A stinking crypt of sweat and blood, a smell that was already there the first time I was brought in by the duke at seven years old; screaming, crying, snot running down my face, lashed to the wooden table, begging to go to my mother, not understanding that she was dead and nobody was coming to save me.
Screaming as the knife sliced into my shoulder, a sound that reverberated from the cold stone. The chamber where the duke had taken me for my first beating was large, cavernous. Somewhere, there was the steady drip of water. The soft skittering of rats.
“Please… What did I do?” My voice breaks on the words.
“Do?” He laughs a cruel laugh. “You were born, you little bastard. The king doesn’t want you. He’d be glad if I killed you.”
The tears stream down my face. “Then I wish I wasn’t born.”
His gloved hand roughly grabs my chin, turning my face up to look into his eyes. “That makes at least three of us. If it wasn’t for that damned fool Giles Aaron, you’d have died in the fire along with your bitch mother, and no doubt you’d have preferred such an end. But here you are, and here you shall stay, eating my food and reminding me of my cousin’s dalliances in the capital while I rot away here in the arse end of nowhere, where one of my few pleasures will be reminding you what a burden you are.” He drops my face and takes a step back, casting his gaze over me then grabbing my right hand and holding it flat on a smooth stone beside my hip.
Somewhere in my new home many leagues from Aramoor City, I could hear Patara crying too. At the time in my dream, we had yet to meet, but I remembered her sorrowful screams, echoing in the halls. She’d lived there since she was four, and no doubt the duke had beaten her every day just like he did me. His own daughter, but a bastard child too. Apparently that was enough of a crime to deserve whatever punishment he chose to doll out. She was my only friend. My sister in suffering and a mother in spirit.
This dream hearkened back to when I was seven years old. Just over seven years later, after he disfigured my face, I’d kill him for putting his hands on her.
He turns his nose up like there’s a bad smell. “I’ve watched you eat. You use your left hand. You will still work with your right.”
He grabs something off the tray nearby as confusion and pain spins my intestines into knots, the memory of my mother’s soft voice doing nothing to ease my terror.
“This is going to hurt,” the duke says, a glint in his eye, the large rock gripped in his palm as he raises it above his head. “I won’t tell you it isn’t…”
“Fuck.”
I shook my head to rid it of the memory, to rid myself of sleep, unwilling to allow him to force me to relive his tortures, even from beyond the grave.
I sat there, my chest tight, cradling my right hand against my stomach. The fingers were still twisted and broken, never having healed quite right, but at least I could use them these days. I could fight a man with that fist if I needed to.
I had no regrets over the way his life had ended, the very knife I still kept with me night and day, slashed across his throat as he tried to force himself on his own daughter. He was dead, that was all that mattered. Turning, I looked out at the night sky and tried to calm my breathing. I blew out a breath as I stared at the milky-white face of the full moon, thoughts of Iris rising up inside me, pushing away the darkness.
Iris.
The object of every fantasy I’d had since that first moment in the corridor.
Since that day, I found out everything there was to know about her life. Millstone Farm, out along the Kingsway, was her home, leased to her father from the royal estate. When I spoke to the master of books, he told me that they were on the verge of being evicted; their taxes not covered by their production for nearly five years.
No fucking way would I let that happen.
I stood over him and forced him to erase the debt, then buried all records of the farm in an old file where they wouldn’t be found for a hundred years. No royal collectors would ever darken their doorstep but my small measure of kindness did nothing to eliminate the pounding obsession she’d rooted inside me.
Drawing a deep breath, calm settled me as I thought of her. Of the way her innocent, stunning face had looked that day, and every day I’d watched her since. My fantasies teased me otherwise, but I knew I could make no life for her here. Locked away in the tower. She deserved freedom, a home, someone who would live life out in the open air and not as a disgrace to be hidden from the light.