in my voice with equal success.
“Very beautiful,” the girl offered, her smile obscenely delighted as she fingered the blue taffeta trimming the skirt.
“Very.” It rasped.
Pretty as a colored cobra rearing to strike, more like.
The Veil would put me in its shows tonight, trapped beneath the red circus tent? I would not.
But I could not fight the Veil’s men.
I took a slow, measured breath; panic raged inside my skin, twisted and writhed as if it would tear through my constraining flesh. Everything I looked at seemed as if it came from far away. Fresh sweat erupted over my forehead, my shoulders.
The women looked at me expectantly.
I had no choice. And only one real option.
Feeling sick, I gestured to the door. “I can dress myself.” A worthless bit of modesty, for all they’d washed my body already.
The women once more looked at each other, and I wanted to scream at them to get out, to leave me alone.
“I will dress myself,” I insisted. “Thank you. Now, please.” If there was rather more emphasis on the please than I liked, I would not fault myself. I quaked beneath the robe, fear and nausea rapidly taking what control I barely maintained.
When neither woman moved—and in fact, the older began to roll up her long, wide sleeves with intent—I raised my voice. “Osoba!”
As I suspected, it only took one summons. The door opened, and if the man maintained a decent bone in his body, he did not show it, looking in with untoward interest. “Yes, Miss Black.” The tone was not one of subservience.
I did not expect it, but at least he opened the door. It was a crucial step. “I wish to dress myself,” I told him, folding my arms tightly over the front of the robe. I must have looked a sight, with my hair long, frizzed in brushed out curls and unevenly black, my robe too big, my bare toes peeping from beneath the hem.
He studied me for a long moment. “Why?”
“Because I am used to dressing myself,” I explained, pretending far more patience that I truly had.
Such snobbery. Such fabrications.
Yet if he had any interest to argue with me, it was put to rest abruptly as Zylphia’s voice, dearly familiar and one more ragged hole punctured in my composure, interrupted the negotiations. “Ikenna,” she said, with a degree of familiarity that did not seem to sit well with the man. “Cage demands your appearance.”
That she was the one to bear the message only indicated that she had not left Hawke’s side this whole time. The panic clawing at my throat tightened.
The man turned away, the door closing partially. “Is it Cage doing the asking?” I heard, low menace. That each was so familiar with Micajah Hawke as to use the intimate shortening of his first name was a telling reveal.
Zylphia’s tone did not change. “Does it matter?”
“It matters,” he said darkly. Apparently not one for farewells, the man said nothing else. He was simply gone, no trace of footsteps or sound.
The door moved. Zylphia beckoned, shaping a few halting words with care. The servants bowed to me, collected my discarded clothes—damn and blast, not at all what I’d wanted—and left the room.
I met steady blue eyes across the small expanse. Gratitude, anger, accusation all congealed into a wordless knot of emotion I could not process quick enough. The door closed again, leaving me in the room with black bathwater, my own dread, and the attire I would not put on.
They had taken my opium.
Terror demanded my capitulation.
I could not acquiesce.
The door handle rattled. I marked it, as I’d marked all the others in the past untold hours, with a deliberate counting. “Twenty-three.” Or was it twenty-four? I could not be sure; counting had not done my peace of mind any favors.
I sat in the farthest corner of the room, huddled over my knees. I clasped them to my chest, rocked because I had no choice.
How angry Osoba had been when he’d returned to find the door blocked. I’d fitted the chair beneath the knob, then obstructed that with the heavy trunk I found behind the folding screen. With some effort, I’d laid the screen between the trunk and the wall, finding just enough room to angle it in a secure brace.
It wasn’t sophisticated in any way, but it had provided its service without fuss. There were no windows in this room, no other entry but that door that would not open, no matter how many times it was rammed from the other side.
On the other hand, there was no other exit.
I was sweating profusely. It had set in an hour after my self-induced incarceration. With it, nausea swirled and my head ached like a pounding drum. The ague I’d worried about earlier this morning had returned three-fold, and I felt as if I’d been beaten solidly with sticks and left to rot.
I chewed on my thumbnail as I rocked. Blood had long since welled from the ragged edge I was creating, but I did not stop.
Back and forth, I rocked. Back and forth.
I wanted to pace, but it seemed a nightmare to even sit up straight, much less walk.
How long could I last in this cell? How long until the pain sitting like a rock in my gut turned to blistering agony?
I blew out a breath that shuddered free of lungs too full of phlegm.
The doorknob went still. So did I.
Did anyone wait outside? I had listened for some time through the panel, heard a bitingly angry Ikenna Osoba order men to stand guard for my inevitable defeat.
It did not escape me that he would be punished for my actions. Although the girls had done their bit, I wagered the Veil would not let them escape unscathed, either.
I could not summon the will to help them. Guilt paled beside the depths of my illness now. My efforts to help would only demand my surrender, and that I would not allow. Not for all the coin in the world.
Fresh blood filled my mouth as my teeth found a torn edge and sank deep.
The pain did not distract me for long.
I breathed as if I had run for hours, gasping for air as I rocked once more. My backside ached from the wear, but everything I was had become a terrible knot of panic and fear and pain and illness.
I wanted to laugh, but could not understand why.
“One miller, two millers,” I whispered. “Three millers, four.” The term was Ishmael’s, interchangeable with hang-in-chains for the name of a murderer. “How many millers to open a door?”
Two that I knew of, each demanding justice. Revenge. Rivals with each other, rivals with me.
The dead haunted my every waking breath. Feminine laughter, a woman’s screams. The wide, shocked eyes of an earl’s dying stare—foggy green, and never again to fill with warmth when he looked at me, or delight when I surprised him.
I saw in red and breathed the metallic reek of fresh spilled blood. Mine, perhaps, from the wound I would not leave alone between my teeth.
