“I don’t think your government will like the way you’re treating me, Lieutenant Montgomery. They very much want the vanadium my country has and I’m not sure I’ll sell it to America if I’m not treated well.”
“Treated well!” he sputtered. “I saved your skinny ass and look what it cost me.” He pulled his shirt from his left shoulder and she saw a deep, puffy, ugly furrow across his skin and around that were half-healed scars that ran down his upper arm, his ribs, and into his shorts. His leg was also scarred and the wounds there looked deeper and not as well healed.
She turned away from the sight. “You should not show me such things. Please keep yourself dressed in my presence.”
“You expect people to risk their lives for you, don’t you?”
“My subjects—”
“Subjects, hell! Here, get busy on these shrimp. If I have to do them, you don’t eat them.”
“I cannot believe you’d refuse me food.”
“Baby, you just try me.”
“Lieutenant Montgomery, you cannot call me—”
“Cut!” he yelled at her.
She picked up a boiled shrimp with the knife, put it on the piece of wood, then tried to slice downward with the knife. The shrimp moved but did not cut.
“Don’t you know how to do anything?” He took the knife, grabbed a shrimp in his left hand, and deftly cut off the head then broke the tail off and slipped the shrimp from its shell. “See? Easy.”
Aria was looking at him with all the horror she felt. “You touched it.”
“The shrimp? Of course I touched it.”
“I cannot do that. One does not touch food with one’s hands.”
He looked at her in disbelief. “How do you eat corn on the cob? Hot dogs? Hamburgers?”
“I have never eaten any of those things, and if one must touch them I do not plan to eat them.”
“Apples?”
“With a knife and fork, of course.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment but looked at her as if she were an alien from outer space. He took her hand in his, turned it palm up, and dumped a fat shrimp in it. He kept holding even when she tried to jerk away from him. He forced her to hold the shrimp in one hand, the knife in the other, and guided her through the motions of cleaning the shrimp.
Aria willed herself not to gag. She tried to close her eyes but the horrid man waited until she opened them before proceeding.
“Got it, Princess? When I get back, I expect the lot of them to be done.”
She breathed a sigh of relief when he was gone but the mound of shrimp looked enormous. She felt like the princess who had to spin straw into gold or be beheaded in the morning. Tentatively, she picked up another shrimp. It took her a full five minutes to get the thing cleaned and then there wasn’t much of it left.
“The American government will not like this,” she said under her breath. “When they hear of this, they will no doubt use their trial system to condemn this man to a long prison term. He will wear chains about his ankles and live in a rat-infested dungeon. Or better yet, they’ll send him to Lanconia. Grandpapa will know how to deal with him.”
The man’s snort from directly overhead made her jump.
“You must announce yourself. You cannot enter my chamber without my permission.”
“This is my chamber. You haven’t done ten shrimp. At this rate we’ll starve.”
She expected him to take the knife and finish them but he didn’t. Instead, he had an
other string of fish. He used a big knife to remove the heads then tied a string to the heads and secured them so they dangled in the water.
“We’ll have blue crab for lunch—that is, if we ever have breakfast.”