The Duty and the Gone (The Fertility Plague Book 1)

by Claire Vale

  Silence.

  Seriously, Roman? Your business couldn’t have waited?

  A nerve twitched in my small toe, an impatient, irritable cramp. He hadn’t forgotten I was stuck in here without an inch to spare, breathing stale air and gnawing on discomfort. Of course he hadn’t.

  One minute stretched into five.

  If this was his idea of teaching me a lesson, it wasn’t funny.

  Five minutes stretched into ten, twenty, I was starting to lose track of time.

  It was the opposite of funny.

  The truck bed shuddered. Had someone climbed on? They wouldn’t search a warden’s truck, surely? They wouldn’t dare.

  I heard a metallic scratching…light!

  Blood rushed my brain, my heartbeat froze, my insides turned to jelly as I looked up at a man I didn’t know, not Roman, a grizzly guard with grey hair and a grey beard and watery blue eyes.

  He held a hand out to me. “Come on out, young lady.”

  Tell him who you are.

  Make him fetch Roman.

  My throat closed, thick with dread and regret. Roman couldn’t help me now. This wasn’t curfew I’d broken. Loose words I’d spoken. I was caught, stowed away on a truck that had just arrived from outside the wall.

  “Don’t make this more difficult on yourself than it has to be,” the guard said, scowling down on me from beneath bushy, arrowed brows.

  “Okay,” I said shakily, breathed a breath for strength, another breath for courage before I could manage to uncurl my body from its hiding spot.

  As soon as I was upright, the guard’s hand shot out, hard, unsympathetic fingers cuffing me by the arm, as if he thought I might try to make a run for it. To where? The wall loomed directly in front of me, more than twice my height and capped with electric fencing. The gate we’d driven through was solid iron and just as high, and firmly shut.

  The guard had let down the back of the truck and he led me off that end, passed me down into the cuff-hands of another two guards waiting there.

  I turned into a slow walk between the new guards, my body still struggling, my mind still dazed from the rude discovery of my hiding spot, and maybe that’s why a thread of joy skipped through me when my eyes landed on Roman. Everything will be alright. He’s strong enough for the both of us, always has been. He’ll stand between me and harm, always and forever.

  One second.

  Maybe two.

  That’s how long it takes, apparently, for reality to kick in. For the eye to see what it sees and not what the heart tells it to.

  Roman was standing right there, not between me and the guards who had me by both arms, but neck-and-neck beside a senior guard decorated with officer stripes.

  Who’s the officer on duty?

  He watched, arms folded, his face a mask made of stone and cast in blackened sulphur.

  Sergeant Mackintosh.

  I need to see him.

  He had orchestrated this.

  Roman had turned me in.

  I looked him in the eye. I trusted you.

  He looked straight back at me. Said nothing with his words or his eyes or any expression I could interpret.

  I’d only just learnt that my world had been built on a lie, but it had been my world, it had held me up even if the ground sometimes shook.

  Now that world shattered beneath my feet and it was Roman, my husband, the man I’d seriously started falling hard for, who’d wielded the hammer for the final blow.

  My heart cracked down the middle.

  It seemed like—felt like—a million bits of me spilled out and as I walked past him, blinking away a useless, pathetic tear, I knew I’d never get them back.

  From the Author

  Thank you, Dear Reader.

  This is the first book in my series The Fertility Plague and I hope you enjoyed it and are eagerly awaiting the next instalment, The Sin and the Truth.

  Reviews help other readers find books and I’m always incredibly grateful, even for just a few words. Reviews are so important to authors, opening up promotional opportunities and making our books more visible in the online stores.