“You know that’s not true. I have money to pay for it.”
“Do you now? I’m not so sure that you do.”
I realized that my bag of money had been lost along the way, more than likely in the van.
“The Feverthorne was for your injured troops too. They were carried to The Club Castle by our men.”
“Is that so?” she laughed again. How could she not be bothered? “Well, it is perhaps just as well that we have you here then. We wouldn’t want them surviving and telling my subjects that they were rescued by Clubs. No, that wouldn’t do at all. In fact, I’m glad you told me this. I might need to send some people over to silence them for good.”
“You are going to send troops to our castle to kill your own men?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Insanity didn’t even begin to cover how crazy she was.
“They will make the ultimate sacrifice and be revered in death for years to come. Our brave troops that fought against the Clubs but succumbed in the end will be rewarded with the highest medal I can award for bravery.”
“I’m sure their grieving families will be really happy with the honor,” I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm
“You, my dear, are going to be staying with me for a while. I don’t know how best to put you to use yet, but I’m sure something will come to me. I might need to use you as a bargaining pawn. Until then, the guards will take you to the dungeons. Guards!”
She shouted out the last, and the same two men appeared.
“Take her downstairs.”
“Do you want me to, you know.”
“No. Don’t kill her. I have a feeling that I will be able to make use of her.”
“You can’t keep me here. If I don’t get home with the Feverthorne tonight, my brother will die.”
“Really? Well that’s one less Club I have to worry about isn’t it?”
She dismissed the guards and me with a wave of her hand.
The same one that grabbed me earlier, the larger of the two, pulled at my arms again. I tried to fight him off, but I knew it was impossible. I wasn’t going to make it easy for him, though. He ended up dragging me the whole way down the stairs until we got to the corridor with all the pictures on the walls. This time, we continued on right to the end of it until we got to a door. The man holding me shouted for the other to unlock the door, which he did by pressing his hand to a metallic plate next to it. I couldn’t understand how it worked, but it did something, as the door seemed to open magically all by itself.
“I’ll take it from here,” the large man said and pulled me through the door. He shut it behind him using his foot and then wrestled me down another much wider corridor. On either side of me were bars, like the cells at the Club County Jail, although these were all empty. Each one had a small dirty bed and not much else. At the last one, he put his hand up to another metal plate and the door opened. He threw me in. The force of it made me fall face down on the bed. I was just about to turn to shout at him when I felt something that made my blood run cold. He was on me. His legs straddling mine just below the hemline of my skirt. One hand pushed my face right into the filthy mattress while his other pulled at the layers of my skirt. I tried to cry out, but my voice was muffled, and I could barely breathe. I managed to turn my head to the side while he was working on the net tights. I took in a gulp of air and screamed loudly.
“No one’s gonna hear you down here, lovely; but by all means, keep on screaming. I like it.”
He laughed, making me want to throw up. The pressure on my head lightened as he took his hand down to join the other. He was obviously having trouble figuring out how to deal with the stretchy, holey tights. I knew that he’d figure out the best course of action soon, and when he did, that would be it. I had to act fast. I squirmed until I was at the edge of the bed and then pushed until the top half of my body was hanging over. The momentum pulled me right off the bed through his legs. I turned quickly so I was facing him, and when he tried to follow me onto the floor, I dug the sharp heels of the shoes as hard as I could into the top of his trousers where his legs met. He screamed in pain and doubled over clutching himself, giving me a chance to stand up and run past him. I couldn’t run very fast in the heels, but I was grateful for them. They’d just saved me from something I just didn’t want to think about.
I ran to the end of the corridor we’d originally come through and put my hand on the plate there. Nothing happened. I pressed down harder and still nothing. I could hear the guard screaming obscenities at me from the cell, and I knew I had to get out. He was really angry, and there was no way he’d let me escape again. The only other way out was the wooden door next to the cell the guard was in. I’d only get through it if I was quick and that wasn’t going to happen in these shoes. I undid the buckles as quickly as I could, deciding they made better weapons than shoes, and ran. I didn’t even turn to look as I passed the cell, but I could see out of the corner of my eye that he was right there as I passed. I looked for the plate that opened the door, but there wasn’t one. Fear ran through me as I gripped the handle and pulled. It opened up to reveal a staircase leading downwards into the dark. I was just about to take the first step when I felt a hand grab my right arm. With all the strength I could muster, I pulled back my left arm and hit him with full force in the head with the heel of the shoe. I missed slightly but still managed to hit him with the platform. He grabbed his head with both hands leaving me able to turn to take the stairs. I thought I’d made it when I felt a shoe kick me right in the backside. The last word I heard as I fell into the inky oblivion was, “bitch.”
10th January
“Star,” I could hear a voice, but blackness surrounded me. I was briefly aware of a pain in my right arm and then, nothing. Later, the pain came again, but this time, it was inside my head, as though a thousand tiny pixies were dancing on my brain. The blackness continued. Sometimes, I was aware of it, and sometimes, there was nothing but dreams, punctuated by bouts of pain. All the while, I was aware of a presence beside me.
“Star!”
I opened my eyes. Light flooded in, and the pixies turned into daggers, all hurtling toward my brain through my eyes. I quickly closed them again.
“Ow!” I brought my right hand up to my head where I felt something. Someone had bandaged me up. My left arm still hurt, and when I tried to move it, I couldn’t because of the pain. I wanted to fall back into the darkness, but the pain had triggered something in my stomach. I turned to the side and threw up. Someone stroked my back.
“Wha...?”
I felt disorientated and didn’t know what question to ask first. I couldn’t think beyond the pain.
I tried opening my eyes again, this time, a little slower. Everything was blurry, and in the background, there was a whooshing noise that could have been in my head.
“Star, are you ok? Can you hear me?”
I turned my head toward the source of the voice and tried to focus. Slowly, the figure turned into something, or someone, I recognized.
“Alice! I thought you were dead!”
“No, when those guards pushed me into the water, I just came out in another room. Look, there are more of us.”
I looked around. It was a large dungeon room, very similar to the one we’d first been brought into originally, and the whooshing sound I’d been hearing was actually the noise of the river passing through. Had this been The Club Kingdom, I could have used the river’s magic properties to sooth my head and arm, but it wasn’t. The water here held no magical properties. There were at least a dozen women down there, most of them looking at me.
“What is this?”
“This is where the queen puts people she doesn’t like.” A woman to the left of me spoke. She had once been dressed nicely, but her clothes were ripped and dirty and her hair a mess. “I heard you pissed her off by trying to buy medicine. That’s a new low, even for her.”
“Yeah, I think it’s because I’m a Club rather than because I was trying to buy medic
ine,” I said and winced. My arm really hurt.
“And a member of the royal family to boot, I hear. I’m really sorry you’re here your highness, but I’d get comfortable if I were you. I’ve been here for weeks, and not a single one of us has had any hint of a trial for our supposed crimes. Here, let me look at that arm. I have a bit of healer training.” I let her hold my arm and tried not to cry out when she bent it.
“It’s not broken, just badly bruised. I’ve done all I can for your head. You are going to have one hell of a headache for a while, but unless you start feeling sick or get dizzy, you should be ok. My name is Cassandra, by the way, but call me Cass.”
“Thanks, Cass.” I brought my arm back towards myself and rubbed it. “How long have the rest of you been here?”
“Three and a half weeks,” said another woman. She wasn’t dressed like a Heart. She wore the laid-back comfortable clothing of a Spade. They had to dress loosely to enable them to shift into their animal form without tearing things. “She got her guards to pull me in when I was on a shopping trip in Urbis. She overheard a shopkeeper tell me that I was prettier than the Queen of Hearts and that was it. I was thrown in the back of a van and brought here. The shopkeeper, too. I don’t know what happened to him, but I was thrown down here.”
“She threw you down here because someone thought you were pretty?” She was pretty too, striking, in fact. She certainly wasn’t a hippo shifter. “How can she do that? It’s hardly against the law to be attractive.”
“She’s the queen. She can do whatever she wants.”
“But she still has to obey the laws set out by The Aces in Urbis.”
“The Aces don’t know what’s going on in the Heartlands. She rules here and will do anything to keep it that way. She’s trying to take over everywhere, but she needs to keep it quiet while she gains power. The Heart District is still letting other suits in because there is nothing the queen can do to stop them, but she controls the Heart Echo. The propaganda they’ve been spouting out has become so ridiculous, it’s a wonder anyone believes a word that rag prints.”
“But they do!” said a woman who had gold tattoos weaving up her arm in pretty patterns.
“Yeah, I know. On my shopping trip, I was spat on, shoved, and called some names that I don’t care to repeat,” replied the first woman. “All because I was a Spade. I only went to Urbis to buy shoes!”
“She threw me down here because I teach Dragonology at Urbis Academy,” said yet another. “Her men came right to my house. A big muscled brute knocked out my husband.”
“He’s kinda cute, though,” a young woman at the back said wistfully.
“He tried to rape me!” I said, finally remembering what had happened when I’d been thrown down the stairs.
Looks of shock appeared on the faces of the women in the room. The one that had said that the guard was cute brought her hands to her mouth.
“Oh, God, Star. How did you escape?” Alice asked, her face full of concern.
“I kicked him in the balls and then bashed him on the head with those heels your mother sold me.”
For a second, Alice just stared at me, but then, she started to laugh. The others joined in and began to cheer.
“Serves the dirty old sod right,” one said.
“How can we get out of here?” I asked once the noise had died down.
“We can’t,” the professor said. “The door is locked, and it’s the only exit.”
“What about the river? Can’t we just swim downstream?” I asked.
“There are bars to let the water through but they aren’t wide enough to get out. We can’t swim upstream because the current is too strong. Some of us have tried, but it’s impossible.”
“I hope you don’t mind me asking this,” I addressed the professor, “but you are a Diamond, right? How come you don’t just use magic to get us all out of here?”
She lifted her arms, and her white sleeves fell down to reveal two silver bracelets on her wrists. They were thick and chunky and had some kind of moving clockwork on the inside under a see-through cover. They were beautiful.
“The guards put these on me before I had a chance to react. I was in bed at the time, and before I had could even wake up enough to know what was going on, my husband had been knocked unconscious, and these were on my wrists.”
“But what do they do?”
“They are magic inhibitors. I can’t do anything with them on. There had been a rumor that The Hearts were making this kind of stuff, but I didn’t know it was possible until I saw them for myself.”
“They’ve managed to stop you doing magic?” I didn’t know many Diamonds, but I thought their magic was infallible.
“Can you stop saying them like we are from another planet?” A woman I’d not seen spoke gruffly from the back. She wasn’t gathered around me like the others; she was sat on the dirty floor doing what I can only describe as weaving straw.
“Alma, you know that Helena is not talking about all Hearts. We have enough us versus them out there without bringing it down here.” The gold tattooed woman said, “I’m a Heart too, most of us here are Hearts. The queen isn’t waging war on the other suits; she’s waging war on everyone who tries to stop her getting power.”
“But she already has power!” I exclaimed. “She’s a queen. How much power can she possibly get?”
“She wants Urbis,” Helena said.
“She already has a quarter of it,” Alice replied.
“Actually, she doesn’t. She has a fifth of it. It’s true that it is split into four, but the inner circle belongs to The Aces.”
“But the Aces control everything in Vanatus,” said Alice, her eyes growing wide.
“Exactly!”
“Lights out!” A voice came down the stairs and everything went black. It was the same guard who had tried to rape me earlier. I wouldn’t forget his voice in a hurry. A click told me that the door had shut behind him as he left.
“What just happened?” I asked. I couldn’t see a thing even though I knew the women were all within feet of me.
“More importantly, how long was he up there listening before he turned the lights off?”
It was the woman with the gold tattoos again.
“I’ll go and check to be sure he’s gone.” I felt her brush past me and then call out. “He’s not here.”
“Can someone tell me what’s going on?” I repeated.
“They turn the lights off at nine every night, but, usually, they bring food first. I guess you showing up and hitting him on the head put him in a bad mood. We didn’t get any food yesterday either.”
“But I only got here today,” I said.
“We got here yesterday, Star. You’ve been unconscious for nearly twenty-four hours.”
I was surprised, but something about hearing I’d been out for so long struck fear into me. I was only when I lay down to sleep that it came back to me what it was.
Ash! I’d not taken the Feverthorne back.
11th January
I spent the night curled up on the hard stone floor between Alice and someone else. When the lights were turned back on, I saw it was the pretty Heart woman.
I sat up slowly and rubbed my eyes with my right hand. My left arm still hurt, but my headache was gone.
The thought of Ash in the hospital bed came back to me. It had haunted my dreams throughout the night. I’d completely failed in what I’d set out to do, and with Ash’s life on the line, the pain I felt was almost too much to bear.
“Are you ok?” Someone whispered nearby, making me jump slightly. I’d been so caught up with thinking about Ash that I’d not noticed anyone else was awake. I looked over to see who had spoken and saw that it was Alice.
“I didn’t get the Feverthorne. It was the only thing that would have saved my brother Ash. They gave him a little over twenty-four hours to live and as I’ve been down here more than twenty-four hours, well....” I left the last part of the sentence unsaid. The part where I wo
uld have said that it was almost a certainty that he had died. I felt the tears well up. In my family, I was known as the emotional one, always crying over hurt animals or when other people were upset. Nanny Wisty had told me I was an empath. My siblings had called me a crybaby. I preferred Nanny’s term. She said it was both a curse and a blessing, and in a world of horrible people, I should be proud that I was who I was. I felt the pain of others, but I also felt their joy. When things were good, it was a nice way to be, but in times like these, it was torture. I’d spent years trying to hide my emotions for fear of ribbing by my older brothers and sisters, but now, I figured that I was allowed to cry. I let the tears flow. It was like a dam had broken, and once I started, I couldn’t stop.
“Hey,” said Alice putting her arms around me. The warmth of her body calmed me as it always had when my mother hugged me after one of my crying fits as a child.
“You don’t know what’s happened to him yet. Sometimes people get over infections by themselves. Or maybe some Feverthorne has been found. Most healers have it in stock.”
“Maybe,” I agreed. I’d completely soaked Alice’s shoulder with my tears and snot. It was not a great look for a Heart, but, at least, she had been wearing a top that covered her shoulders unlike me.
“My sister went up in the hills to look for some.”
“Well, then, I bet she found some and brought it back, and your brother is as right as rain!”
I didn’t tell her that Rose wouldn’t even be back from the mountains yet. What was the point? I ripped off a piece of my dress and blew my nose on it. It was pretty easy to do as the guard had already torn it.
Seeing the look of horror on Alice’s face made me giggle nervously. I’d committed the cardinal sin for Hearts. Thou shall not rip, tear, or in any way deface clothing.
“The guard ripped it first,” I explained, feeling the need to defend myself. I’d forgotten just how hung up Hearts were about their clothes.
“It’s fine,” she gulped. Empath or not, I’d never really understand the relationship between Hearts and their wardrobes.
Three of Clubs (War and Suits Book 2) Page 6