it seems to cut through the air as he lifts it right over Digby.

That’s when I start to struggle. Only the pure surge of panic makes it possible. I shove at Scofield and the others, but I can’t get them off.

“No! Digby!”

With frenzied, wide eyes, I see Midas look at me and lift the sword. My throat closes, cinches tight like the knot of a noose, and I screech at him to leave Digby alone, leave him alone, alone, alone...

But the drug has altered my depth perception, because it’s not Digby he brings the sword down on.

It’s me.

I was so aware of being held against the wall, solely focused on trying to fight the effects of the drug and get to Digby, that I didn’t even realize that the guards still have my ribbons pulled taut. That they’re stuck in the mercy of crushing grips.

A split-second warning of terror is all I get.

Then, Midas brings the sword down on them, the edge of the sharp blade slicing into their golden lengths, and my entire sense of self fractures.

All I know is utter agony.

Utter, eclipsing, unmitigated agony.

I don’t just scream.

I rupture.

There is no dulled pain this time. When that sword hacks through my ribbons, I feel everything.

The bite of the blade cleaves into the top where they grow between my shoulder blades, and my vision cleaves with them.

I’m in complete shock, pain exploding beneath the blow of the torture. My ribbons jerk and recoil, screaming a silent scream that fuses into my spine and rattles down every bone.

In speckles of splintered vision, I see three of them flutter to the ground at my feet. Their ends are frayed and uneven, tiny droplets of golden blood weeping from their mangled ends.

I stare at them, mind not quite grasping what this means, and they twitch in response, like the tail of a lizard cut from its body, still spasming where it lies.

A horrible, wailing, guttural bellow tears from my chest. “No, no, no, no! Not my ribbons, not my ribbons!”

“You caused this. You will not attack your king,” Midas hollers back, a manic wildness raving out of the cold determination of his tone.