by Raven Dark
“And yet here you are.” Pretty Boy grinned.
I snorted; even I picked up on Hawk’s irritation as his back tensed.
The Captain of the Guard’s mouth pulled down and his fist tightened on the handlebar of his bike. He slapped the visor on his helmet down and it fell with a sharp snap. Then he jumped on the throttle of his bike, making it growl to life. He gave the signal for us to follow him, making a circular motion with his finger in the air.
We rode out of the desert down toward the harbor on the western end of Zone 2. Old asphalt roads snaked across the landscape, slicing between high cliff faces and towers of red clay. Pretty Boy rode behind Hawk’s right shoulder, me behind PB’s left, in the proper order. Our men followed.
Hope rode me high, and as the wind blew hard in my face, I swore I smelled our woman’s scent on the air, sweet apple shampoo, mixed with the innocence and warmth that was her. An image of her rose in my mind, perfect lavender hair falling down her slender back, the sweet curve of her delicious ass filling my vision. My cock turned to iron.
Our Setora. We had hours to reach that ship or we’d lose her forever. And whether Hawk acknowledged it or not, he needed her every bit as much as us. Him and Sheriff, both.
Guilt ate at me then, the same foreign gnawing sensation I had before this whole shit storm started. I’d never met a woman like Petal, never craved something so innocent in all my life. And even though I knew she was just a slave, that night of the barbeque felt like she was mine, all of her. That she wanted to be there, not that she had no choice. And then I’d had to fuck it up the next day. The day we left. It was like I couldn’t stop myself. I felt like a fool, and there was nothing in the world I hated more than feeling like a dumbass. But that morning, when I got dressed for work, I looked at the bed where she lay, curled up and soft. Warm and heavenly. Never would a woman like her want me for me.
So I buckled up and did what I did best—I shoved it all away. I knew it hurt her that morning. I knew she didn’t know what she’d done wrong, but fuck if I was going to help her figure it out. And when she asked about Hawk taking her to breakfast…that helped settle things in my mind. Of course she’d prefer him over me.
My thoughts went on and on as we rode through the desert night. The longer she’d been gone, the less fucks I gave about my own damn pride. We were going to get our woman back, and I didn’t care if she wanted me, or us, she’d never leave our sight again. And Maker help anyone who hurt her.
Blood would flow tonight, no doubt about it. And I was looking forward to it.
One day, women were sacred.
Then man came upon the world.
An old world saying
Holding onto anger only weakens the heart and poisons the soul.
Cron Horvek, First Vol of Crite
Chapter 2
Allegiance
It’s funny how when you’re scared, an hour can feel like days.
After twelve years living with Damien’s people, I’d learned fast that fear had a way of eating at your sense of time. During long hours sitting in a hole dug out in the ground, with hot sun burning down without food or water, time always inched by like water drip-drip-dripping through a pin-prick hole in a leather skin.
Lying on my stomach in a cramped cell with eight other slaves, I tried to shut out the increasing pain that refused to let me sleep. Not that I could have slept right then. Not here.
With only four cold cement walls surrounding me, and an equally cold, rough cement floor, there was no window or outside light to tell me how long I’d been here, but I had a feeling it was nearly a full day. These men who worked for Talak Barabas had sent guards in twice to check on us, and one of them had bragged about the delicious dinner he and his comrades were having, while none of us had been given any food.
Yes, it had to have been at least a day. Just long enough that the burn on my back, untreated and with the dressing unchanged, had started to throb with the sting of infection. I’d laid on my stomach to avoid rubbing it against anything, but it didn’t help.
The slaves talked quietly among themselves. The lowered, whispered voices, coupled with the hot, darkened room, brought back a memory I’d sooner have forgotten.
My mother had told me she named me Setora on the fifth day after my birth. Early on, I’d started to cry endlessly in the afternoons. For weeks, she searched for the cause but found nothing to explain my constant wailing. Until she pulled back the curtains in the main room one day, and I stopped. Sure enough, mother said, the very next day, my wails commenced, stopping when the curtains were opened. From then on, she named me Setora which, in one of those elder tongues still found in the small village where I was born, meant Deliverer of Light.
My mother often told me that story as I grew older. I’d always had a knack for trouble, she said, a fault which, according to her, could always be traced back to my deep-seated need to make right one injustice or another. Like my father, who’d died two years ago by then, I had a knack for finding the darkness in the world, and the need to shine a light on said darkness called to me.
But as I grew older, that same need to change the world grew along with me, and the voice that compelled me to act grew louder. Listening to that voice always led to the same result—my being disciplined. A smack on the behind, a lecture on not listening to my elders, or a ban from going to certain places on my own. But nothing deterred me for long. If it wasn’t my insatiable curiosity drawing me to trouble’s door, it was that voice, calling me to make things right again, to shine that light on secrets evil sought to hide.
Unsurprisingly, it was my need to make things right that led to my being outside Hell’s Burning so many years ago, where those road warriors found me.
My mother had gone to visit a merchant in the city, leaving me alone with my older brother, Dax. I was six at the time. A new girl had moved into the hut across from us. For weeks, the sounds of crying and yelling drifted out of that house. On more than one occasion, I heard dishes being smashed, saw them flying out the open window and shattering in the yard. Then one day, I heard the girl screaming in what sounded like terror.
My mother was still away, and Dax insisted on not interfering, so I stood at my window, waiting for Mother to return, looking for the moon-kissed lavender-haired woman to come walking out of the desert.
Hours passed, and Mother didn’t return. Then, late that evening, I saw a girl running out of that house across the street. It was the same girl I’d seen moving in the other day. Before she got ten steps from the door, a big man grabbed her by the hair and pulled her back in. I remember my heart had almost beat itself out of my chest. I stood there, frozen in fear. I’d run to tell Dax what I’d seen, but he’d gone out with his friends.
The girl’s screams drifted out of the house, helpless and filled with pain. Anger overrode my own fear, and that voice, the voice that always got me in trouble, screamed at me to act.
The next thing I knew, there I was, climbing into that girl’s window, the one in the east side of the hut. I poked at her leg, finding her crying on a thin dirty mattress on the dirt floor. Her wrists were bound and bruised. I untied her, took her hand, and together we made our way out of that awful house. We ran like the wind. Through the village, deep into the desert mountains.
It must have been almost midnight when we finally stopped.
“Now what do we do?” the older girl asked. She couldn’t have been more than three years older than me. Expecting her captors to pursue us, we’d run blindly into the mountains, only to realize there was nothing out here and we’d brought nothing with us.
“I guess we go back to the village. You can stay with me and my brother until my mother gets back.”
We were making our way back toward the village when a lantern came out of nowhere, followed by the shuffle of boots. The shadows of two men appeared, men whom, I’d later learn, belonged to the Death Blades. One of them grabbed me, and I saw the other throw a sack over the other girl’s head. The man
holding me threw a sack over mine, and his hard palm covered my mouth.
We’d been taken.
Before my mother showed up to rescue me from the Death Blades two days later, I met other girls, some older, some younger. We were kept in a dank, dark room in the basement of that house. I remember tepid, bland stew in metal ladles. The cloying smell of sticky buckets to urinate in. Hot strips of sheets for covering. And crying. Always the crying.
I always wondered at the turn my life would have taken if Mother and Dax hadn’t found me. My mother had paid to get me back, but I never had a chance to find out the details. I remember Dax fighting with one of the men from that house, remember hearing him yelling in anger, and then he and Mother spiriting me away. I remembered the Death Blades finding us again, and then my mother and brother being taken. Over the years, some of my memories of that day had faded, leaving only fragments. Except the road warriors taking my family away. That, I would always remember.
Now, years later, as I looked around the cell in the warehouse Talak’s men had taken me to, I couldn’t help but remember that time back with those girls. I’d found myself in far too similar a situation here—a dark place, a place where, yet again, that voice inside me rang out, telling me to shine my light into the darkness.
My instincts screamed at me, like they did that day with the girl across the street, to act. To fix this. That it didn’t matter that one lone, defenseless person couldn’t possibly have any power to save anyone, let alone herself. Instinct wasn’t logical, and it shouted too loudly to be ignored.
It had been many years since I’ve felt such a need clawing at me, bothering me like an itch. It had come back the day of the fire in the Grotto. I didn’t think, I acted. Even then, the result had been the same. I’d been punished.
And now here I was, with that instinct pulling at me all over again.
Maker, what do you want from me?
If it is to end here, I will act. I will not fight it anymore. I will bring in the light.
I shifted, and the frock I wore chafed against my bare ass, yanking me back into the present and reawakening a different kind of sting there. The sting from Sheriff’s belt.
I winced. An absurd loneliness washed over me. Why I should miss my masters was beyond me, but especially Sheriff. He hated me. Still, the awareness of reality sunk in with a painful certainty. I’d just started to feel connected to those men, and now I’d never see them again.
The heavy steel door to the dungeon opened with a loud whine. Quickly but carefully, I rolled over and sat up, squinting in the low light from the torches that burned on the walls to either side of the door.
“Get in there.” One of the warriors who worked for Talak shoved a young slave with a tousle of blond hair into the room, ignoring her cry of fright. He spun her around and unfurled his whip. Another warrior barged in and ripped the back of her frock open, then backed up.
Instinct called me to rush over, to put myself between the small, fragile-looking girl and the whip. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen, and I’d never seen such a look of terror on a girl face. It took everything in me to stay where I was, motionless. If I interfered, I’d make things worse for her, and then land myself under the whip. I had to choose my battles.
The warrior’s whip came down, a harsh lash that cut the air. The slave cried out and tried to crawl away toward me, but the second man kicked her in the back and she cried out again, balling herself up small.
The whipmaster coiled his weapon at his hip and hauled her to her feet, putting his dark, heavily-bearded face in hers. “Try to escape again, and we’ll make you bleed next time.” His accent made his words sound even more threatening. He shoved her away from him and she fell to the floor. He nodded over to me. “Violet Eyes. Tie her up.”
I closed my eyes, took a calming breath, and nodded. Easy for him to tie her up himself, but I knew why he wanted me to do it. I was intended to be his leader’s Head of Slaves, and I needed to prove my worthiness of the role. Also, he probably wanted me to solidify my role among the slaves as a woman to be feared, the typical cruel Violet who kept others in line in order to spare herself the whip.
I was about to cross the small, steel-walled room where myself and the eight other slaves were held, but he marched over, pulled a knife and put it to my throat.
“You do right, Purple One. She twitches wrong, and I hold you responsible, yes?”
His use of my language might have been rusty, but I got the message. If the slave tried to escape, it would be seen as my fault, and I’d pay for it.
“I understand, sir.” Somehow my voice only shook a little as I took the ropes he held out to me.
He gave a curt nod and went to the door but kept his eyes on me.
Making my way across the room, not for the first time, I was glad of the years of training Damien had paid for, among other things, teaching me how to remain calm and diplomatic in the worst situations.
I knelt in front of the slave, trying to give her the best look of reassurance I could without the Critian warrior noticing. “Give me your hands.”
Trembling, the blonde girl with a mess of uncombed hair and a dirt-stained face held out her hands. I wrapped the rope around her already bruised wrists, forcing down the instinct to be tender and ignoring her wince. If I was too nice with her, the warrior might take over, and I’d never be allowed near the slaves again. Plus, if she escaped again, the other slaves and I might all find ourselves tied up. Still…
“Sir.” I made myself look at him. He gave an impatient grunt. “She’s filthy. Please let me clean her up.”
“A little dirt won’t hurt you, slave.” He opened the steel door, and his partner stepped out, waiting for him. “Worry about yourself, Purple One.”
“Sir?”
When he whipped around to me, I pushed down my fear.
“If those whip welts get infected, you’ll be dealing with sick product. That will cost money, and probably anger Vol Talak. What can it hurt to let me wash her up?”
The warrior gave an angry sigh and then snarled something in Critian to his partner who disappeared down the hall. I heard water splash in the distance. He came back with a pail and cloths, setting them down near me.
“You wash,” the whipmaster snapped. “Hurry. And no funny business, or you taste the whip next.”
A quick glance at the pail almost made me wonder if it was better not to bother. The cloth looked clean, but it was draped over the edge of a pail that looked like it hadn’t been washed in days. The water had an alarmingly cloudy look. I gave the warriors a nod. They stepped out, then the heavy steel door squealed on rusted hinges and banged shut.
“You aren’t what I expected,” one of the slaves said from over in a corner as I tied up the one in front of me, then bound her ankles.
“Oh, no?” I pretended not to know exactly what she meant.
“You’re supposed to be mean,” the blond in front of me said.
I was about to answer but stopped when male voices drifted from the other side of the door to the holding cell.
“We need to get moving,” someone said in in my own tongue. “We’ve been here too long; he will find us.”
“Vale doesn’t scare me. We were told to wait here for Vol Talak, so we wait,” the whipmaster replied.
Vale. They were talking about Damien, my former master. My mind raced while I started to wipe away the blood from the blond slave’s back, cleaning her cuts as best I could. My former master was still looking for me.
“Vol Talak hasn’t paid for her,” the other warrior said. “If Vale finds her here, he’ll have us all killed, including Vol Talak.”
“You have your orders, Crom. Go play with one of your whores and relax…”
The voices faded until I heard no more of what they’d said.
So, Pretty Boy and Steel had stolen me before Talak Barabas had been able to pay Damien for me. If Talak was taking me away now, he was stealing me from Damien. The one called Crom was
right—my former master would slaughter them. My gut twisted at the thought of living under Damien’s thumb again. The longer Talak’s men remained in port, the more likely he would find us.
I shook my head. Maker, I was getting good and tired of these big strong lords fighting over me, of being a pawn in their money games. I tried to focus on my task, cleaning up the woman sitting on the floor in front of me, but my mind wouldn’t stop spinning.
At least with Pretty Boy, Steel, and Hawk as masters, I’d found a glimmer of happiness, of freedom and connection slaves only dreamed of.
Over the days I’d been with them, days that felt like months, I’d thought they’d grown to see me as more than a slave. Well, Hawk had, at least. Things were so complicated with the others, I wasn’t at all sure about them. And they were the Dark Legion, ruthless pirates known the world over for their lack of mercy or compassion. I had seen that there was more to them than the stories, but none of that mattered now. I would never see them again. It wasn’t like they’d travel all the way to Crite to rescue me, that cold and desolate land that I’d be taken to soon.
Once I’d cleaned the girl up as best I could, I had the others wash their faces, then put the pail by the door. I sat on the floor in a corner and winced at the sting on my ass. I tried to think of what I’d say to Talak, tried not to think of what he might do to me once he saw me.
I knew little of the port these men had taken me to, and they’d kept me blindfolded the whole way here, so I had no clue how to get back to the Grotto on my own. Escape wasn’t an option right now. The best I could do was wait for Talak to show up and hope for a plan.
How long I’d been sitting there waiting, I didn’t know, but when the door squealed open, I lifted my head, expecting the guard from earlier to step into the room.