Page 1 of A Guard and a Gardener

Chapter One

“Does that hurt?”

The words, whispered in my ear by someone I couldn’t see, made me go rigid.

But my limbs were bound tight, as they had been since I’d first been brought here, leather straps lashing my arms, neck, and ankles to tall posts driven into the ground until I could barely move an inch. I’d broken one of the restraints the second day, pulling against the cord that bit into my wrist until it snapped, but my captors had responded quickly and viciously, beating every inch of my body until darkness took hold and I’d woken secured twice as effectively as before.

“You’re a tough one, big guy.” The whisper was back, and fuck, I’d hoped to never hear that voice again. “I can always get my guests to scream, but you’re holding out on me, aren’t you?”

I didn’t respond.

Ademar would have backtalked them until they took his tongue. Luis would have cracked jokes. Elías, I expected, would have delivered his flattest, most unimpressed look until they withered under his stare.

I favoured silence. Pretending my captors didn’t exist, that I wasn’t here but was back with Ren and Mathias in that hut in the woods, that was how I was getting through this. Feeling the reassuring hilt of my sword under my fingertips, the grip wornand familiar, as I kept one wary eye on the door and the other on the two boys curled up together on the ratty bed. The way my prince’s fingers entwined with Mathias’; how the northerner pressed his face into Ren’s hair in turn. Sleepy little gestures of effortless affection between them that warmed my heart and confirmed that watching over them was not a chore, but the greatest honour I could have received.

“Let’s try this again.”

Vicious pain blossomed through the side of my head, sending flashes of light and colour across my vision. Through the agony and disorientation, I saw the hammer that had just been used to hit me drop to the ground at my feet, soil coating the blood in a sticky, gruesome mess.

“You’re going to die from that, big guy.” The tone, as always, was conversational. “It’s taken a nice chunk out of your skull, all that shattered bone and brain matter, and you really don’t have long left. Want to tell me where that prince of yours is?”

I couldn’t think of anything I wantedless.

The inside of the basement I was being kept in swam before my eyes, refusing to stay still.

“We’re going to find him, you know,” the man said as nausea made my stomach roil, the pain bitter and horrid. But it wasn’t as foul as the words that rolled from my torturer’s mouth as he sank into the part of the endless cycle I hated the most.

The taunts. The sick promises.

“And when we do find little Renato, we’ll be sure to make you watch as we cut out his eyes. As we fuck his pretty corpse. We’ll send him to the afterlife with your name carved into his fucking heart so Dios will know who was responsible.”

He leaned in to whisper his next words in my ear.

“Tell us where he is, big guy, and I can promise you both quick deaths instead.”

Never.

The thought...theoath, echoed around my head and darkness began to take me.

As I wondered if this was it at last, the day I was finally allowed to die, the flicker of blue and red sparks flashed in the gloom. The rebel healer sighed as he restored my body whole, patting my shoulder as if in reassurance.

“Very well.” He bent to pick up the bloody hammer. “Let’s try that again.”

A grunt pushed its way between my lips, a scream threatening to follow on its heels, but something clamped my mouth shut before it could erupt. I struggled against the gag I didn’t remember them putting on me, feeling warm flesh on my lips and-

“Jiron!”

No. They’d never known my name: that was something else I’d refused to give them. How did...

“Jiron, you daft bastard. Come back to us!”

The tension left my body as I finally recognised the voice, the familiar scent of baked goods and seed oil helping me to place it through the horror of the nightmare.

Luis.

I forced my eyes open, snapping them to the other man’s. Luis had a knee tucked onto what little space was left at the side of my cot, pressing a hand firmly over my mouth. He was one ofthe few people who could hold me down with nothing but his own strength, and only because my limbs had become uselessly tangled in the thin, sweat-soaked bedsheet.

“You’re in the palace,” he told me, reciting the usual assurances. “The pricks who did all that to you are dead. Ren is safe.”

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