Two men yank my arms painfully behind my back. When I cry out from the twist of my shoulders, they backhand me across the face and my split lip wells with blood. I spit some on the floor and go quiet as they pull zip ties and stiff cords that feel like wires around my wrists and then my elbows.
Then a thick, rough sack pulls down over my face and steals the world away. I can barely breathe, and in few heartbeats it becomes stifling hot inside the sack. Pushed forward with a gun in my back, I stumble to an unknown destination in the dark, my feet scuffing over rough concrete ground.
“Who are you?” I say quietly.
“Shut up,” she says, though I can hear the smirk in her voice.
“Are you the Resistance?”
“Shut up, you stupid American whore.”
“Please, you have to let me go.”
The gun jabs hard into my back. I stifle a cry of pain.
“Why should I do that?”
“I don’t want him to hurt you.”
“You don’t want him to hurt us?”
She laughs, but she doesn’t know how serious I am. I mean it. When he finds out about this he’ll kill them all.
Oh God.
I know why they did it now, why they waited. Oh sure, snatching me from the castle would have been difficult, but this same woman has been in and out a dozen times, I’ve seen her everywhere. They could have grabbed me anytime they wanted.
They waited until right now because he doesn’t know if I’m coming back. I stifle a sob and tears well in my eyes. Not like this, please. He’ll think I left him. He’ll think I abandoned him.
As they sit me down on a thin seat—I think they’re putting me in a van—I do something I have not truly done for a long time. Not with intent. Out of panic or fatigue, without sincerity or thought. Very deliberately, silently, I pray.
Please, God. Don’t let him think I abandoned him. Gentle the rage in his heart. If you do not find it within your divine plan to guide him to me as you did before, then I beg of you at least, do not let this be the end of the man he could become. I beg of you, if this is the end you mean for me, give him a better one. Help him. Help him. Help him.
I must have said the last part aloud.
“What are you saying, whore?”
“Nothing.”
It’s the woman who hits me. Not a slap, a punch. It knocks me off the seat onto the floor and my mouth wells up with blood, throbbing. The world spins, poked through with bright pinpricks of light. She drags me up by the arms and punches me in the stomach, and I double over in agony, spitting blood on the inside of the black sack they’ve put over my head.
“I take it back,” I growl, “I can’t wait for him to find you.”
I’m a teacher. Not a saint.
“You say that as if he’d harm me,” she says, her trilling accented voice like honey. “He had his chance.”
My head pops up. Bloody cloth clings to my lips. “Good God, you’re her, aren’t you? You’re Cassandra.”
“No. I am,” a third voice intones. She must have been waiting in the van.
“I first thought to take you when we drew him away from the castle a few days ago, but there are too many loyalists, we never would have made it past the inner courtyard. Even in the hell he’s built there are still some fiercely loyal to him.”
“He told me about you. Don’t try to play a man-of-the-people card with me. You made him kill his brother.”
“A pity. I thought my Kristien would rule after Kristoff’s untimely death, but like a romantic idiot he insisted on dueling his brother for the crown and my hand. My hand, can you imagine something so foolish? Of course you can, look how you’ve taken to those ludicrous dresses.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
“Yes, I am. Intimately and slowly. I will do things to you that your pretty little mind cannot even imagine. That carnival-show torture chamber in the castle will seem like a dream to you. You’ll beg me to take you there.”
I take a deep breath, coughing from the stink of my own blood in my face. “Why? Because he loves me and not you?”
She sighs. I hear the swish of fabric as she crosses her legs. “Are you such a romantic fool as to think that matters? Of course there is an element of quid pro quo at play here. He questioned my lover, so I will show his the same courtesy. I hope he’s gotten a whelp on you. I’ll keep you alive long enough to carve it out and make you eat it.”
I blink a few times. “Your lover, what?”
It hits me. Of course. “Brad.”
“That is not his name. I admit I have a certain fondness for the idiot, he has a nice prick. He thinks he is using me and like all men he thinks the gash between our legs means our brains have leaked out. He relates to me all sorts of plans, all sorts of information. I use him. I reached out to the authorities, and I offered them something they could not refuse in return for backing my insurgency.”
“The armor,” I breathe. “You want the armor.”
“I have a suit of my own. That pretty cut on your beloved’s chest, do you think his brother gave him that? Kristien didn’t last thirty seconds against him. I put that scar there, and he gave me none in return. I would have had him, had the Phoenix Guard not run me off. What I need is the advanced prototype, the one he wears, and you will bring it to me.”