Gleam (The Plated Prisoner 3)
With desperate panic, I try to steel the rest of my ribbons, try to sharpen their edges and turn them as firm as solid metal, but I can’t. Not with the drug, not with the exhaustion, the shock, the pain.
I can’t. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t—
My sobs quake and wrench and threaten to topple. “Oh goddess, please...”
Midas raises the sword and brings it down again.
And again.
And again.
More ribbons fall at my feet, more screams explode from my throat and rip me in two. At some point, vomit heaves out of my mouth, leaving me to choke on acidic torment. I am nothing but flashing pain as he severs my very soul from m
y body.
I cry. I scream. I beg.
I spit and flail and fight, and my vision fractures, my body unable to hold myself up beneath the weight of the pain.
None of it matters. The guards still hold my ribbons taut. Midas still brings the sword down and cuts a part of me away, strand by golden strand, another limb lost.
I don’t know how long it takes.
Seconds? Minutes? Hours? I black out, become a convulsing mass of wailing stupor whose only cognizance is misery.
And then...
He cuts off the last one, and I shatter.
Right there on the floor, pieces of me left like bits of useless rags. Like the strings of a harp that can no longer play. Like the strands that once wove me together.
I’m dropped, body left in a heap to lie on the hard stone floor, but I don’t feel it. I don’t notice the blurred forms of the guards as they start to file out. I only see my ribbons, lifeless and lackluster. Just like me.
“You did this to yourself.”
My eyes roll up to Midas’s towering figure, to the hard set of his jaw. To the cruelty in his eyes.
He passes off the sword, straightens his tunic. “Disobedience has consequences, Auren. I needed to cut away this disobedient disease I’ve let fester in you. This was what you led me to do,” he tells me, peeling me raw.
The tears that fall down my cheeks cut me open, drip by drip, hot gashes that slice through my face and sting all the way to my essence. Midas’s mouth thins, eyes flickering with some unknown emotion that’s probably as close to softening as they can get.
“Don’t disobey me anymore, Precious. I hate seeing you like this.” His gaze shifts over the inert ribbons, down my throbbing spine. “This hurts me a lot more than it hurts you.”
Infuriated outrage flares in the mouth of my beast, but I’m far too numb to spew it. He didn’t just chop off meaningless streams like trimming off a bit of fabric. My ribbons weren’t just attached to my back, they were attached to my fucking soul.
The moment he sliced them away, he took something integral. He gouged in and ripped a part of me away, and now…
I’m empty. Mangled. Nothing but a radiation of agony.
The maimed edges along my spine are choppy and blunt, short and twitching with spasms I can’t control. Each mutilated end pokes out from my back like snapped wings plucked bare of feathers.
With a shake of his head, Midas straightens himself up, already convinced that his every action was justified. “I’ll have a mender tend to you later. Take some time to rest, Precious,” he says softly before he turns and walks out, and I flinch when his shoes step on my ribbons, as if I can feel the phantom pain of their massacred lengths as they’re crushed under his heel.
When the door slams shut, the sound tips me over the edge, and my consciousness casts me into a cold oblivion.
I fall willingly into the darkness with a plea for escape, while twenty-four pieces of me are left to wilt and wither in gilded grief. I shudder as my back drips and my eyes weep, knowing I’ll never be whole again.
Chapter 42