Page 63 of A Steeping of Blood
Then the men pulled the crate out from beneath her feet.
A scream tore from Flick’s lungs. She gasped for air as the ground disappeared. Her shoulders shrieked. The metal cuffs dug into the bones of her wrist, the knobby bones of her thumbs, her skin. She was suddenly lightheaded, and she wished she could hold back the tremors that ran through her, to stop herself from shaking and her wrists from chafing.
She was hanging.
Please, was what she wanted to say.Stop this, she wanted to beg.I can’t take it, she wanted to admit. But Flick refused to beg even as she whimpered.
The Ram tilted her head. “Such steel, Felicity. And for what? For a pair of orphans who haven’t even come to your aid.”
“Better an orphan than an unwanted child,” Flick said, her voice strained.
She had been wanted, once. She wasn’t a child the Ram birthed; she was chosen by her. Adopted, for some reason, before the Ram decided she didn’t quite care anymore.
The men likely assumed she was prattling nonsense because of the pain. Flick didn’t know if she meant the words, really, but she felt them just then. She wished, more than anything, that the Ram had never been her mother, and when she looked into those blue eyes now, framed with gilded metal, she saw that it didn’t matter whether Flick believed it.
Her mother did.
And the satisfaction that washed through Flick, from her stretched and aching arms to the tips of her toes, was insurmountable. The Ram turned on her heel and stormed from the room. The men looked at one another and a pair of them left while the other two remained, taking up position by the door.
Tears streamed down Flick’s face, hot and angry and spurred by the pain. No one was coming to save her. What would Arthie do, or Jin? What would—why could she not do anything herself? Why did she need them? She craned her neck up as much as she could. The hook suspended from the ceiling didn’t snap closed. It didn’t have a lock or closure. It was open, ending with a sharp curve, made for easy use.And you only need the manacle chain link to jump the hook, love, Jin said in her head.
That was exactly what she needed. If only she still had that crate beneath her to use as a launchpad to leap off. It would be a lot easier to throw up her arms and get the chain over the hook then.
You wouldn’t be in this situation either, came Arthie’s words in her thoughts.
And Flick realized: Arthie’s and Jin’s voices in her head weren’t memories or things they’d said to her before. They were Flick’s own thoughts. She wasn’t incapable of functioning without them. She’dlearnedfrom them. She’d taken the best of Arthie’s and Jin’s cunning and strength and made herself better in turn.
Having their voices in her head made her a little less lonely, really, and there couldn’t possibly be anything wrong with that.
She tried shuffling the chains as best as she could through the pain numbing every inch of her form, until her arms quivered even more and she couldn’t muster the strength to keep craning her neck upward.
The men were watching her.
“Are you going to just stand there and stare?” she snapped.
They turned their attention to the floor.
Flick blubbered. Her arms were going numb now. She could barely feel her thumbs. The Ram had said she wouldn’t be able to use her hands all too well if she was ever freed, and Flick sincerely hoped that wasn’t true.
Another sob lodged in her throat. She wanted to sink into a ball on the floor and weep. No, she wanted to thrash; she wanted to scream.
And perhaps because she was alone and there was no one to stop her, or because she was angry and hurting and had come to so many realizations at once, she did just that. Flick screamed.
It wasn’t smart, she knew deep down inside. She should have reserved whatever energy she had left, but she couldn’t.
Flick screamed again, a sound unlike any other she’d made before. She thrashed, the clinking chains a melody to her voice, and then she slumped forward, empty of life and breath, and everything went dark.
20JIN
Jin hurried behind Arthie into the Horned Guard carriage and closed the door behind them, leaving the unconscious captain behind. They had little time to waste. The carriage dipped to one side and straightened as Matteo got in the driver’s seat outside, quickly joining the line of carriages waiting to pass into the fort.
Jin was numb. Arthie had told him nothing changed.
The plan was still the same, because she had planned for this.
Jin wanted to lash out and say she was wrong. That they—hehadn’t seen this coming, butmy parents could be on the wrong sidehad been a prevalent thought since he’d begun his search anew. Perhaps they were being blackmailed or were biding time, but did that make their actions any different? He felt the sharp points of his fangs—that he still hadn’t mastered retracting at will—and remembered his first thought: If he had changed, how could he have expected them not to?
Switching sides isn’t a change, he told himself. It was a tragedy.
