So what more was there?
Nothing good.
I didn’t trust the cunning mind of an aniel, let alone the cunning and cruel mind of a God. And I knew my own Monster so well that cruelty was no stranger to me. Sometimes, it fuelled my body like a hunger forever unsatiated.
Monsters are drawn to darkness…
I hit that thought from my mind as I rubbed my eyes.
Sleep still threatened to drag me back down onto the hard mattress and creaky bedframe. I forced myself to stand, rolling out the stiff muscles in my shoulder.
“Hello?” A croak made for a poor voice. I mustered every scrap of strength I had left. “Ava?”
“Lissa!”
My breath hitched as I swerved around.
I found myself staring at a door cloaked in gloom and shadows, hidden in the dark corner of the room. With the heavy curtain shielding the day’s light from outside, I hadn’t noticed the door until now.
It whipped open.
A rush of bottled fragrance muted the stale smell of the room for a fleeting moment.
Ava stood in the doorway.
Her face was softened with relief—the very same that saddened her eyes as she strode towards me, determination coiled in every brisk step she took.
Then I was scooped up in her strong arms.
Never been much of a hugger.
Ava knew that. Often, she respected that. So I gathered she must have been terrified for me while I was passed out, and just had to hold me.
Still, I didn’t reciprocate. My arms were stiff at my side.
“I didn’t think you were going to wake up.” My unwashed hair muffled her voice. I was certain I heard tears sneak into her words. “I tried to wake you up so many times, Lissa. You’ve been out for ages—”
“Ok, ok,” I mumbled and tried to squirm out of her arms. “Good to see you too.”
She shot me a withering look but gave me my space all the same. I could handle every weary stare in the world if it meant no one hugged me again.
“Ages,” I echoed with a backwards glance at the bed—the bed that still called to me in my tired bones and throbbing head. “How long is that in real time?”
“Two days.”
Ava’s fingers twitched. The way I longed for the bed was the way she longed to hold onto me again.
I’m an avoider—
I fell back onto the foot of the bed, out of her reach, and stared up at her with all the weariness my body felt.
Ava lowered onto the base of her own bed, our knees almost touching. “Are you going to say it or should I?”
“Say what?” I tossed up my eyes. “What the hell are we doing here? Why are we still alive? What’s through that door?”
Ava shot me a bemused look. “Chamber pots are through the door,” she said evenly. “And yes—I meant both of those; Why are we alive, why are we in this room and not under the blade of an executioner?”
“I’m the one who’s been asleep for days, like you said.” I shrugged, eyelids growing heavier by the second. “How the hell should I know?”
I’m not sure I want to know.
“Yes, well,” she huffed. “No one tells me anything.”
I considered her. “How many no ones have you seen?”
“Since we were taken to this room?” Ava sighed and lifted her gaze skywards. “The same maid comes twice every day to empty the chamber pots. And the bossier one—I think she’s in charge—checks on you when my meals are brought.”
I squinted at her. “Jasper?”
The darkness in the gloomy room was making it harder to stay awake, as though it wanted to lull me back to sleep.
Ava shook her head. “Haven’t seen him since he carried you here and dragged me along with him.”
Whether she meant he really did drag her along, I wasn’t sure. But then, I wouldn’t be surprised if he did.
“Bastards,” I muttered. “The lot of them.”
Ava managed a mute nod, and a distant glaze washed over her eyes. A terrible silence pressed between us.
It shattered after a long moment when Ava mumbled, “This is the part where we give each other hope. Plot our escape.”
My grimly set face turned to her.
No hope glittered in my dull green eyes, whose reflection I caught in the dusty shine of the vase on the bedside table. In that warped metal-mirror, I looked just as ashen and murky as everything felt.
There was no hope to be had. None to give.
And no escape possible.
“Do you have any ideas?” I asked, if only to humour her.
Ava said nothing.
With a sound not unlike a combined sigh of defeat and whimper of pain, I forced myself to my feet again and slowly wandered to the thick, grimy curtain that blocked the window.
I pushed it to the side. It was heavier than I expected.
The view from our grime-covered window was unlike what we’d seen on our way to the palace. We faced the smooth curve of the bone-hill that the palace was cut into.
“We’re trapped.” Despair threatened to wreck me. My fingers slid down the side of the curtain until my arm hung at my side, defeat slumping me. “We’re literally between a door and the wall of a solid hill.”
Ava shifted on the bed.
“A locked door,” she amended.
“Curse it,” I mumbled. “Curse it all.”
Ava said nothing.
I let the curtain fall back into place, but not before I caught a glimpse of a crow sweep down the side of the hill, crammed between the palace and the bone-wall. The gap was barely wide enough for the crow to swoop through.
Not even the sight of a crow could bring a smile to my cracked lips or a bud of hope to my withered heart.
I turned my back on it and looked around the room.
I was only grateful for one thing in here. The privacy of the chamber pots.
Back home, we used the chamber pot in the main room when it was too dark or wet to trek to the outhouse in the garden.
I took full advantage of this newfound privacy and dragged myself across the room for the door.
My body didn’t call for the chamber pots, it called for the discretion of the small closet.
I didn’t want Ava to see me cry.
2
I must have been in the privy closet a while. When I was done weeping into my blood-stained and dry hands, I found that two maids were in the room.
Ava loitered around the maid who filled the washtub.
She looked as eager for a bath as I felt. Her burnt-red curls had collected specs of dirt and smears of blood from when Adrik had slapped her, and her cheeks were as tear-streaked as my insides felt.
Ava needed more than a bath to wash away the dirt clinging to her. We both did.
At the foot of my bed, the second maid carefully lowered a pile of boxes, ribboned with silky reds.
Ava and I shared a look; mine wore suspicion, while her honeyed eyes gave an answer to a question I didn’t ask.
‘Worshippers,’ she mouthed across the room.
Worshippers were willing mortals who resided in the Palace of the Gods, choosing to live out their lives in total servitude.
I knew little about the worshipers, but I knew there were many different types.
Some were said to live under vows of silence; monks. And others, like the two maids in our room, existed in total monotony. They were ordinary, and so were their dull lives of servitude.
They didn’t speak a word, not to either of us.
Hell, they didn’t even meet our gazes.
After they left—and locked the door behind them—Ava didn’t give me the chance to argue for first wash. She was already poking her leg into the tepid water and lifting her shabby dress over her arms.
My mouth set and I threw her a scathing look. I was the one wearing blood on my face. Blood was only on her hair.
I sighed and turned my attention on the boxes on the floor. A note rested on top of the pile with a singl
e signature.
Prince Poison.
Kneeling in front of the pile, I carefully peeled off the ribbons and thought fleetingly about what they meant to some. Marriage. Commitment. Availability.
A ribbon tied through hair was a sign of an unmarried girl. One around the wrist of even aniels said, I’m spoken for.
But this was no aniel sending ribboned boxes to my locked room. It was a God, and I doubted it meant a damn thing to him.
“What is it?” Ava called from the tub as I carefully lifted the lid of the first box.
I braced myself, half-expecting poison to spray up at me from a godly device.
Nothing happened.
I peered down at the box and … frowned.
A layer of white and red rose petals covered the gift. I swept some of them to the side gingerly.
“Well?” Ava pressed.
My mouth turned down at the corner. “Boots. A pair of boots and … rose petals.”
Brow still pinched, I plucked out a boot from the box and turned it over in my hands.
Soft pearly-white leather kissed my fingertips. Scarlet laces glittered up the side, embellished with small rubies.
“This can’t be right,” I muttered to myself.
Ava sat up straight in the tub, her chest visible over the copper edge. Her frown matched mine. “Why would he send you boots?”
After a long moment, I stuffed the boot back into the box, then tore through the other two.
Rose petals, stark white and blood red, flew through the room like glitter at a midnight party. They were piled into every box and I had to dig through them to get to the gifts.
In the second box were raisin-purple stockings and one-piece undergarments, woven from the finest and softest lace my fingertips had ever touched.
The final box, wider than my new prison-bed, stole my breath.
I didn’t dare touch any of its contents with my unwashed hands.
First to steal my breath was a black, silver-threaded coat whose hem would end just above the breastbone, but with sleeves reaching beyond the wrist.
The cropped coat sat upon a deep lilac dress with an attached corseted bodice that cut in at the waist. The skirt had no petticoat, but it came in layers and layers of sheer burnt-lilac flows and parted up the leg, all the way to the hip.
My cheeks blazed. Even my dance clothes didn’t bare my skin above the stocking.
Slowly, I faced Ava’s blank stare and lifted the box, angling it at her.
She said it all. “Why?”
Exactly.
Why?
Why bother dressing me in the most stunning pieces I’d ever seen, if he was just going to kill me anyway?
Maybe he wouldn’t kill me today or tomorrow, but the time was coming.
I’m not finished with this one.
He wasn’t finished with me yet.
But it was inevitable that the time of ‘finished’ would come, and my blood would decorate whichever pretty clothes I wore that day.
Water splashed as Ava sank back into the bath. “Seems a waste.”
At least she could claim brazen honesty in the worst of times. Her refined harshness was one of the reasons I kept her as a friend. That, and very few others on Zwayk could stand to be around me. Even my own family.
Our friendship was as strained as any other—not that I had many healthy relationships to compare mine and Ava’s to. But I could always count on Ava.
She never betrayed my secret. A secret I should have never told her all those years ago when we were simple young girls just trying to connect.
Still, I didn’t regret telling Ava about how my mother died, or how it had really been my fault.
Not once did she utter a word of it to another soul. And for it, she was doomed. After all, she was here in this room with me, wasn’t she?
My curse killed my mother.
My curse would kill me.
And it would drag Ava down with it.
3
After Ava left the tub with almost cold water, I made quick work of washing myself. Cold, left-over water always made my skin crawl in the worst way. Stewing in someone else’s body sweat and dirt never seemed all that clean to me.
Maids came again, when I was drying off behind the tattered screen, and brought us dinner. Potatoes and hunks of cured, smoked ham. A meat I’d never had until that night.
It fast became a favourite.
Mostly, I lived on a regular isle diet. Fish, crabs and imported wheat to make bread. I decided that ham would make a fine last meal.
Later, Ava’s snores came sooner than I was happy about.
Her deep sleep left me alone in the room.
For a while, I fingered through the boxes again, reread the Prince’s signature, and stared out at the bone-wall of the hill through the window.
Crows came and went. I watched them for a long while.
Fatigue clung to my insides and tried to drag my eyelids down with it.
I found my way back to the bed in the dark and dropped down, ready to be plunged into a long nightmare. But sleep didn’t come.
For hours, I tossed and turned. I listened to the heavy silence, broken only by Ava’s throaty snores. I waited for some explanation for the boxes, for Jasper to break in and kill me—for something terrible to happen.
Just when exhaustion strengthened its grip on me, and I finally started to fall asleep, the door swung open and in poured three maids to wake me.
4
Those pushy maids forced me into the gifts—that no doubt came with barbed strings attached—sent by Prince Poison.
After Jasper’s insistence on appropriate-wear, I felt more vulnerable than ever as I walked behind my escorts; two silent guards that I suspected were vilas like me and Ava, since they wore woven chains of armour over their plainer uniforms.
Every step I took swished the gauzy skirt of my dress and revealed my right leg; long, and only covered by a sheer lilac stocking to halfway up my thigh. From there up to the lacy hem of my undergarments, where the slit stopped, was bare milky skin.
I didn’t bother trying to cover my leg as we moved through the halls, back to the atrium I first arrived at. I was too busy tugging down the hem of the cropped coat that cut just above my breasts, leaving an abundance of cleavage between it and the beginning of my black bodice.
Sure, the dress itself, complete with all the extras, was undeniably the most gorgeous of any dress I’d ever seen; but on me, it wasn’t right. My ashen hair was brushed out in kinks, free-falling down my back. With an outfit like this, I should have worn braided hair or something a bit more appropriate for a prisoner/unmarried girl wandering around the Palace of the Gods.
Options were limited, though.
It was either this or spit in the face of the Prince’s gifts and cover myself in that old garb from the chest on the ship. I had an inkling that wouldn’t have fared well for me.
As we passed through the grand atrium into another corridor—this was a maze from a story book—I glimpsed more aniels with trading cards and heard whispers coming from little nooks behind columns and from alcoves that I couldn’t see.
A half-hour of being steered through winding hallways and narrow corridors taught me that the boots the Prince had sent me were made from clouds and feathers. They must have been. How else could it be that not a strip of my feet hurt in brand new leather boots from all that walking?
The silent guards dumped me at two creamy doors at the tail of another atrium, far from the vilas corridors. Too far for me to make my own way back.
One of the doors was ajar. A wedge of glittering pale light seeped out from the gap.
With an unsure look at both guards, I reached out for the door and nudged it. In seconds, a burst of light was flooding the atrium, as though the sun itself lived in this magnificent room.
And magnificent it was.
Its arched ceiling was taller than the sails of a ship. Wall to wall, the entire Capital by the Scocie shore could have fit i
n here at least twice. Columns punched up from the solid marble shine of the floor, sheathed in glittering diamonds and ribbons of gold.
I stepped inside.
One of the guards shut the door behind me, but I was too enthralled with the grand room to take much notice.
The walls were lined with giant portraits, all framed in an array of coloured crystal. Portraits of the Gods, I realised.
Tables and shrines were spread out beneath them.
It was a worship room.
I wandered the length of the closest wall to study the portraits.
Some of the Gods I recognised from my mother’s old skripta—books whose pages were filled with old stories of the Gods, legends of their doings and undoings, and some faint sketches of their faces usually done in the Gods’ favoured colours.
In the portraits, the paintings of the Gods were much more precise. And they moved. Just like the trading cards.
From her solid gold frame, a mean-faced God glared down at me. She wore a golden halo, and I fleetingly remembered that mother’s skripta said that the halo was crafted from tanned mortal flesh.
Her cutting look sent me rushing over to the next portrait.
The next one was a heavily worshiped God, Mistress Mad. Offerings overflowed on the shrines beneath the frame, and more than a dozen candles blazed for her.
Mistress Mad gave me an alluring smile that tickled my stomach and sent flurries of want to my heart. I choked on a heavy breath. If that was the effect of just her portrait, I didn’t want to ever learn how seductive she could be in person.
The stories of Mistress Mad had her firmly planted in with the Malis Gods. Driven by cruelty and evil sports. So seductive, she was rumoured to be able to lure anyone to her lips and with a kiss, would send that poor soul spiralling into madness. Victims would tear off their own faces just to offer her pieces of their flesh, on which she would feed.
A shiver seized me, and I scurried over to the next portrait.
My heart still hammered violently against my chest. Still, I slowly came back to myself and all those lingering flames of lust simmered away to nothing.
Warmth replaced the budding panic in me. I gazed up at a kind-faced portrait, whose smile was as wholesome as her eyes were fierce.
Gods and Monsters, Books 1-3: A Dark Gods Bully Romance (Gods and Monsters Box Set) Page 7