Chapter 7 #2
This one. I want this one.
The guard would unlock my cage, fit a leash to my collar, and lead me wherever I was wanted.
I don’t remember any of their names. There have been too many over too long. But I remember everything they did to me. And I remember what I wanted to do to them in return.
They’d wash me in copper tubs, hands working soap into my skin, using it as an excuse to touch me. Fingers combed through my hair while they decided how best to present me.
Hold still. Turn. Lift its arms.
I held still. I turned. I lifted my arms. I thought about holding their heads under the bathwater until the thrashing stopped and the bubbles went still.
I knelt beside chairs while they ate their meals, food passed down to me in scraps, while voices above my head discussed politics, weather, and alliances.
I learned which ones had enemies, who had debts.
They talked freely in front of me because I was a pet.
A mindless beast who couldn’t possibly understand what they were talking about.
They had no idea I was memorizing every word, filing away every weakness, and building a list of how I’d kill each one of them if I ever got free.
In their beds, they’d tell me what they wanted.
Lie here. Move like this. Smile. Tell me I’m beautiful.
Tell me you want this. I was displayed at parties, dressed in scraps of silk that covered nothing, positioned in corners where guests could admire me.
They’d comment on my features, appraising me as though I was a painting, then they’d ask permission of whoever owned me if they could touch.
The answer was yes. Always yes.
I’d stand motionless while hands stroked my hair, my shoulders, my chest. Dozens of hands, hundreds of touches. I imagined snapping their wrists. Driving their fingers into their eyes. I pictured it in perfect detail while I smiled and let them paw at me.
Such fine bone structure. Such unusual coloring. So docile. So well-trained. You’d never think they were so dangerous once, would you?
No. They wouldn’t know. That was the point.
I was leashed to bedposts, kneeling through the night while they slept in a bed above me. One of them kept me for nine moon cycles. She said my presence soothed her, and she slept better knowing I was there.
Nine cycles of watching her sleep three feet away.
I spent those nights planning how I’d kill her.
The leash was long enough to reach the bed.
I measured the collar’s punishment against my tolerance for pain, and decided I could endure long enough to wrap the leather around her throat and pull until she stopped breathing.
I never got the chance. Her husband came back before winter ended and I was returned to the cages. She died in her bed years later.
One of them liked pain. She had tools designed to hurt, and I spent four years in her cellar.
She thought she was breaking me. She had no idea what breaking actually looked like.
Her cruelty was a child playing in the dark, convinced she understood what suffering meant.
I gave her what she wanted. Screamed when it satisfied her, went silent when that pleased her more. And I waited.
Another wept every time she used me. She’d sob into my chest and apologize, and I’d hold her because that’s what she wanted. She sent for me night after night, her guilt never stopping her from taking what she paid for.
Her, I hated the most. The others were at least honest in their cruelty. She wrapped hers in tears and pretended she was the victim.
There was one who wanted me to pretend to be her lover, not her pet. I whispered endearments and she cooed about how beautifully I spoke.
Tell me you love me.
Having to give her affection and desire and connection … that was the hardest thing to pretend. I am fae. We cannot lie. She was forcing me to twist my very nature into knots, and that hurt more than the collar ever did.
The collar burned when my performance wasn’t convincing enough, when I didn’t obey direct commands. So I learned to bury what I really felt so deep that even the iron couldn’t find it, because those thoughts were mine. They couldn’t collar those.
The ones who used me in the early years are dust now.
So are their daughters, and their granddaughters.
I’ve been passed down through generations.
One would tire of me and send me back, and decades later a woman with her same eyes or voice would point at my cage and say this one, I want this one, never knowing her grandmother had said the same words about the same fae a lifetime ago.
Generation after generation. And not one of them ever paid for what they did to me and others of my kind. What they continue to do.
The female whimpers in her sleep, and I blink, refocusing on my surroundings.
Her lips have gone blue at the edges, her body curling tighter against the cold. She’s shivering now, a constant tremor that runs through her from head to toe.
I could warm the cave with a single word.
I don’t. Not yet. Instead, I watch as her trembling worsens. She wanted my head on her wall yesterday. A few minutes of cold is a fair exchange for that.
My fingers flex against my thigh. I’m tempted to wrap them around her throat. I force them to stillness. If she dies, she’s useless to me.
I whisper a word, and the cost of even that small magic drives a spike through my skull. Warmth spreads through the cave, her shivering slows, and the blue fades from her lips. She sighs in her sleep, her body relaxing slightly as the cold releases its grip.
Once again, I have taken steps to stop her from dying.
This human female. This princess. This creature who came to the forest planning to kill me for sport.
I think about the moment I first saw her. The way she pushed through the undergrowth and stopped, staring at me while I hung tangled in the branches. I could smell the fear on her, but underneath it, there was excitement. This was her hunt, and she’d found her prey.
Her prey. She had no idea what she was looking at.
She reached for an arrow, nocked it, and drew the string back, and sighted along the shaft, aiming for my heart. Her fingers were ready to release. One twitch, and it would be over. And the fury that washed over me …
I was a warrior. A being whose name was whispered in terror. And I was about to be killed by a pampered mortal princess and her iron-tipped arrows.
Then she met my gaze. And in that moment, I realized I wasn’t ready to die. So I stopped pretending to be safe, and let her see the truth.
Pathetic human.
The words came out rough. Her face drained of color, and the bow wavered wildly.
I tore free, and crossed the clearing before she could react. My hand closed around her wrist, and the bow clattered to the ground. She opened her mouth to scream, and my other hand clamped over her face.
She was warm, and soft, and trembling, her breath coming in panicked bursts.
I spun her around and pulled her back against my chest, locking my arm around her ribs.
She struggled. Of course she struggled, but it didn't matter.
I was stronger, even with the collar burning against my throat.
I held her there, her heart hammering against my arm.
After so long being the one held down, here I had a human in my grip.
A king's daughter.
Every hand that had ever touched me. Every woman who used me and died in her bed, never knowing what I would have done to her if I’d ever gotten free.
All of it rose up at once, white-hot and screaming, and I wanted to crush her.
I wanted to feel her bones splinter under my arm.
I wanted to hear her scream the way they made me scream.
My hand tightened on her jaw. My arm wrapped tighter around her ribs. A little more pressure and they would start to give.
I held there. Shaking with the effort of not killing her.
But dead, she was worth nothing. Alive, she gave me options.
So I choked it down. I buried it, the same way I’d learned to bury everything.
I used her blood to break the collar, and the wards on the forest. And when her fragile human body began to fail, I healed her.
She murmurs in her sleep again, her face troubled. I watch her, and think about all the ways I could repay what her kind did to me in her flesh. The others might have died in their beds.
But this one won’t.
This one is mine.