Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 109674 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 548(@200wpm)___ 439(@250wpm)___ 366(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 109674 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 548(@200wpm)___ 439(@250wpm)___ 366(@300wpm)
A martial scream sounded. Not mine.
Nestore gripped the guard’s shirt and jerked him toward the bars. His face slammed against them, so he released my hair, and Nestore wrapped his arm around the man’s throat from behind, holding on to the bars for leverage.
The man’s eyes bulged as he struggled against Nestore’s hold, his arms flailing almost comically. I scrambled away, my heart slamming into my rib cage as I watched. Nestore pulled my pen from his trousers and rammed the tip into the guard’s eye over and over again. The man’s flailing increased, and the key chain flew out of his hand and past the bars into the aisle. Nestore released the guard when he hung limply in his grip, and he tumbled to the ground, gurgling as blood spurted out of his eyes. Nestore breathed harshly as the guard jerked, then stilled.
I was frozen in shock. Blood spread out around the head, and the stench of feces flooded my nose.
Nestore had killed this man in a horrid fashion. I wasn’t even sure why I was so shocked.
“The keys,” Nestore rasped, looking exhausted. I stumbled toward the bars and knelt, then squeezed my arm through the gap between the bars, trying to reach the dropped keys, but they were still more than an arm’s length away.
“I can’t reach them,” I whispered.
Nestore sank to the floor with his back against the bars, his chest heaving. I crawled over to him and touched his shoulder. “Thank you for saving me.”
“I’ll always save you,” he said fiercely.
I sat against the bars, so our backs were touching, and regarded the corpse with trepidation. “I hope they’ll bring us food tonight, so someone takes away the body.”
“He’s dead. You don’t have to fear the dead. Fear the living,” Nestore murmured. He was right, but the idea of spending the night with the dead body terrified me. His face was disfigured from the pen and would definitely feature in my nightmares.
“I’m worried they’ll punish you if they find out you killed him,” I whispered. “I’ll tell them I did it in self-defense.”
“They won’t care if it was self-defense, Amelia. Let me take responsibility. I didn’t save you so you’d get punished for something else. You won’t take the fall. They can’t do anything to me that they haven’t already done.”
Despite his words, I could detect a note of fear in Nestore’s voice. I wished I could protect him as he protected me. I wished we could find a way out of this.
I washed myself with the small cloth Flavia had given me for that purpose. It was rough and smelled musty by now. The cool water on my skin felt good, even as the cotton skimmed bruises and cuts. I imagined I still didn’t smell particularly good. I didn’t have any soap, so blood and sweat seemed to have ingrained themselves in my skin, but my nose was immune to it by now.
Nestore did push-ups in the cell beside mine. Nobody had come to torture either of us in ten days.
Nobody had visited us at all in more than twenty-four hours, which meant no food, and the dead body had been in a cell with me since yesterday. As he began to decay, it became increasingly difficult to ignore his presence. Nestore was pushing his body more because of these new developments.
“What do you think is going on?” I asked. Flavia hadn’t been allowed to come down here in many weeks, so I didn’t get any updates, and even before that, her visits had been rare since she’d given birth to Luciano four months ago. I hadn’t seen him yet. She didn’t want to bring him down into the basement, a decision I wholeheartedly agreed with. This wasn’t a place for a child.
Nestore paused mid push-up and looked at me before he resumed his workout, panting, “Something is in the air. I can sense it. Your father exuded animal fear the last time he came for me. Someone’s after him.”
I bit my lip. “That’s good, right?”
Nestore got on his knees, sweat trickling down his chest. The bruises and cuts had partly healed after so many days without torture, but the many scars spoke of the pain he’d endured. Seeing his missing left nipple always made my belly tighten.
Still, for the first time since Nestore had been thrown into this cell, fresh injuries didn’t slow him down. His motions were more fluid, and I caught a glimmer of anticipation in his eyes.
“The question is if the one who’s after him will be after us.”
“It can hardly get worse for you.”
“Whoever comes next might torture you in ways your father hasn’t done for various reasons. So it can get indefinitely worse for us.” His eyes moved to the man he’d killed. “Though if your father lost control over his men, your situation could already be perilous, dove.”