Brown eyes glare out of a ruddy face, his chin prickled with week-old hair like spines on a cactus. I can smell the alcohol on him, so strong it overpowers the trash beneath me. He’s probably been into the cups for hours.
“Zakir.” I can’t keep the guilt out of my voice, am barely able to look him in the eye as I slide down from my spot to stand in front of him.
He puts his hands on his hips, making the sage-colored vest he’s wearing gape at his hairy chest. “You got wax in your ears? I said what the hell are you doing?”
Hiding. Dreaming. Pretending. Avoiding.
As if he can hear the silent answer in my head, he sneers at me, teeth stained from pipe smoke and pints of henade. Lips cracked from too many curses and verbal kicks and cruel deals.
Ever since the long moon came and marked the new year, Zakir’s duties for me have changed. By his count, I’m fifteen years old. An Orean adult.
“I was just...” An excuse doesn’t come to my tongue quick enough.
Zakir slaps me on the back of my head, making my neck snap forward. It’s the only place he ever hits me now. My gold skin bruises a dark, burnished color rather easily, but no one can see the marks beneath my hair.
“You were supposed to be at The Solitude an hour ago!” he snarls, getting down close to my face. “Bastard came in hollering to me that you never showed, and the guy I had watching you said you must’ve snuck out the back door.”
Wrong. I climbed out the broken window in the cellar. Easier for me to make my escape down the back street behind the inn. The other option would’ve been the side alley, and that’s always full of feral dogs fighting for the scraps left in the bins.
“You fucking hearing me?”
I grab my dirty skirts and squeeze, as if I’m trying to pop the sound right out of his voice until it bursts like a grape. “I don’t want to go to The Solitude again.”
My voice trundles out like the roll of an uneven marble across the ground. I don’t even like to think about the inn, let alone talk about it. Despite its name, solitude is the last thing I’ll find there. There, where my innocence was stolen like grubby fingers dipped into strangers’ pockets on the street. All I’ll find in The Solitude is the oppression of unwelcome gazes, the trappings of repulsive touch.
Zakir’s face hardens, and I think he’s going to smack my head again with his meaty, ringed fingers, but he doesn’t. I wonder how much of my hard-earned coin went into buying him those encrusted gold gems.
“I don’t give a fish-frying shit what you want. You work for me, Auren.”
Desperation tightens my throat, cutting off my air with its grip. “Then send me back to the streets to beg on the corner or pickpocket the marketers,” I plead. “Just don’t send me there. I can’t do that again.” My eyes inadvertently fill up. Another thing in Derfort that floods.
Zakir sighs, but that hateful sneer doesn’t loose from his face. “Ech, don’t give me that weepy act. I kept you off your back for this long, which is more than I can say most flesh traders would’ve done. If I’m not making a profit off you, then I have no need to keep you,” he warns. “You got it good with me. Remember that, girl.”
Good.
That word trills through my head as I think of my life for the past ten years. Lots of other kids have come and gone, but I’ve stayed the longest because my strange golden skin attracts him the kind of attention that he’s made profitable. But not once, in all of that time, would I ever say I’ve had it good.
Forced to beg on the streets all day and pickpocket at night, I had to learn to make my strange looks work for me while I roamed the port city. It was either that or I had to clean Zakir’s house top to bottom, scrubbing surfaces until my fingers cracked and my knees hurt. Though, there was never really getting the cellar clean. It always dripped with cold and mildew and loneliness.
There are usually ten to thirty of us down there, crammed together beneath rotting blankets and old sacks. Kids sold and purchased and worked. Kids who never play or learn or laugh. We sleep and we earn coin, and that’s pretty much it. Friendship is always squashed, nonexistent, while meanness and a competitive edge is constantly cultivated under Zakir’s watchful eyes. Just dogs kept salivating to fight each other over a bone.
But I have to look on the bright side. Because even though it’s not good...it could be worse.
“What’d you think was gonna happen?” he huffs out, like I’m a naive idiot. “You knew this was coming, because you’ve seen the other girls. You know the rule, Auren.”
I look him steadily in the eye. “Earn my keep.”
“That’s right. You earn your keep.” Zakir checks me over, gaze stopping on my muddied hem as a frustrated cough puffs up from his pipe-burnt throat. “You’re a damn mess, girl.”
Normally, being a mess is part of the orphan beggar child act, but I’ve moved on from that. Being fifteen meant Zakir changed my clothes from patched up scraps to ladies’ dresses.
When he brought me my first dress, I thought I looked pretty. I was actually stupid enough to think he’d given it to me as a birthday gift. There were real pink laces at the front and a bow at the back, and it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen since I’ve lived here.
But that was before I realized that pretty dress meant something ugly.
“Get to The Solitude,” Zakir tells me, his tone elbowing aside any room for argument.
Dread settles in my stomach as his eyes drag back up. “But—”