Chapter 10 Forla
FORLA
Ireturn from the market to find Talia and Brom slaughtered in their own kitchen, throats slit, blood pooling on the floor I swept this morning.
My screams echo through the empty house until my voice gives out, until nothing remains but the terrible silence of death and the metallic taste of copper in the air.
On the table: gold coins, still warm from Dark Elf hands. Thirty pieces of silver, scattered like fallen stars across the wooden surface where we shared our last meal together. The price of an orc's freedom. The price of their lives.
I hold Talia's cooling hand and understand the cruel mathematics of survival with crystalline clarity. They betrayed Thoktar to protect me—and died for their trouble. The Dark Elves left no witnesses, no loose ends, no complications to their neat little transaction.
My safety cost three lives: theirs and his.
The guilt threatens to tear me apart, but rage burns hotter. They're all dead because I was a coward. Because I chose safety over love, duty over desire, because I let fear make my choices for me. While I sat in my room last night drowning in self-pity, killers were already on their way.
I could have warned him. Could have run after him, shouted his name into the darkness, told him what Brom was planning. Instead, I listened to hushed conspiracies and did nothing, paralyzed by the terrible weight of impossible choices.
Now everyone pays the price for my cowardice.
Blood soaks into my skirt as I kneel beside them, my parents in everything but blood, the people who saved me from slavery and gave me something beyond freedom. They gave me family. Love. A home where I mattered to someone.
And I let them die for it.
"I'm sorry," I whisper to Talia's still face. "I'm so sorry I wasn't strong enough to save you all."
But sorry changes nothing. Sorry doesn't bring back the dead or free the captured or undo the betrayals that led to this moment. Sorry is just another word for helpless, and I'm done being helpless.
Hours pass in blood-soaked silence before I hear the barn door creak. My heart leaps—could it be Thoktar, escaped somehow, returned to find me? But the footsteps are wrong, too fluid for orc boots, and when the kitchen door opens it's Nazim who enters.
His serpentine eyes take in the carnage and soften with understanding. He's seen enough violence to read the story written in blood and scattered coins—betrayal, murder, the cleanup that follows when Dark Elves tie off loose ends.
"The orc?" he asks gently.
"Taken." The word tastes like ash and failure. "They took him to the arena in Eelry. For the games."
Nazim nods grimly, unsurprised. "Gospar pays well for fresh gladiators. And orcs..." He doesn't finish the sentence, doesn't need to. Everyone knows what happens to orcs in the fighting pits.
"I have to get him back." The words surprise us both with their steel, with the absolute certainty that cuts through grief like a blade.
"Child," Nazim says carefully, "the arena is a fortress. Gospar has guards, Dark Elf magic, defenses that would challenge an army. And you're—"
"What? A scared little slave girl who hides when danger comes calling?" I stand on unsteady legs, blood staining my hands like evidence of crimes I should have prevented. "You're right. That's exactly what I am."
I walk to the kitchen cupboard and pull out the knife Brom used for slaughtering chickens. The blade gleams in the afternoon light, sharp enough to cut through bone if necessary.
"But I'm done being that person."
Nazim studies my face, reading the determination written in blood and tears. Slowly, his expression shifts from concern to something like respect.
"The arena fights are spectacle," he says quietly. "Rich patrons pay gold to watch slaves kill each other. If we could get inside as buyers, as slavers ourselves..."
"Then we'd need a plan. And weapons. And more luck than either of us deserves." I turn the knife over in my hands, feeling its weight, its potential. "Can you do it? Can you get us inside?"
"I have... connections. From my old life. People who remember me as something other than the reformed fool who feeds stray cats." His smile is sharp as winter wind. "But this is suicide, child. Even if we succeed, even if we free him, they'll hunt us to the ends of the earth."
"Let them come."
The words ring with a finality that surprises me. The scared little slave girl who clung to safety is gone, burned away in the crucible of this blood-soaked kitchen. In her place stands something harder, sharper. Something capable of walking into hell itself.
As we bury Talia and Brom in the garden where she grew her healing herbs, I make my own vow. Thoktar saved my life in that barn, showed me what it meant to be cherished instead of used. Now I'll save his, or die trying.
The scared little slave girl is gone. In her place stands a woman with a knife in her hand and vengeance in her heart. A woman who's learned the difference between surviving and living, between safety and cowardice.
A woman who's done letting fear make her choices.
They took my love, murdered my family, and turned my home into a slaughterhouse. But they made one crucial mistake.
They left me alive.
And I'm going to make them pay for that oversight.