38. Ash
Chapter 38
Ash
I gazed out the window, the same window that I always looked out. The small square of light that allowed me to see everything I wanted but couldn’t have. I put my small hand on the glass and rested my forehead against the cool pane. The snow fell gently outside and stuck to the ground, but it couldn’t be that much colder than it was in here. It was always too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. I glanced down at the book in my hand—one that Daddy brought to me about the sun, the moon, and the planets. One of the few books I had. I couldn’t read the words, but I liked to look at the pictures.
The door creaked open behind me, and the gray-eyed boy walked into the room, holding the baby William. He smiled at me. “Whatcha lookin’ at, Blondie?”
“I wanna go outside,” I whined .
He sat down next to the window with William in his lap. The baby smiled happily at me, and I grinned back at him.
“Hi, little Will,” I crooned, taking his little chubby hand in my own, and he giggled.
“You lookin’ at your sun and moon book again?” the boy asked.
I nodded sadly and handed it to William to play with. My elbows rested on the windowsill as I stared out into the snowy day.
“Jackson?” I asked.
“Mm-hmm,” he hummed, showing William the pictures in the book.
“I wish I was the sun.”
“Why?” He chuckled.
“Because then I could leave—I could see everything from up there. Plus, I’d be in heaven with my mama… The sun is the heavens, right? That’s where Daddy said Mama is.”
He shot me a sad smile. “I think they’re different kinds of heavens. The sun is in the sky, and your mama went to a better place where people go when they die.”
“Oh… Well, at least I’d be warm. The last time Daddy was here, he told me about a place that’s always warm. He said there’s water for as far as you can see and…sand. What’s sand, Jackson?”
“It’s kind of like dirt, but different. Look, it talks about it in your book.” He opened the pages, and we all looked down at a picture of the moon among pictures of vast expanses of water where the edges splashed into the land. “See, these are called beaches, and that’s where the sand is.”
“What’s it say?”
His eyes flew over the words on the page as he kept the book out of William’s reach long enough for him to read. “It says the water is called an ocean, and the moon controls the tides. ”
“What’s a tide?”
He shook his head. “I’m not sure.”
I turned around and looked back out the window. “That’s where I want to live one day. Where it’s always warm, and I can see the moon moving the water… But if that doesn’t happen, then I want to be the sun.”
He laughed softly. “If you’re the sun, then I want to be the moon.”
“Why?” I giggled.
“Do you know why the moon glows at night?”
“No.”
“It’s because the sun is reflecting off it from the other side of the world.”
“Really?” I gasped.
He nodded. “That means, no matter where you and I go, your light will always find me.”
I giggled with glee.
“I’ll chase you around the earth all the time since it’s your favorite game, and if I’m the moon and I can control the ocean, then I would bring it to you.”
I smiled. Jackson had always been my favorite person. “And Will can be a star!” I exclaimed. I rubbed the little man’s blonde hair with my palm. “Then we can all be together in the heavens forever. Oh, and Aunt Izzy…she can be a star too! And Daddy!”
“Yeah, Ash. That sounds perfect.”
For once, I woke feeling peaceful. I could have sworn I was having another dream, but I felt calm…and hungry. My stomach growled loudly in discomfort. I looked out the window, and only darkness shone back at me. It’s the middle of the night; you can wait ’til morning. I internally scolded the loud organ. I closed my eyes, only to have it rumble again, even louder. Fine. I rolled up off the floor and tiptoed over to the table to see if any of the food was left from dinner, only to find Ryan had cleared my plate.
I trod lightly over to the door—maybe I could sneak down to the kitchen. Jerek stood guard on the other side when I peeked my head out and an odd smell rose into my nose.
“What?” he said, his voice clipped.
“Never mind,” I mumbled, turning around and pushing the door closed. Before it could shut, he stuck his hand out to stop it.
“What do you need, Princess?” The name that sounded like a joke so many times before was thrown at me like an insult.
“Are you still sour about the whole skewer incident?” I cocked my head to the side and stared at him.
His cheeks colored slightly, and he looked away. “I thought we were friends, and you never even apologized.”
I tried my best to hide the smile that formed on my face. Jerek was sentimental, was he? “I mean it was only the leg; at least I didn’t aim for your neck or eyeball. If that doesn’t scream friendship, then I don’t know what does. ”
“How about not stabbing people?“ he asked, his mouth agape.
I laughed—really laughed—for the first time in a while, and it felt like relief.
He blew out a long breath and ran his hand down his face, shaking his head. “It’s been a long day. Are you going to tell me why you’re up in the middle of the night?”
“I’m hungry.”
He looked taken aback by my words. “Do you want me to send for Ryan?”
“No…no, don’t wake her up. I can go to the kitchen and find something.”
“Let me get this right—you’ve sent back full plates of food almost every meal since you got here, and now, all of a sudden, in the middle of the night…you’re hungry and want to go get food?” He gazed at me suspiciously, and I didn’t blame him, but I had no ulterior motives tonight.
“I’ll just go back to bed,” I mumbled.
“Wait… Are you really hungry?” His eyes danced over my face.
My stomach growled loudly again in response. “No games tonight, Jerek. I’m only hungry.”
“How about this: a truth for a truth? You tell me something honest, and I’ll tell you something honest, and if I believe you…we can go get something to eat.”
“Fine.” I scoffed. “Who goes first?”
“You.”
I thought for a moment before I spoke. “You smell like cinnamon.” I finally realized what the strange scent was. I had only smelled and tasted cinnamon once. He raised his eyebrows at me incredulously. “I hate cinnamon,” I said.
“That’s your truth? ”
I smirked and nodded.
“And tell me, Princess, why is it that you hate cinnamon?” he asked.
“It tastes like dirt. The one time Nan and I used it, we both threw up afterward.” My cheeks twitched as I tried to hold a smile at bay.
A smile grew in the corners of Jerek’s mouth. “I don’t think you used it right.”
I shrugged. “I still hate it, and you smell disgusting.”
He chuckled low. “Sorry, not good enough. If you tell me something better, I’ll show you the right way to use cinnamon, and it tastes delicious.”
“Gross…” I sighed, but my stomach pangs only grew worse by the second. I paused in thought before sinking back against the wall and staring at the lights on the ceiling.
“This is going to sound messed up…” He looked at me intently, waiting for me to continue. “I miss the hardship of Cedar Hill. I miss the days when my fingers were so cold, I couldn’t feel them. I miss having to work my ass off for a meal. Everything is so easy here. It’s warm, people bring food, I can even take a bath whenever I want.”
“And all of this is a bad thing?” Jerek asked.
I scrubbed my hands over my face. “No…not necessarily. It’s just—I feel like—I dreamed of comforts like these, but now that I have them, I’d give it up in a heartbeat to wake up under the sky and hear the birds in the trees again. It’s like the whole world is muted. The colors and sounds of life have disappeared, and all that’s left are these black and gray walls that I stare at for hours, and all I feel is emptiness. I just want to feel…something.” That wasn’t the whole truth. I could feel something, but it was only anger, and it swallowed up every other feeling, numbing me to everything else.
He gave me a sad look. “That’s why you sleep on the floor under the window?”
I nodded gloomily.
“Come on. I have something that might cheer you up a little.” He turned and strode down the hall, and I followed after him until we ended up at a kitchen a level down from my room. Not a soul was in sight at this hour. Stoves and cooking equipment littered the walls and the counters on the edges of the room. In the center was an island with a wooden top and stools next to it. Jerek pulled out a stool for me and gestured for me to have a seat. Then he went into a back room before walking out with a pan covered with cloth.
“Are you ready to taste what you have been missing your whole life?” he asked.
“Is this where you bring all the girls? To taste the wonders of cinnamon?” I raised my eyebrows.
He rolled his eyes. “First of all, if I was trying to get into your pants, they’d already be gone.” He smirked, and I made an exaggerated gagging motion. “Second of all, I’m not stupid enough to try to get with the Prince’s fiancée.”
I cringed. “What’s the deal with you two, anyway?” I asked.
“He didn’t tell you anything?”
“I haven’t exactly seen my fiancé very much lately,“ I mused.
He whipped the cloth off the pan, and a heavenly scent greeted my nose. Circles of bread, swirled with dark stuff and coated in white, gooey substance, stared back at me. The only problem was the underlying stench of cinnamon. I noticed one of the rolls was missing in the corner of the pan .
“You’ve already been down here once tonight, haven’t you?” It explained his cinnamon smell.
“It was gonna be a long shift. I needed a pick-me-up.” He scooped one out of the pan and placed it in front of me and took another one for himself.
“What is it?” I asked, poking the white cream with my finger.
“A cinnamon roll. One of life’s most delectable treats.”
I brought it up to my nose and sniffed it. The sweet scent lingered in my nose, but the stench of cinnamon outweighed everything. My nose wrinkled in disgust.
“Oh, try it, you big baby,” Jerek teased.
“You don’t understand how bad my experience was. Nan put a whole container of ground cinnamon sticks in our tea one morning.”
“How big was the container?”
“Bigger than this roll!” I said, holding it up for him to see.
His mouth gaped open, and then he broke out in obnoxious laughter. “She put that much in?”
“Yes!”
“No wonder you hate cinnamon.” He laughed. “I promise this will be significantly better than cinnamon tea. Just try it,” he said, exasperated.
I did as instructed, and my mouth burst with sweet deliciousness. The gooey inside of the bread and the white frosting on top made the perfect bite. I closed my eyes and hummed in approval, and my stomach agreed.
“Okay, you’re right,” I admitted with my mouth full and quickly took another bite—cinnamon was delicious .
He smirked and polished his off in four bites before grabbing another, and I chuckled, remembering the way he finished my stew the first night we met. “Are you always this hungry?” I asked.
“Who do you think eats all the food that you send back?”
I choked on the bread in my mouth and laughed. “Seriously?”
“When I’m on guard duty for you. It’s a sin to waste good food like you do.”
I shook my head and laughed. “What if I spit in it?”
He shrugged. “As long as you don’t tell me, and I don’t taste it…it doesn’t bother me.”
“You’re disgusting.” But really, I had eaten things far worse than secondhand food.
“No, I’m economical. I’m always hungry, and you don’t eat. Solves both our problems.” He smiled.
“How are you not fat?” Not that I had ever really seen anybody that was grossly overweight, but if Jerek ate that much, he would probably be a little chubby, not the sculpted man I had seen shirtless in the training center so many times.
“You see, food,” he held up his cinnamon roll, “fuels our bodies so we can train and gain muscle.” He explained it to me like I was a child and reached out and waggled my arm. “No fuel means no muscles.”
I brushed his hand away and rolled my eyes.
“Why don’t you eat, anyway?” he asked.
I wagged my finger at him. “Nu-uh, I gave you two truths; you still owe me.”
He scoffed. “Hardly. Only one was a truth, and the other is now a lie because you love cinnamon.”
He had me there; I licked my fingers clean of the remaining frosting. “Fine… one truth then.”
He inspected his cinnamon roll for a moment before speaking. “Gabe and I went to school together.”
I nodded; he’d already told me that.
“We are the same age and were friends in school, somewhat. He was always striving to be the best. More competitive than anyone. Top of our class.” He glanced away. “He liked to follow the rules to a T. He never once broke a rule or let anything slide.”
“And you did?”
He nodded. “We saw an…issue very differently, and I was pissed at the way he handled it. But then he suddenly disappeared on a special mission, and no one ever knew where he went. Except the King, of course.”
“And now he’s back and in line to become the next King,” I said thoughtfully.
“I’m worried about you, Ash. You’re the first rule he’s ever bent—the first order he never followed through with.”
Did that mean he loved me or that something was still off? My eyebrows furrowed. “You know he was supposed to kill me?”
Jerek winced slightly at my words. “Yeah, I know. He told me.”
That surprised me. I hadn’t seen Jerek and Gabe interact very much since we got back to Hope. “Are you two friends again, then?”
“No,” Jerek said with a hard edge to his voice, and I studied him quizzically as we sat in silence.
“Why do you work for the King, Jerek?” I asked. I couldn’t understand it. He honestly seemed like such a good person under the soldier’s uniform. Maybe I’d misjudged him.
“I didn’t have a choice. My mother was a midwife, and I didn’t know my father. I didn’t have a trade to return to, and I wasn’t about to watch babies pop out of women all day long.” He cringed .
“Yeah…it might ruin your favorite part of a woman,” I joked.
He full-on snorted. “Shut up. I’m not that bad.”
I shot him a derisive look. “Do you have amnesia? You make at least one comment about it every time I talk to you.”
He looked shocked by my observation. “I could never be with you… You annoy the shit outta me.”
I laughed out loud. “Wait… What did you say on the ride to Hope? There’s no one I like talking to quite as much as you, Princess,” I mocked in my best man’s voice.
He shook his head and ducked to hide his face, but I knew he was laughing by the way his shoulders shook. “That was back when I was trying to get into your pants.”
“Oh, so you admit it now.”
“What can I say? You’re a beautiful woman, but now that I know who you are…well…my desires have changed.”
I shoved his shoulder. “You annoy me, too.”
He smiled, and I realized how very much I liked talking to Jerek. It was like I had revealed more of who I truly was in this one conversation with him than I had to anyone else the whole time I’d been in Hope. The air in the room stilled once more and turned serious.
“Want to hear another truth?” I asked.
“Sure.” He shrugged.
“Today—well I guess yesterday now, was my twentieth birthday.”
He looked at me with nothing but sadness written in his features. “Happy birthday, Princess.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled, picking at my fingernails. I never would have imagined that I would be spending my twentieth birthday in the kitchen of the King’s mansion, eating cinnamon rolls with a soldier of Novum.
“What kind of rules did you break that Gabe followed?” I asked. It was a loaded question.
“Was telling me about your birthday your way of buttering me up with a truth so I’d tell you another one?”
“Maybe… Did it work?” I asked sweetly.
He chuckled and glanced around before his blue eyes blazed into mine. “Rules that meant life or death. He turned in one of our friends for his intentions to desert.”
“What?” I stilled in shock. What? He did what? I couldn’t think straight. The whole time that I’d been friends with him, this was in his past. He turned someone—no, not just someone—one of his friends in for desertion? Wasn’t the penalty for desertion death? That’s what Ryan had told me because… Lightning suddenly struck my brain. Because Ryan’s brother had paid the price for desertion. My hands covered my mouth in horror.
Jerek nodded silently.
“Rafe?” I whispered through my fingers.
He nodded and bit his lip, like he tried to quell the emotions that came to the surface. “It’s why I’m still here, working for the King. I can’t leave Ryan because…”
“She’s Rafe’s sister,” I finished for him, my voice coming out breathy with emotion.
His eyes shot to mine in surprise.
“She told me about Rafe, but she’s ready to fight back. She’s ready to get revenge for her brother.”
“Ryan said that?” he asked as a crease formed between his eyes.
I nodded. “She’s helping me. ”
A frantic look crossed his face. “No, it’s too dangerous. Ash, you can’t ask her to do that.”
“I didn’t. She’s the one who came to me.”
He shook his head. “Do not get her tangled up in this, do you hear me?” His voice was like steel.
“You can’t take away people’s free will to protect them, Jerek. If she wants to help, then I’m not going to stop her.”
He furrowed his brows and didn’t say anything as he looked down toward his hands.
“Jerek,” I said softly, and his eyes flicked back up. “The King asked you to report all my whereabouts, did he not?”
His eyes widened. “How’d you know that?”
“That’s why he told me I can’t go anywhere without you, right? He needs to know what I’m doing, in case I find Liam and don’t tell him.”
He nodded and looked away.
“It’s okay. I’m used to the deceit, we’re still friends,” I said. I suspected as much for a while, but the confirmation was the truth I needed from Jerek. Besides, he hadn’t seen anything incriminating yet.
“I’m sorry, Ash. I have to do whatever I can to protect Ryan,” he said softly, and his blue eyes appeared undeniably sad.
“Don’t apologize for that. I don’t blame you.” No, it wasn’t ever Jerek’s fault. It was the fault of a country—a kingdom run by someone whose sole purpose was to leach all the power he could from the land and use fear against the people until his ideals were followed. It was the fault of a school that brought nine-year-old boys in to indoctrinate them with lies and power. But all the black and poisoned limbs branched back to the same evil tree with a heart blacker than night, and the thing I hated most was that the same blood that ran through his veins ran through mine as well.