Page 595 of Rage

“Please, don’t insult me. Iboughtyour chips in the first place, and you know I hardly have need of money,” he said.

My skin crawled. I’d never opened my legs for a mark and I wasn’t about to start. With how this conversation was going though, I guessed he might ask for it. If he did, the game would be up. I would have to get messy. And that would delay me more than I wanted.

I’d encountered so many terrible men in this town, some easier to correct than others. A few hissed words while their small cocks went soft underneath the blade of my knife and I would get a promise that they’d leave town and never be seen again.

But men like Richard…I found them irredeemable. I saw them as depraved monsters who deserved to have their throats sliced open. I acted as judge, jury and executioner. An unwilling witness to his many crimes. As much as I relished the thought of his eyes going glassy beneath my blade, as much as I longed todo it, I knew that if I had to kill him today, it would get messy and I’d have to slow down. Lay low for a while.

The longer I had to wait, the more women would get hurt.

I gave him a stony look and he heaved his own long-suffering sigh.

“Briar, what kind of man do you take me for?” he asked. “I’m a gentleman. I only want a kiss on the cheek.”

I doubted that.

“Really?” I said. “Just a kiss on the cheek? Doesn’t seem your speed.” I hoped the derision in my words remained suitably hidden.

“With you, a kiss on the cheek will be like being touched by a woman for the first time all over again.”

Disgusting. He always acted so crass.

“Well fine. A kiss on the cheek, then. But I don’t know what you could do to prove this so-called magic of yours.” I picked up the cards that slid across the table to me, checking my hand and setting it face down on the table again before throwing another handful of chips on the pile. “You better not try to pull a coin out from behind my ear.”

“Oh no, my magic trick is much more impressive,” he said, his smile sharpening. “It’s a sort of…hmm…clairvoyance, or perhaps a clairsentience. An innateknowing.”

The other gamblers at the table called their hands and left the table as I looked at Richard. “Well,” I prompted. “Go on. What do you know?”

His smile faded and his eyes went flinty. “I know that you’re the only high-end whore with her maidenhead still intact,” he said.

I froze. I’d not expected that answer. Not at all. My poker face fell and my stomach clenched with nausea and my head pounded.

“Well, Briar?” he said as he drew closer. “Where the fuck is my kiss?”

I woke up with a start, disoriented.

I had no recollection of falling asleep, and falling headfirst into a vivid memory while I slept was doing nothing for my clarity. I still held Cassandre to my breast, only we both leaned back against the stone wall of the cave we’d been locked up in.

Groaning with discomfort, I shifted my shoulders slightly. The slight movement made my leg explode with the sensation of pins and needles.

“Cassie,” I said, jostling her gently. “I need to move.”

She didn’t rouse. She didn’t even move. I almost panicked, thinking she’d caught her death from the cold, but her body warmth enveloped me as she breathed slowly, steadily.

In fact, the entire cave was near silent except for the steady breaths of the other slumbering captives.

Had we all been drugged again? Had we been moved?

My eyes were no more adjusted to the darkness than they were before, but I strained them anyway, trying to see anything; an outline, a slice of dim lighting. Something coalesced as I watched, a sort of darkness.

No. That wasn’t right. We sat in darkness. This was…nothing, the void, the abyss. Not so much darkness as the embodiment of absence.

“Cassie, Cassie–wake up.” My heart pounded against my sternum so hard it surprised me when it didn’t wake the girl sleeping against me. “Diana. Atreya. Bella!” Each call that went unanswered became louder, more panicked.

“They will not wake,” the nothing said.

“What did you do to them,” I asked.

“They slumber. They rest.”

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