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One would think that after all these years, I would have stopped finding Esmaris so breathlessly intimidating.
I had lived with him for seven years, and I had perhaps seen him in more — one could say — compromising positions than likely anyone else had. But still, sometimes I would walk into a room and be momentarily stunned by him, by the way that it seemed like all of the air in a room bent towards him.
This was one of those moments.
I watched his back silhouetted against the window of his study. Like the night of the party, he wore red, though this time his jacket was a deep burgundy brocade. His hands were clasped in front of him, the line of his shoulders perfectly broad and square. The man never slouched.
He didn’t look at me.
I told myself that I had nothing to be nervous about. This was a straightforward business transaction. Nothing more. Nothing less. Serel was stationed outside the door, as Esmaris’s favored bodyguard, and I clung to the memory of the brief, encouraging smile he had given me as I walked into the room.
Still. My palms were drenched in sweat.
Say something, I willed Esmaris.
“One thousand.” As if he heard me. He still didn’t turn around. “That is significant.”
“Significantly more than the fifty silver pieces I offered you the first time,” I replied lightly, letting my smile seep into my voice but, to my relief, none of my anxiety.
“Indeed.” Esmaris turned at last, surveying me with sharp, dark eyes. That single unruly strand of peppered black hair hung on front of one eye. It was the only thing out of place in his appearance. Everything else, from the fit of his clothing to the edge of his cropped beard to the smoothness of his bound hair, was impeccable. He had to be nearing sixty by now, but he had the stance of a much younger man.
I reached a tendril into the unspoken words between us, feeling for his reaction, his thoughts. He was always difficult to read, stony and unyielding. Still, I could occasionally catch glimmers from him, especially when he was pleased with me.
Now, nothing.
“I actually have one thousand and two,” I added. “But I’m willing to give you the extra, since you’ve done so much for me.” Riding the line between a joke and the truth, flirtation and gratitude, stroking his ego and reminding him why he liked me.
No reaction. A hurt that I didn’t want to examine too closely flitted through me — a small, small part of me that, for whatever reason, had wanted him to be impressed.
“You have it?” He jerked his chin toward the bag I had brought with me, which rested near my feet. It was surprisingly heavy. It turned out one thousand gold coins was a lot of metal.
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
I did as he asked, bringing the bag to his desk and opening it. As soon as it touched the table, he yanked it upside down in one movement, dumping the coins over the
desk. If I had closed my eyes, they might have sounded like bells. Some tumbled off the desk and onto the floor.
We stood in agonizing silence until those twinkling sounds finally quieted.
“Should I make you count them?” he said. “I will if you wish. It’s all there.”
“This is a significant amount of money. How did you earn it?”
How did I earn it? What didn’t I do? I did whatever I had to. Whatever I could. “I made myself valuable wherever possible,” I said.
And look at what I did. Even the moments I weren’t proud of were worth it, for this. A pleased smile crept to the edges of my mouth.
“And what,” Esmaris hissed, “does that mean?” My smile promptly disappeared.
Shit.
“I learned from you,” I said, smoothly, pacing forward. “Business is just a matter of—”
“You whored for this money.”
His revulsion — his fury — split the air so violently that I felt like I had been slapped across the face. The ugliness of the word, the way he hurled it at me, left me momentarily speechless.
I had never even said it that way to myself. It hit harder than I thought it would.
“No, I—”
Only once. I pushed away the whisper, reminding myself that I had no regrets about what I had done.
“You and I both know that I am not stupid. You could not have gotten this money any other way.”
“I worked for it. Whoever who would hire me. Danced, conjured, scrubbed floors—”
That was the truth. I did work for it. And only one hundred of those coins came from that single night. The rest of it was hours and hours of sweat.
“Coppers, maybe. But this?” He let out a scoff so violent that I felt flecks of spittle dust my cheek. “I let you earn your silvers for dancing. But I never allowed you whore for it. To embarrass me that way.”
“I would never do that to you,” I replied, acting insulted at the thought.
“One thousand gold pieces should have taken you fifteen years,” he shot back. “Twenty, even.”
Fifteen years.
I realized in that moment that Esmaris had never intended for me to earn his absurd price — at least, not until I was either too old for his tastes or he was too old to make use of me anyway.
His anger pounded in my ears, my head, beneath my skin, but it was slowly being replaced by my own.
“I met your price. You can buy a real Valtain with that money, if it suits you. One more beautiful and more talented than me.”
“Slaves don’t have the luxury of bargains, and I don’t need your money,” Esmaris snarled. “You forgot what you are.”
My stomach fell through my feet.
“Are you aware of how well I treat you?” He straightened, eyes narrowed, clasping his hands behind his back. Silence. He expected an answer, but I suddenly didn’t trust myself to open my mouth.
I don’t need your money.
I had one plan. One goal. He had kicked out the foundation, and I felt that at any moment, my soul would topple.
“Are you?”
“Yes, Esmaris.”
“And yet.” His voice dropped so slightly that the change was barely perceptible. “You’ve gone to such great lengths to leave.”
Suddenly, it hit me. The air reeked of it—the hidden undercurrent mingling with Esmaris’s anger:
Hurt.
We stared at each other. I focused on the single wrinkle between his eyebrows, the lone sign of guarded vulnerability.
This was the man who had given me so many scars, who had stolen my freedom, who had crushed me, bent me, and beaten me. But he was also the man who remembered my favorite color, who once stayed up with me for hours after a terrible nightmare. Who had smiled down at me with an odd sort of pride the day I had demanded my freedom from him.
I leaned forward, pressing my palms against his desk, the cold gold coins sticking to my sweaty skin.
And I said just one word: “Please.”
He looked at me for one long moment, and I could hardly breathe.
Please, do this for me. If any part of you has ever cared for me. Please.
Then, I felt a door slam shut, a blanket of ice silencing Esmaris’s internal conflict.
“Get off my desk. Kneel.”
I don’t need your money.
Gods, what was I going to do? “On your knees.”
I dropped so hard that the polished wood floor bruised my knees.
I don’t need your money.
His voice, echoing in my mind, drowned out everything else, even the shattering of my hopes.
I didn’t hear Esmaris’s boots cross the room or his return as he stood behind me.
I don’t need your money.
I didn’t hear the sharp crack of the whip cutting through the air.
But even through my haze, I certainly felt the pain tear across my back, splitting me in two. My throat released a gasp, a whimper.
Crack. Two.
Crack. Three.
And it kept going, and going, and going.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
Five. Ten. Twelve. Sixteen.
I don’t need your money.
What was I going to do?
I refused to scream, refused to cry, even as I bit my lip so hard it bled. Just like I had that night, years ago—the night I abandoned my family, my mother, because she believed I could do something more. Be something more.
Crack. Twenty.
But she had been wrong because Esmaris was going to kill me.
This thought slowly solidified into certainty through the fog of my fading consciousness.
He was going to kill me because I had made a critical miscalculation. I had foolishly thought his twisted, confusing affection would help me escape. Instead, it would crush me because Esmaris only possessed or destroyed, and if he couldn’t do one, he would do the other.
I wondered if Serel could hear this, through that thick door. I wondered if he would try to help me. I hoped he wouldn’t. He’d be punished for it.
Crack. Twenty-five.
Esmaris was going to kill me. That bastard.
A fire lit within me. As I heard the whoosh of Esmaris raising his arm over his head, I flipped myself over, ignoring the agony that flared as my back touched the ground.
“If you’re going to murder me,” I spat, “you’re going to look me in the eye as you do it.”
Esmaris’s arm was raised, the whip slicing through the air behind him, a cruel, stony wrinkle of disdain on his nose. My blood flecked his shirt, blending into the burgundy brocade. Something barely visible flickered in his face. His eyes dropped from mine.
“Look at me!”
I didn’t come this far just to flicker out like a snuffed candle. I’d haunt him.
Look at me, you coward. Look at the eyes of the little girl you met eight years ago. The little girl you saved and then destroyed.
Esmaris only deepened his sneer, as if he could silence me by wiping me from existence.
Crack.
Twenty-six. I brought my arms up to shield my face but didn’t blink, not even as the barb nearly grazed the tip of my nose.
“Look. At. Me.”
You will see my eyes in the darkness every night, every time you blink, every time you look at the girl who will replace me…
Twenty-seven. My forearms were on fire. Darkness blurred the edges of my vision.
LOOK AT ME.
And then, everything stopped.
Esmaris’s chin snapped towards me. His arm froze. That dark gaze met mine in one jerking movement, as if pulled by a string I held twisted around my finger, as if I had reached out with invisible hands and forced him to see me.
I realized, with surreal amazement, that I could feel his mind perched within my grasp. And for one fractured second, I saw something raw, felt something raw, in his gaze.
There were a million moments I might have seen in his eyes then. Moments I shared with a captor, or a lover, or a father, or some warped combination of the three.
Maybe I might have felt something.
But instead, I just thought about how fragile he felt beneath my invisible grasp. How sweet his fear tasted on my tongue as he realized—as we both realized—that I was capable of more than little butterflies.
His fear turned to rage. His arm broke free from me, the whip lifting, the barb slicing—
And before I knew what I was doing, I yanked on that thread between us as hard as I could.
A deafening crack split the air. I cringed, thinking it was the whip, but the pain never came.
A crash. I opened my eyes to see Esmaris stumble over a chair, falling to his knees in front of me.
I pushed myself upright as he fell, nearly colliding with him. His extended hand almost brushed my cheek but instead grabbed a fistful of my long, silver hair, clutching it with a strength that belied the rest of his body.
I was numb as he yanked me down to the ground with him, my palm instinctively bracing against his chest.
Look at me, my command echoed.
We both obeyed. I didn’t blink, didn’t look away, as I watched the fury drain from his face, leaving behind a raw sadness that stripped my flesh more viciously than those twenty-seven lashes.
“Tisaanah—”
I barely heard Serel’s gasp. When I lifted my head, my friend stood in the doorway, hand on the hilt of his sword, staring at me in horror.
I must have been quite a sight: soaked in blood, my back shredded, holding the dead body of the most powerful man in Threll.
