Chapter 4
Chapter four
Marco: A Taste of Home
Burning blood screams beneath my skin, fixing me in place. But I keep cool control in front of the guards; they need to know their place, and that’s beneath me.
I wait for them to leave under the hard stare of Victora’s newest offering, hatred radiating from every inch of him.
And why wouldn’t it?
His face is blue and purple around the scarlet slice I stamped in his cheek with my own fist. A violent tarnish that does nothing to lessen his beauty, not that it would probably mean much to him right now to know he’s the most gorgeous sight I’ve seen in five long years.
The guards are as efficient and obedient as ever, but it feels like a lifetime listening to their footsteps recede. Every beat of my heart is an eon while I await one moment alone to talk to this man.
I casually pluck a grape from the overabundance of food that’s pushed at me daily, sickened at the thought of having to eat it. I roll it between my fingers, unable to resist another look at the prisoner.
He’s covered in dirt, still unwashed from his journey.
How long was he on that truck? Several days at least…
He’s clad in rough-hewn, loose, calf-length pants, a vest pulled taut with string.
And for the first time, it occurs to me he likely wasn’t prepared when they came.
That he was pulled from his bed in the night, put on the closest thing to hand.
With the wave of nausea that pounds into my skull, I throw the grape into the garden.
His head snaps across to follow it, and it’s surprising to see he’s found a deeper shade of hate.
I thought we’d already reached the bottom of that pit, but there’s disgust in the slant of his top lip, the handsome arch already so pronounced, now risen with repulsion.
Finally alone, I ask him, “What’s your name?”
His eyes hit mine dead on. “Fuck you.”
“Alright, ‘Fuck You.’ And where are you from?”
The dry lips curl into a defiant grimace. “Fuck you.”
“‘Fuck You’ from ‘Fuck You.’ We’re off to a great start.”
I walk a short pace of the terrace, careful not to get too close to him. He’s desperate—a caged animal. I’ve seen such creatures chew off their own limbs to get free. I even saw a man do it once. There was a time I would have done the same.
Everything inside me wants to throw caution to the wind—to speak to him in the same mother tongue he insulted me with last night. But I can’t. He can’t know where I’m from. It’s been half a decade, and I’ve never once betrayed my people with a word of their existence.
Yet my stomach convulses with desperation to know.
Just one word. Just one breath of home. Is he truly from Atrea?
Has the island been found? Do my parents live?
Did my brother marry? Has fate smiled on them, made them prosperous and happy?
Do they know I didn’t choose to leave? That I was snatched from the mainland…
Do they still think of me?
I bite down every one of my questions.
This man is not my friend. No one is my friend. I won’t ever get back there if I trust any of them.
How Victora would love to find Atrea, to know there’s an entire civilization of warriors ripe for the harvesting, ready to be enslaved, abused, forced into war, into the mines, and into this living horror, Deathball.
And after all, he could be from anywhere. Maybe it’s some similar regional dialect that I misunderstood last night. We can’t have been the only people to inherit the language.
I size him up as I turn a close circle. His hands are clasped tight in powerful fists. His log-like wrists strain against the indifferent might of Victoran steel. His enormous muscles are lined with cuts and bruises I didn’t give him, living, healing evidence of his enslavement.
Red dirt clings to his clothes, his knees, his shoulders and forearms. Why haven’t they let him wash? But for all of that, he doesn’t smell bad. He smells manly. Strong. He smells like defiance and open air and everything I crave.
I can virtually feel the salt air radiating off him, sand and slate flowing in his veins. He’s all the cliffs of home, ragged shores and sun-glazed warriors, and a taste of everything I’ve lost.
Before I can contain it, the words are out of my mouth. “You can wash first.”
A strangled scoff breaks out of him. I realize the weakness I’ve shown in the offer. He’s supposed to be under my boot, not the other way around.
I’m about to correct course, but like lightning, he cuts me off. “I’ll die before I let you touch me.”
“Let me?” The words are sharp at my lips, his arrogance a crushing reminder of the upper hand I’ve lost—that I need to regain at all costs.
“You’re property of Victora now. Enslaved to the capital and the people.
You’re nobody, with no name, and no past, and no family.
And until you die in that arena, you’re under my complete control. ”
I watch his Adam’s apple work as he swallows, the flicker of a vein flash in his neck. He stares forward, eyes on the wall like a soldier, lips clamped shut.
My tone softens despite myself. He needs to understand. “You’re nothing but a commodity. The sooner you realize that, the better you’ll do. The sooner you accept your place, the more likely you are to survive. If you do what I say, I can help you. If you don’t… you’ll live to regret it.”
Eyes harder than the stone they bore through, his silence is broken only by the breath that comes a little quicker in his chest.
“Where are you from?”
No ‘fuck you’ this time. Only that tense and unbroken refusal.
“Have they fed you?”
The slightest line creases his carefully schooled brow, and not for the first time, I hear his stomach growl.
He’s starving. Of course he is.
“What would you give me for a taste?” I pluck another grape, the largest and juiciest he will ever have seen in his entire life if he’s from the same place as me.
If anything can convince a man to give up a name, or his people, it’s starvation followed swiftly by the offer of food.
I bring it to the hard seam of his mouth, trailing the wet fruit across his stubborn lower lip.
He pulls his head back with that same wrinkle of disgust he showed when I inspected him in the lineup.
That’s fine. He can be as disgusted as he likes, so long as I get the truth out of him. “Tell me where you’re from.”
A muscle sparks beneath his left eye.
“Do what I tell you, and you can eat as much as you like.”
There’s a taut moment of hesitation, then finally, his head lowers. For the first time, I have the sinking feeling he’s going to tell me. And that, therefore, he’s not really from Atrea.
He can’t be.
He’s splendid in every shift of muscle, every line of his form. I could swear I sense the sunshine of home in his hair.
But an Atrean would never give in so easily—never be so desperate, so lacking in pride, or so stupid as to give up their people for a piece of fruit.
His mouth slides open, and I let him have the grape anyway, my dreams vanishing as fast as the fruit disappears into his mouth with the push of my finger, a lifeline closing like his pretty white teeth—
“Motherfucker!”
As quickly as the pain of the bite shoots through me, the resounding crack of the back of my hand meeting his jaw claps off the stone walls around us.
Hands restrained, he stumbles against the table.
I’m behind him in a second, smashing his head down against the wood.
“You want to bite the hand that feeds you? I’ll teach you a lesson you’ll never forget. ”
“You will never touch me!” he screams, face red, spit flying from his clenched teeth, hard against the table. “You try it, and I’ll fucking kill you!”
Try what?
It takes a moment for his words to sink in, to realize what he’s saying. I release him the second the revulsion hits, stepping away as sick laughter rips out of me. “Is that what you think?”
I can’t help it. It’s verging on hysteria, the laughter pouring out, the memories of it all, one piled on top of another—my first day standing here just like him, presented not to the captain, but to the Emperor himself. “You’d be lucky if I were the one who claimed you first.”
He regains his balance, spitting blood from his mouth onto the stone ground—his or mine, I’m not sure.
I guess my face is too far away this time.
The memory of that, the disrespect, the fear of my first day in this city coming back upon me in full—the ground I’m about to lose in front of him—shoots anger through my arm.
In a second I’ve got him by the throat, that hard slap of his back against stone filling my ears, the mass of him pinned against the wall.
My fingers sink deep into his flesh, controlling every breath of air above the hard curve of his gilt collar. “Look at me.”
He does, breathing hard but unflinching, furious gray eyes, fathomless, violent seas like the shores of Atrea.
“Do you think I need to take you by force?”
I try to stare him down, but he never yields, not for a heartbeat.
“Do you really believe there isn’t a man in that dungeon who wouldn’t get down on his knees for me then say thank you with his next breath?”
His eyelashes waver. I feel his neck work beneath my hand. Still, he says nothing.
“I can have any man or woman in this city with the click of a finger. You might be beautiful, but I don’t need to force you to have you. Give it a day or two, and you’ll be kneeling with the rest of them, begging for a taste of my cock.” My eyes stay trained on his when I shout, “Guards!”
I swing away from him as soon as I hear their footsteps, and I don’t look back when he’s dragged off, gone and out of my sight.
I rip a napkin from the table to wrap my bitten hand. The blood seeps through instantly, and I stretch my thumb, forcing more into the white fabric.
Blood.
So much blood in the last five years that I could drown in it.
Maybe he is Atrean, after all.
He’s braver and bolder than he has any right to be in this place.
But one thing’s for sure: I’m going to knock it clean out of him tomorrow.