Page 18 of Ivory Oath

My voice doesn’t carry. I realize all at once how thirsty I am. When’s the last time I had water?

“I said, ‘Because it is,’” Mikhail repeats. “It is a picture.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about, but the sky is suddenly getting dark overhead. The beautiful day is gone and storm clouds are rolling in. The waves are large swells that rise over my head. The water pulls at Dante’s legs, laps over his knees.

“Dante! Come back!” I go to pull Mikhail’s hands off of my stomach, but my bump is gone. And it’s not hands wrapped around my middle, but chains.

The heat at my back is replaced by an eerie chill. I finally look over my shoulder and see Trofim grinning back at me.

“All of this is a picture,” he hisses. “It’s not real. It was never real.”

I turn frantically towards the water, but Dante is gone. The castle he was working on is underwater and there’s no sign of my son anywhere.

“Dante!” I cry, but my voice is gone now.

So is Dante.

So is Mikhail.

“None of it was real,” Trofim whispers along my spine. He circles in front of me, grinning like a devil. “Except for me.”

He lunges at me and I swing at him.

“For fuck’s sake!” a man complains, swatting my hand away from his face. “I thought she was unconscious.”

The guard in charge of bringing my meals is standing above me, a growing bruise on his cheek from where I hit him.

“She was,” another man insists from the doorway. “I guess she’s awake now. Just in time.”

“What are you doing here?” I try to sit up, but the man grabs my chain and yanks me towards him.

I wait for the painful tug of metal against my wrists, but it doesn’t come.

“Stand up. And if you hit me again, I’ll hit you back,” he warns.

My chains are loose. The cell door is open.

Half of my brain is still locked in the nightmare, but the other half is scrambling to make sense of what’s happening.

“Where are you taking me?”

They don’t answer. They silently lead me out of the room and into the hallway.

I’m not sure why Trofim thinks I need two guards on me. I can’t even stand up on my own, let alone fight someone twice as big as me.

My legs are shaky. The only times I’ve stood up in days have been to waddle to the makeshift toilet in the corner. But even that has become less frequent. Can’t pee if you have no water in your system.

The hallway is dim, but there are other closed doors every so often. How many other people are huddled behind them, too starved and thirsty to fight back?

Suddenly, the man in front of me turns into a large, open room. There are no windows, so I know we’re still underground. A table set up against the wall with a curling iron and blow dryer sitting on top of it. A makeup bag is spilled open on the table.

A woman is standing in the middle of the room, her hands folded in front of her. She can’t be older than eighteen and she looks even smaller than I am.

“You can sit here,” she offers nervously, gesturing to a metal chair in front of her. Her smile falters the longer she holds it.

I don’t move, but the men shove me forward and drop me down in the chair. The cold metal bites through my thin clothes. But nothing is as sharp as the pain that lances through my wrists when the guards re-cuff me to the chair.

“Why?” I ask through a sob.

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