Page 7 of Scourged

Her instincts had led her so astray. She couldn’t equate the man who’d once been unable to tear his attention from her to this stranger with a strangling, empty ambivalence.

With a heavy swallow, desperate for moisture in her parched, burning mouth, Mariah slowly turned her attention back to Shawth. “What, exactly, do you mean?”

Shawth hmphed, taking another step down the dais, pulling one hand from his pocket to scratch his scraggly beard. “It’s quite simple. Give me what I want, and I will set you free.”

“And what is it you want?” she asked, voice quiet and withdrawn. She held her wariness and alarm close to herpounding heart and fixed a mask of boredom on her face. Her blood still dripped down her forearm to the black marble beneath her, the sound like a pounding drum to the fraying fear clawing down her limbs.

Shawth’s grin widened, taking the last few steps. He now stood so close that she had to tilt her head back to meet his stare. The smell of his too-strong cologne burned her throat and turned her stomach as she held his bitter sneer.

“Yourpower, Mariah. The power of the queen. Give me that, and I will set you free.”

Everything inside Mariah stood still. Her insides boiled and froze in a constant, repetitive loop of anger and fear and thrashing distress. Her hands shook, and even her magic, though locked far from her reach, snarled at Shawth as it fought against its chains.

Mariah took another grimacing swallow and gritted her teeth. “I … I can’t do that.”

“Of course you can! For whatever reason, the Goddess gave that power to you, and you can just as easily give it back.” Shawth slowly knelt, lowering his face to hers. The barest hint of power-drunk madness swam behind his eyes, an insanity brought on after too many years of exerting ultimate control over more deserving people. “Abdicate your power and your magic, and I will set you free. I promise it.”

Mariah’s gagged magic clawed desperately against the walls of its prison, scrounging for purchase, a caged silver-gold beast thrashing against the lord’s so-called offer. She leaned into it, desperate for even the barest of connections to the piece of her that had been silent and missing for too long, using the anger of her dampened magic and the fuel it fed her battered soul.

“Fuck. No.” Her voice was laced with everything she couldn’t do with her body, all the hate and anger and anguish and terrorand heartbreak and betrayal she’d dwelled on those past six weeks.

These men could take everything from her: her home, her magic, her dignity. But they could never have her power. Could never take something so ingrained in her soul, it wasn’t even hers to give. She didn’t know if what Shawth asked was possible, and she had no inkling of desire to find out.

Even with her firm, confident resolve flushing her skin with her racing heartbeat … she did not miss the flicker of excitement warming Shawth’s gaze at her defiance. As if he was expecting, evenhoping, for this response from her. There was no anger or fear, only a subtle glee that would’ve terrified her if she hadn’t been so fuckingangry.

Shawth exhaled a dramatic mockery of a sigh, leaning back on his heels and rising to his feet. He stared at her for a few more beats before turning on his heel and returning to his makeshift throne. “What a shame.”

On the dais, Laurent’s jaw was tight, eyes blazing. Flames, a gift of elemental magic he didn’t deserve, danced on his fingertips and in his pupils. Shawth gave him the barest of nods that cooled a portion of Mariah’s rage, icy fear beginning to prickle once again beneath her skin.

Laurent’s face spread into a shallow grin, straightening the lapels of his jacket. He quelled his flames and walked down the steps, heading to an alcove beside the galleries. He bent down, retrieving an object, then strode back and halted beside his son.

“Andrian,” Lord Laurent said, a cruel smile twisting his voice. “Why don’t you show our guest a little …hospitality?Something that might shift her spirits in our favor.”

The guards behind Mariah gripped her shoulders and upper arms, locking her behind them and pinning her knees to the marble floors, her battered skin screaming in protest.

She struggled weakly in their grasp, twisting just enough to see Laurent and Andrian, her fingertips digging into the skin of her thighs beneath her tattered leggings. Everything in her froze in abject, muted horror as she saw what Laurent pushed into his son’s hands.

It was a whip. A coiled length of leather, its end tipped in something dark and glittering.

Mariah’s limbs slackened, and she sagged against the guards. True dread, oily and vile, now crawled through her like sludge.

“Ellis, Konnor, if you would please make our guest comfortable,” Shawth said, his tone conversational, as if merely discussing the weather.

Mariah heard a blade slide free from its sheath, then felt the bite of cool metal against the small of her back.

But it was not there to cut her. No, with an easy slice upward, the sharp edge only slashed through the fabric of her ragged sweater before snapping the elastic of her underclothes. In a matter of seconds, the two men pinned her between them, Shawth’s greedy, watery eyes drinking in her exposed chest as her clothes dropped to the ground. Jeering and raucous calls filled the throne room.

“The whore queen!”

“On her knees, where she belongs!”

Shawth raised his hand, and the cheers fell silent.

“Seven lashes should be sufficient, Andrian. We only need to change her mind. Break her spirit, just a touch.”

The command was far away from Mariah’s ears. At the sight of the whip, at the shredding of her clothes, and the calls from the crowd, she began pulling back all of herself, retreating into the deepest and darkest parts of her soul. She wanted to find those threads of silver and gold, to cower with them away from what awaited her, but she still only felt that familiar place within her, walled in by vile black and gold stone.

Mariah simply laid her mind against that wall, curling into it, and waited for the pain to come.

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