Chapter 1
FELORé
Ihad no idea how old I was.
I supposed it was safe to say I was in my mid-twenties, but birthdays weren’t something we celebrated in the orphanage where I grew up.
In a place where compassion was a rarity, you learned to scrape by on little. Little acknowledgement. Little food. Little hope.
The only day we were celebrated was on our Choosing Day. It was when a human’s future was determined for them by nothing more than a quick glance and a feeling of what that human should become. A whole life decided with less attention than one might give to a rat in the street.
Maybe that was why it felt so personal to me—why my hatred for them was concentrated in my blood like a thick syrup. I wasn’t just any human living under their tyrannical rule. I was their human whore.
In other words, I was demon food.
Not that we were allowed to call them demons anymore. Oh, heavens no, child.
If you let it slip, it would be the last time you said it. It’d be the last time you said anything at all, as the punishment was a swift knife to the base of your slandering tongue.
There was a wall in my village where they nailed them all. Over time, they looked less like tongues and more like leathered fruit, which was a strange and horrifying sight to any starving human.
To their faces, I called them by their proper name, and I did it with a lifetime of manufactured respect that made my mouth pucker in bitterness:
Vultae.
But behind their backs, I cursed their vile existence. Every time one smiled at me, no matter how pretty he was, I fantasized how it’d feel to spill his blood with my bare hands. To take his life as he slept so soundly on pillows spun from the finest silk.
Not that I’d ever get the chance. But a boy could dream.
“Feloré,” said the brothel’s latest newcomer. “Are you still awake in there?”
The brothel keeper usually put new whores on a lounge next to mine so they could learn from someone seasoned. I’d forgotten this one’s name, but his voice reminded me of a scratchy cat’s mew. One somewhere between its eighth and ninth life.
I’d draped my legs over the back of my amethyst-colored sofa, so I could hang my head off the side, flipping the room upside down.
I’d tried my hardest to wipe clean some of these questionable stains that were here long before me, but it didn’t help.
They were encrusted in time, each promising a sinful story.
This brothel had existed before the Great War and before the vultae had taken their place as supreme rulers. It was a free-to-choose type of society back then, or so I’d heard. Now, this was a state-sanctioned brothel and one of hundreds throughout the kingdom.
“Hello in there?” the newcomer asked, his voice frail and his words a little slurred.
His tongue must’ve still been swollen from the metal pipette they pierced through it when they gave us the title of concubine. They welded it on each tip so it could never be removed. Like a branding.
“Tell me you’re awake,” he said.
I let my eyes drift shut as the blood rushed to my head, making it feel like it was full of cotton. “Barely.”
It’d been a slow day at the brothel. Only two vultae had visited all day, and while one had chosen me, he only paid for an hour. That was barely enough to make quota.
“I feel like I’m going to pass out,” he said. “I’m starving.”
I hated to tell him it didn’t get better no matter how hard you worked. We were all starving.
“Did you not ration your food like I told you?” I asked, smearing a hand over my face.
Just like him, I lay mostly naked, covered only with a gossamer amethyst robe to match my sofa, but unlike him, I had the finest spot in the house.
It was a cubed cutout in the wall that’d been encrusted every inch with the bellies of iridescent seashells to give it a soft but dramatic glow. As of this month, I’d been here six years, making me one of the brothel’s longest workers.
Not that seniority got me anything besides the nook, and on the rare occasion, jewelry I cared nothing about.
The newcomer poked his head inside my nook. The sheer drapes, fashioned with tiny shells along their trim, clinked as he slid them aside. “I ate the last of my food. I had to.”
I could sense what was coming, which was why I shook my head and preemptively said, “No.”
“Do you have any food?”
“No.”
“Please?” he asked, his voice quivering. “I’ll take anything, and I’ll pay you back. I promise.”
I pinned him with a look, but I was still upside down, so it was difficult to tell if he caught it.
“I haven’t been paid in two weeks, Feloré,” he said. “I haven’t had anything to eat in days.”
“I tried to warn you. It’s the slow season. The seas are too rough, and the lack of sailors makes a difference.”
“I know, but I don’t have anything left. I can barely think straight.”
Gods. I scrunched my face tight as I rubbed my eyes. Dammit. Dammit.
My anklet and the spindly silver earring I wore—gifts from the brothel owner—jangled as I pushed myself up to a seat. I reached into my satchel hidden behind one of the legs of the lounge and fished out a small purplish apple I’d been saving.
His face lit up like a child who’d been gifted a pony when I presented it to him. He crawled into my nook and onto my sofa where he tucked his knees beneath him.
He was bones. Skin and bones. “The whole thing?”
My stomach protested at the thought of giving the whole thing away, but he wouldn’t make it very far if he was too hungry to work. The moment I nodded, he snatched it from my hand and crunched into it, chewing like he couldn’t be bothered to taste it.
I couldn’t help but smile a little. He was cute. Really cute. It was the mousy curls, the boxy teeth, and the brown eyes that were so big they looked like a struggle to shut. Something about him reminded me of my little brother.
Maybe it was the way he was fresh from the orphanage and dripping in naivety. I ate all my food. Of course, he did. It was going to be a long, hard road for him. If I wasn’t careful, I’d take him under my wing, too. Then I’d have another mouth to feed.
I really had to stop doing that.
“Feloré,” said our keeper Jaxlyn, where he suddenly stood at the foot of the nook, peering down through his spectacles at a leather-bound paper register in his hands. “As usual, you made quota. Here’s your cut.”
I held out my palm as he stacked a pile of seven coins into it, one for each day.
“Lennox, I’m sorry. You did not. Better luck next week.”
I stole a glance at the new guy, or apparently Lennox, who slouched a little more, his shoulders rounding forward, highlighting his skeletal frame. He looked like he might cry if he wasn’t so exhausted.
The rules weren’t fair. Newcomers were expected to make the same weekly numbers as a seasoned whore, and yet they didn’t have a base of frequent lovers, nor were they given any of the special touches that demons loved so much.
No jewelry or silken trinkets. No bits of sparkling stone for their hair.
Although I wasn’t convinced any of it mattered. In my experience, the vultae didn’t care how you’d been outfitted. You could be painted head-to-toe in glimmering gold, and it was like they either saw you or they didn’t.
He resumed with the apple, gnawing around the core until it was just a pile of seeds and rigid pieces in his palm. He’d probably eat that, too.
I tried to drag my attention from him and focus on the coins in my hand. It wasn’t my obligation to feed him. People perished all the time. If he didn’t make it, it wasn’t my problem. It fucking wasn’t.
Then he did eat the seeds—just swallowed them whole like they were tiny capsules of medicine—and licked the stickiness from his hand with his tongue so red and swollen from his fresh piercing.
My heart, the frozen brick it was, melted.
I slid my gaze to Jaxlyn as he continued his rounds, sighing in defeat at what I was about to do.
The shelled drapes tinkled when I shoved them aside to hop from my nook.
“Hey,” I said, saddling up behind Jaxlyn as he stopped at the next sofa. “Listen. You have to give him something. He’s going to starve to death, and I can’t watch it. You know I can’t.”
He swiveled around, face scrunched. “Who?”
“Obviously him.” I pointed. “The new guy. Lennox, I think.”
Jaxlyn squinted over my shoulder for a moment, then dismissed the thought, gaze back down at his register, like someone starving to death was so common it wasn’t even worth discussing. “Well, you know how these things go. That’s life.”
“No, it’s cruelty. He’s on his third week with no money, and he’s already out of food.” I tried pacing into his path, but he sidestepped me. “We can’t just let him suffer. He needs an advance.”
“Oh, Feloré, do not start with me.” Jaxlyn peered down through his spectacles, finger stopping on the next name. “That’s not how it works, and you know it. Lucia, I’m sorry, you did not make quota this week.”
“It could work that way just this once,” I said. “Come on. One coin. You have the money right there.”
“It’s obviously not my money—”
“Then it should be no bother if one coin goes missing.”
“You want me to steal from the brothel?”
I almost laughed out loud. Was he joking? You didn’t survive without stealing. They’d designed it that way. “Why not? Because the brothel doesn’t steal from you? And me? And him?”
He glanced over his shoulder, then mumbled, “You should mind yourself a little better. You don’t want to get caught saying the wrong thing.”
“Like how there shouldn’t even be a fucking quota?”
“Shh, Feloré—”
“Like how it’s a deplorable system? We should get paid per feeding, and you know it.”
His eyes rounded. “If you have such a problem with Terrek’s policies, that’s fine, but leave me out of it. Better yet, why don’t you go take it up with him?”
Terrek, a vultus and the owner of this fine establishment, would sooner have his eyes plucked out by a crow than listen to what I thought about his policies.
I glanced once more at Lennox, who’d curled onto his side, just a pile of bones.
“Fine.” I wheeled toward the door.
“Feloré,” Jaxlyn said. Then when I didn’t respond, he shouted, “Feloré! Have you gone completely mad? I wasn’t serious. Do not bother Terrek. You know better.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. You’ll get yourself hurt.”
It wouldn’t be the first time. I shoved the door open with a loud whack and trudged toward Terrek’s study. And it wouldn’t be the last.