Page 8 of Wings of Ash & Flame
“Be careful. The captain is not someone to mess with.”
“Another day, another nemesis, it would seem.”
Muffled giggles drew a genuine smile from Alaire’s lips, the first in days.
Later, after cleaning up the mess the guards had left, Alaire lay back on her cot, Elodie’s words floating through her mind—finding something they can’t take.
They could throw her in a dark cell. Lock her away.
But they could never make her be someone who’d walk past that boy.
And that, perhaps, was worth everything it had cost her.
Three
The darkness had teeth.
After a year at Grimstone, Alaire had become intimately familiar with it.
She traced the grooves in her wrists where the shackles had worn into her flesh. The marks had become a roadmap of Captain Verran’s games, each one a memory of his particular brand of entertainment.
Metal scraped against stone—weekly inspection.
Alaire tracked his approach by sound alone: the measuredclickof his boots, the jingle of keys at his belt, the soft whistle through his teeth.
“Still breathing, I see.” He leaned against the bars, close enough that she could see the dilation of his pupils. “Ready to play?”
“What do you think?” Alaire kept her eyes on the wall. Seventeen cracks in the mortar. Same as yesterday. Same as the day before.
“Why do you keep denying yourself? There aren’t any better options.”
His fingers began their familiar rhythm against the iron bars—thumb to pinkie, always the same pattern. It preceded violence the way thunder preceded lightning.
“You’ll beg eventually,” he said, breath hot through the bars. “Your kind always does.”
He wanted her to go to him willingly. To plead for him.
“Never,” Alaire spat.
The drumming stopped. “Perhaps another three days in solitary will help you find your voice.”
Her jaw locked, but she gave him nothing. No flinch. No fear. The captain fed on weakness.
Alaire’s spirit was the one thing he couldn’t have—andwouldn’tbreak.
Three days in absolute darkness. Three days when her heartbeat became the only sound in the universe. Three days to sit with her thoughts while the walls pressed closer.
In the darkness, she painted the grey stones with Verran’s blood. The fantasy had evolved over the months, growing more elaborate with each stint in solitary. She imagined the sound of the blade as it found his throat, blood spilling across the damp floor, the feel of thick sludge sticking between her fingers.
Soon, she promised herself.Not today. Not tomorrow. But soon.
The morning shift guards were getting lazy. She’d noticed it three weeks ago. They had started cutting corners on their rounds. The tall one with scarred knuckles had dozed off twice in the last week alone.
The guards kept a precise schedule. She memorized their body language, tics, and habits. In the world Alaire hadlived in, weaknesses were opportunities, and information was ammunition. She’d been stockpiling.
This world had carved the naïveté from her soul and fed it a heaping dose of reality instead. The marks on her body were evidence of that.
Recently, the guards had been buzzing about the reignited war front against the vampires. They loved to boast about their connections to the noble houses.
