Page 3 of Broken Queen
But she wasn’t supposed to die. The sacrifices were about testing limits.
I glared back at my father. He shrugged dismissively.
“I was having fun,” he said. “It’s not like I can take you here.”
Acid curled in my throat. You’d think that being a sacrifice would be enough, but once my mother died, there were other needs my father had to fill, and I clutched my mother’s words.
Act like you like it, she said, That’s how you make it stop. That’s how you survive, Zira.
I twisted my head, but there was no one else in the room, just my father, me, and this woman. Blood soaked her hair, light freckles painting her neck, a dullness to her brown eyes.
Whoever had sacrificed her wasn’t in the room.
“You must never tell anyone about this,” my father said. “Ernest cannot be my enemy.”
I blinked, and my father’s footsteps clicked away, wandering to the hallway, leaving us women alone. She was so fragile in my arms, like a small bird with a broken wing. But she didn’t have a chance.
My father had killed her.
My chest warmed as I considered exposing him, throwing him into the snake pit for once. But I had to show my father that I was trustworthy. That I could be a board member too, one day, like him. I might have been a woman, but I was still as capable as any man.
The cut on the woman’s neck was a third of the way into her, veins like tendrils of hair spilling over the edge, her tissue exposed. Almost like my father had tried to decapitate her and had changed his mind halfway there.
Had my father done this to somehow cope with how my mother—his wife—had died?
I shouldn’t have cared about this woman. And maybe I didn’t. Maybe I just pretended to feel things, so that I could feel human again. But whenever I saw a woman like this, I thought of my mother. Her head falling into a basket. How I had hoped, above all else, that it had been painless.
Footsteps crashed into the room. A man with inky black hair, cut short, adjusted the black mask over his face.
“Is she dead?” he gawked.
The blood pooled like a crimson gulf between my legs, as if I was a follower of Bacchus, bathing in wine. The answer was obvious, but the man wanted confirmation. Almost like he was hoping she was dead. He crouched to the side of me, the scent of cloves forcing its way through the metallic fragrance in the air.
“Who killed her?” he asked quietly, as if suddenly realizing his own lack of empathy. I lifted my shoulders, letting my body language speak for me.
I would never tell. I obeyed my father when it came to things like this to prove that he could trust me.
And I could use that information against him.
“She was stealing from me, you know,” he whispered. “That’s why I took her here. But I just wanted to teach her a lesson. I didn’t want her to die.”
I rolled my eyes. If the situation had been switched, and he was stealing from her, he would never be sacrificed. That’s not how the Marked Blooms Syndicate worked. The men were respected and favored; the women were objects to play with.
But the women weren’t supposed to die here.
He reached over, touching her knee. Perhaps he had some sort of ‘feeling’ for her. But as he raised his hand, he inched closer to me, resting his hand on my shoulder, almost like he wanted to pull me into his arms. I put up a hand, pushing him away from me. I let the gauze drop out of my mouth.
“I am done being a sacrifice tonight. You will not touch me.”
The words came out with force, even as they rasped through those new gaps in my teeth. The man jolted, taken aback by my words. His eyes narrowed at my bare chest, then traveled back up to my face.
“A haughty little bitch, aren’t we?” he said. “It’s a shame that Bloom couldn’t make a son.”
I scowled. “I am Zira Bloom, the?—”
“No one will take you seriously no matter how hard you try.”
“I am Zira Bloom,” I said again, forcing myself to ignore him, “the heiress of?—”
