Chapter Two
I knew I was in trouble when the last of the women in my cell was released, and the guard’s sulfurous stench of malice became
spiced with the cinnamon of lust.
Mrs. Fellows shivered as the door slammed shut and was locked behind her. Even in my envy, I was relieved for her. The woman
had spent the better part of the last . . . two, was it? Two days weeping and shivering, distraught at the thought of what
had become of her nine children since she’d been arrested. All for the crime of attempting to sell her dead husband’s fairy
comb at the Midnight Market, so she and her family wouldn’t starve.
“It’ll be my brother, I expect, lately arrived in town,” Mrs. Fellows murmured more to herself than to me.
I nodded, no feeling left in my body as I leaned back against the cold stone wall. Her brother was the last in a succession
of husbands, sons, fathers, uncles, and cousins who had dutifully arrived at the prison gates to pay their wayward relation’s
way out of Fairgate ahead of their coming trial.
I met her dark gaze one last time, the rusty scent of her guilt indistinguishable from the actual rust clinging to the bars
between us. Her hands twisted in her ruined cloak, her throat working to find the words. In the end, she said nothing.
It was just as well. There was nothing she could have said. Certainly nothing that would have made me feel better. I’d told
her and the others the truth that first morning: no one was coming for me.
With one last nod, Mrs. Fellows scurried after the other guard as he strode away, not willing to be left another moment in
this hell.
The other guard, Branson, lingered. Of course he did. The pressure of his gaze was like a tongue tracing the curve of my cheek.
I fought a shudder of revulsion, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of any response.
“Looking awfully lonely in there, Red,” Branson said, giving the bars a tap with his truncheon. “How’s about I come and keep ye company tonight? Gets awfully cold down here after sunset, don’t it? I’ll keep ye warm . . .”
I wasn’t a coward, but I also wasn’t a fool. I congratulated myself for my restraint as I somehow managed to bite back the
words Not as warm as your blood when I slit your throat. I wouldn’t give him an excuse to beat me again—not that he needed justification. The guards had been empowered to brutalize
prisoners under the guise of “subduing wicked spirits.”
“Think yer above me, do ye?” he jeered.
Ignoring him seemed to annoy him more than cutting retorts, so I merely looked down at my filthy nails, studying them.
He slammed his truncheon against the bars again, and this time, my body jumped instinctively at the harsh clang. He laughed, and all I could do was swallow my bile and let him.
“Tonight then,” he promised, with a last leering look. “I’ll show ye how a little bitch deserves to be handled.”
My jaw clenched to the point of pain, every muscle in my body going rigid with the effort to remain still as he finally strode
away, whistling “The Black Needle” to himself.
Damn him, I wouldn’t let him ruin that song for me, and I wouldn’t let him touch me, either. Couldn’t.
My breath steamed around me with my harsh exhale. His body was rotting away quicker than his soul, just not quickly enough
to matter to me. Not when I knew now what happened to women at Fairgate after dark.
There had been twelve of us packed into this cell, which was barely the size of a carriage. Most of the other women had been
customers at the market, but a few were simply prostitutes who’d been walking the wrong streets as the King’s Guard had stormed
through the Brickbats. And while fate had taken it upon itself to weave our lives together, it moved quickly to unravel the
protection our numbers had provided. Branson took the utmost pleasure in returning to lead each of the others out, well aware
that he was stripping away layer after layer of defenses.
He will not touch me, I told myself, wrapping my arms around my knees.
My whole life, I’d managed to dodge every cruel trap the world set for women, but at the end of all that running, I’d managed to fall into the worst of cages.
God, or fate, or whatever greater force loomed beyond death must have had a wicked sense of humor—that, or he truly despised women.
Why else would men be born to live, while women existed only to be punished?
Stop this, I told myself, squeezing my eyes shut. Self-pity will get you nowhere here.
I leaned against the wall, just to the right of where someone had, intriguingly, carved hell’s tits into the stone. Just that, and nothing more.
Hell’s tits. I sighed, sliding my back down the wall. It was as good a descriptor as any for the situation I found myself in.
I curled around my knees like an old piece of parchment, letting the stagnant water and filth seep into my ruined skirts.
The chill gnawed on my skin with needlelike teeth, and I couldn’t gather enough warmth to my center to ward it off.
I touched the iron shackle around my ankle, flinching at the burn of raw skin beneath it. As I lifted the attached chain,
testing the weight, nausea swelled in me, roiling my empty stomach.
Arabella had told me once that the difference between hunger and starvation was a willingness to kill for a meal, of choosing
your life over another’s. It was why so many of the long-term residents of Fairgate became expert ratcatchers, and why one
never saw anything but the quickest and most wily of street cats in the Brickbats.
I wasn’t sure I was there yet. As hard as I’d fought to survive in the years since Mama’s death, I was equally uncertain I’d
be up for the challenge when the time came I was forced to try.
The thought of Arabella drew up that same fear, the same questions that had been haunting me since that night. Had she gotten
away? Or was she only a few cells down, her essence swamped by the seething stench of the prison?
Pressing my face to my knees did nothing to smother the rolling tide of horrors that assaulted my nose: unwashed bodies, human
filth, rotting food, desperation. Hell couldn’t reek half as badly as this place. It terrified me to imagine that this stench
could linger in my hair, on my skin, marking me forever.
Think, I told myself. Think . . .
If Branson came for me, would I be able to take him by surprise—cut him deep enough to take his key, unchain myself, and flee through the cell door?
Were there other guards posted at the end of the hall, or upstairs, near the entrance?
Even if I did get away, could I disappear the way I’d need to, becoming someone else?
Isn’t that what you’ve always done?
I felt blindly across the ground, slipping my hand beneath the pile of wet straw that served as my bed. My fingers closed
around Sweetie.
And to think I’d laughed when one of the other women had found it hidden behind the waste bucket, a gift from a previous occupant of the cell. Somehow,
someone—through means I preferred not to contemplate too deeply, given how thoroughly the guards had searched me—had smuggled
a gentleman’s smoking pipe into Fairgate.
While our mystery benefactor had likely hoped to trade it for better food or privileges, one of the doxies, Sally, had seen
the true opportunity it presented: she’d pressed its narrow lip against the stone ground, grinding and grinding it until it
became a sharp point.
Well. If I did manage to walk away from this festering pit of misery, I’d know a thing or two about improvised weapons.
Hours passed. That single, frail beam of sunlight that sneaked into the cell through a crack in the ceiling found me again,
and I lifted my hand, trying to catch the motes of dust drifting through it.
Then, as though I had sunk into an even deeper layer of hell, the putrid air warmed with nutmeg.
“No,” I huffed out, pushing unsteadily to my feet. My stiff, bruised body protested every movement, from trying to smooth the
tangle of loose curls around my shoulders to futilely beating the grime off my skirt. No, no, no—he couldn’t be here—
Prisoners jeered and wailed as the new arrival passed their cells, hooting with laughter at whatever reaction they’d received.
Panicked and mortified, I kicked some of the straw over the disgusting bucket we’d used as a chamber pot, but there was no
hiding the leg-iron that chained me to the bolt on the wall.
I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing the shadows would just devour me, the way they’d been trying to for days.
“Oh, Vi,” came the wrenching whisper.
I forced myself to look, a helpless anger working my lungs like bellows.
“Ye got five minutes,” Branson sneered, holding up the gold mark he’d been handed.
The world seemed to sharpen painfully, as if to cut from every angle. Because there, standing a short distance away, as if he couldn’t bring himself even a step closer to the bars, was Oliver.
What little light I’d managed to keep alive in my chest guttered and died.
I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it before, his essence. Leather reins, sweet apple, and nutmeg cologne, the smoky traces of
a gentleman’s club, a warm eagerness. There had been so many times over the last two days that I’d been tempted to search
for any hint of him in the air, but I’d never let myself imagine, not for a moment, the image of him striding down the hall
to save me. I knew it would shatter me when he didn’t come—because why would he?
And yet, somehow, it was a worse agony to have that phantom hope realized. The thought of him seeing me like this was too
much to bear. Him, one of the few people in the world who held me in something like esteem. Who . . .
Who cared for me in a way he shouldn’t have.
Oliver waited until Branson had moved down the hall to speak.
“I . . . would have come sooner, but . . .” he said, his voice scarcely above a whisper as he looked anywhere but my face.
“It took some time to discover what had happened and where you were being held.”
“Well, you’ve found me,” I rasped. “Exactly where you always said I’d end up if I kept selling at the market.”