Chapter 10 #2
My hair was still braided now, but only loosely. Seized with sudden inspiration, I turned my head side to side, tossing it, loosening the thick mass even more, doing everything in my power to free the strands enough to obscure my back. Could it work? Could it be enough? Please, please, please.
Crack.
I heard the piske first before my body communicated the pain to my mind. It could have only been a fraction of a moment, but time had a way of stopping, holding its breath in instances like this, when life hung in the balance, caught between the anticipation of pain and pain itself.
And then it found me. The wait was over.
I was engulfed. My skin broke, peeled back, split from my muscle and tissue—the meat of me.
This was pain. Raw. Stripped to its barest form.
I opened my mouth wide in a silent scream.
I felt a fool. All my life, and I didn’t know real pain.
The discomfort I felt when injured: the whippings, the time I fell down stairs, when I’d been so miserably saddle sore in the crossing.
Those occurrences had been nothing. It was all a pale echo of this, the agony in my back so blinding, so bright, so crippling, I could not move, could not breathe. Could not cry out.
My eyes went wide, rolling as my brain slowed and digested in halting bits of recognition.
Oh. Wait. Wait. That hurt. Still hurt. Hurt so much. Hurt not stopping. Hurt. Hurt. Hurt.
I fought it, trying to push past, determined to claw my way through it.
Gritting my teeth, I panted, swallowed steam, bidding my dragon to calm, commanding my blood to obey my will.
My head f lung back on my shoulders. I shook out my hair, unraveling my braid even more, hoping to conceal my back even as impossible and unlikely as that seemed.
Crack.
My dragon roared inside me. My skin snapped. Too hot, hissing like oil in a burning pan. I didn’t have to see myself to know what it looked like. I knew my flesh winked and glistened red-gold. A transformation, thankfully, too subtle to be noticed in the dark.
Please let it be the only transformation.
Steam filled my nose, and I inhaled deep and hard, drawing the heat back inside, pushing it down low. My dragon prowled inside me, looking for a way out, gnawing at the walls. It wanted to devour whatever—whoever—was inflicting this pain upon me.
I held it in, shaking from misery, from restraint.
I dragged my hair across my back, across my oozing wounds until the strands grew heavy and wet.
Warmth trickled down the slope of my back.
Blood … dripping to pool at the base of my spine.
Despair settled over me. It couldn’t be hidden.
Not with Stig at the end of the whip, looking for this very thing.
Please be red. Please be red.
Crack.
I arched into the unrelenting wall of the tree, grinding skin and bone into bark as though I could flee the blows. Only there was nowhere to go.
Without the ropes, I would have collapsed, and I despised this weakness in myself. My head fell back, my neck boneless, unable to support it.
My eyes rolled, straining, observing a dizzying blur of faces around me. The soldiers watched this spectacle of me. I read no satisfaction in their expressions. Several of them averted their faces, turning away as though what was happening to me was too much for them to bear.
They might take commands from the Terror of the Borderlands, but they were humans with consciences. They did not condone what was happening to me.
The coppery scent of blood teased my nose. I strained for a glimpse over my shoulder, to see the evidence of my weakness, my failure—the betrayal of my body.
Crack.
Blood sprayed. Droplets spattered onto my face, onto the tree—my arms. Even onto my lashes. I blinked. Red blood.
I did it.
Pride lanced through me, bright and pure as the pain.
I gasped a wheezy chuckle of relief. I didn’t know how much longer I could last, but I’d controlled my blood this far.
Longer than I had ever done when we trained in the pride.
I was not the same girl Arkin attacked and caught off guard in the woods.
I was prepared. I was in control of myself.
Crack.
This time I felt the barbed tips of dragon scales tear deeper through muscle and sinew and strike bone.
Spots danced before my eyes. Blackness crept in at the edges of my vision. I was slipping, my grip loosening. I struggled, pushing back.
Then Stig was there, at my side, his breath damp in my ear. “You think me a fool? You think I don’t remember? Why do you bleed red? How is that possible? More of your fucking magic?”
Whatever I thought to say came out an incoherent mumble.
He changed tactics, speaking in a gentler voice.
“Tamsyn.” He pushed the hair from my sweating face with his cold fingers almost gingerly.
“There was a time I would have given you anything. Done anything for you.” Accusation weighted his every word.
As far as he was concerned, this was my fault.
He’d loved me … and I’d betrayed him by being a thing most vile, most unforgivable. “Tell me the truth and this all ends.”
I moistened by lips, looking out at him through blurring eyes. “You should get on with it.”
His brown eyes flattened. He stepped back, cracking the piske on the air as though warming up for something big, something momentous.
I clenched my fingers around my bindings, bracing myself, guessing what that would be.
CRACK.
One of my ribs snapped, and I was no longer silent. I screamed. He was breaking me one bone at a time. There was no way I could last. No way I could hide my blood much longer. My masquerade would soon end.
I tasted death in my mouth.
Sparks popped and crackled in my throat. I smelled the smoke in my nostrils and blood thick as black char on the air. Even as I felt myself igniting, even as I could not escape my bonds, I struggled to suppress my instinct to defend, to strike, to let my fire out.
Sweat beaded my sweltering skin, and I shook, battered within and without.
Flames licked inside me to break free, burning at my walls, and I wondered if I could die this way, internally combust—or would it be Stig delivering the final death blow?
I clung to the tree, my body so hot I could smell smoking wood, taste the acrid coarseness against my lips. I dragged cold air into my lungs, desperate to quench the angry embers.
I tried to breathe through the fire … through the pain. Tears dampened my cheeks, and tendrils of steam lifted. I buried my face into the trunk of the tree.
Suddenly I was hit from behind, engulfed by the scent of strawberries—but this time it was not the piske striking me. A body rammed into me. Wild sobs, not my own, filled my ears, spilling against my neck. Fingers curled around my shoulders, clinging tight.
“Stop! Stop it! Leave her be!”
It all happened in a flash: Alise throwing herself against me, and the whip, already flying, landing.
Crack.