8. AURORA #2
Now it’s my turn to smirk.
“But,” Dimitry continues in English, “even the lowest Guild member is more than the highest Digger. Remember that, boyevaya.”
“Whatever,” I shrug, still trying to play it cool. “What is it you want me to do?”
He looks around. “I think our area is dirty. Get on your knees and clean up the окурок, and all the rest of the detritus.”
So that’s what happens. I crawl around the bleachers, picking up sodden cigarette butts and trash from the cracked concrete. My knees quickly become raw and bleeding beneath the thin coveralls, but I keep my face blank. I’ve survived my father, I’ve survived Thomas Crankshawe, I can survive this.
At least moving prevents me from being frozen to the bone.
My bodyguards make it obvious they are thoroughly bored—and pissed—but they do their job.
No one touches me.
When the claxon finally shrieks, signaling the end of rec, my legs are shaking so hard I can barely stand. I hobble back to the block, past the smirking face of Rice, and collapse onto my cot.
Traitorous tears leak down my face, hot and stinging. I hurriedly wipe them away before Taliesin can see.
It takes more than a couple of hours in the dirt to break Aurora Drakeward.
???
The next few days are a blur of gray concrete, threatening side-eyes, and the position of either being glued to Taliesin’s side, or out in the yard doing whatever “labor” the Guild can think up for their entertainment.
My neck muscles are in spasms from trying to keep my head held high.
Yesterday was a new low. Odessa, with a voice as sweet as poisoned honey, suggested to Dimitry that I’d make an excellent table. I spent an hour on all fours on the cracked concrete, the small of my back serving as a resting place for his half-eaten apple and his rolled cigarettes.
Odessa watched me with the focused intensity of a cat toying with a cornered mouse.
When my arms trembled, she’d let out a soft, mocking laugh to Dimitry. "Look, darling," she purred. "The furniture is sub-standard, what a surprise."
I have to keep reminding myself who she really is: a power-hungry, desperate scavenger. In here she might be the reigning queen, but I remember the headlines. The Westlund family was scrubbed from Havengard society after her father was caught embezzling from Conclave-owned blue-chip assets. Idiot.
Odessa Westlund is nothing but the daughter of a greedy, inept little man. No doubt she did something equally idiotic to find herself in here.
And I’m not enjoying her lording over me. I’d leap and smash her fucking smug face, but I know Crow and Hauser would pull me off before I even got one decent hit in. It’s infuriating.
Fucking Taliesin.
To make matters worse, while I was being their “accent table”, Odessa encouraged the other gross Guild members to humiliate me further. There were a lot of comments, and disgusting stroking of erections through the dark blue jumpsuits.
Thank Gods for the “no touching” rule.
But still, Fuck you, Taliesin for allowing this to happen.
Adding to the shit that my life has become are the nightmares. Nightly nightmares have started plaguing me. More than once I’ve woken up screaming and crying. Taliesin sits on his cot, watching me through the bars.
He doesn’t ask what the nightmares are about and he also doesn’t enquire about my “yard duty” with the Guild.
And I don’t tell him.
Fucker.
But sometimes when he watches me, I’ll catch his eyes softening in a way that seems…almost as though he likes me.
Maybe the hands-off approach is him indicating that he knows I can take care of myself.
Which is true.
Other times all I feel from Taliesin Bevan is coldness, through and through.
That makes me hate him, but the hate at least gives me the strength to keep going.
I have had one moment of joy though. I’d come across some real prickly thistle plants during my bleacher-cleaning duties, smuggled the spiky leaves back into the cell block, then distributed them under Taliesin’s bedsheets.
His shocked yells as he slammed back onto his cot made me laugh—loudly and repeatedly.
Score one for Aurora Drakeward.
He sat up, cursing, picking out the thorns, then looked at me. Just looked, and there wasn’t murder in his eyes.
It was almost an amusement.
My other pleasure is ballet. My body aches so badly after the abuse of the Guild, stretching and moving are the only things keeping me sane. So whenever I’m locked in my cage—I dance.
By rights, I should hate this dance form. It had been forced upon me as soon as I could toddle around, but what daddy-dearest never understood is that ballet made me feel invincible.
Father didn’t see dance as art; he saw it as yet another system of rigorous control. To him, the turnout of my hips and the arch of my feet were just more metrics of perfection.
"A Drakeward woman is a masterpiece of precision, Aurora. Every movement must be calculated, every breath measured."
If I wobbled in a pirouette, I was just a defective eight-year-old who needed to train harder. He didn’t take into consideration most girls didn’t go on point until they were at least ten.
Father wanted me to be a doll in a music box—beautiful, repetitive, and entirely dependent on his hand to keep me spinning.
But I stole the joy of dance for myself.
The discipline and pain were for me, not him.
I was building a body that could endure anything.
Every plié was a silent promise to myself that my foundation wouldn’t break.
Every relevé a lesson in how to rise, even when the weight of the world was pressing down on my shoulders.
I learned how to hide my pain behind an impassive expression—a skill that’s serving me well in this hellhole. I taught myself how to bleed into my shoes and keep smiling.
I know how to be shattered and still hold my form.
In the quiet hour before the morning bell, when the block is a symphony of snores and the distant hiss of steam pipes, I use the iron bars as a barre.
My joints pop in the silence, as I move from tendu to grand battement, focusing on the pull of my muscles, the familiar burn in my thighs and a new flutter in my chest.
For a few minutes, I’m not wearing stained gray twill. I’m wearing silk and tulle, and I am the only person in this world who gets to decide when I stop spinning.
I’m mid-extension, my leg vibrating with the effort, when I feel it. That prickle on the back of my neck.
I spin around.
Taliesin sits on the edge of his cot, forearms resting on his knees, watching me with an expression that I can’t decipher.
“What?” I snap, wiping sweat from my upper lip.
The sweep of his eyes over my body sends an unwelcome fire racing through my veins. I quickly shrug my arms back into the coverall sleeves that I’d tied around my waist. The prison-issued sports bra doesn’t leave much to the imagination.