He jerked her and she caught a scream of pain in her throat. He wasn’t going to tell her, anyway. The head of the guards had given a command, and he was executing it, and maybe he didn’t even know.
“Would you treat your female this way?” she grunted.
“You’re not a female to me. You’re not anything.”
Nadya gasped, even though she shouldn’t be surprised. That really was the answer, wasn’t it.
When they got to the stairs at the end of the hallway, he set her backon her feet with such roughness that pain shot up her calves and into her knees. On the ascent, she did what she could to stay upright, gathering her robing so she didn’t trip, trying to stay on her feet because the alternative was so much more agonizing. It was hard to track what floor they were on, the landings a blur as the subterranean levels were climbed.
After what seemed like an hour of hiking, she was pushed through a door, and as she got a hazy look at what was ahead, cold fear replaced all other sensory inputs.
Down at the end of a long corridor of closed doors, a towering wall seemed like the only thing in the whole world. Added as part of the build-out that had occurred before the prison camp’s population had moved to the location, it was raw and unpainted, swaths of plaster marking the seams of unpainted gray panels. But none of that mattered.
It was the stains.
Brown stains had seeped into the matte gray, felt-like surface, and though the swaths of discoloration were varied in saturation and shape, there was a pattern. They were between sets of pegs… where the prisoners being punished or controlled were chained.
The guard prodded her, and she stumbled forward. Any time she slowed, she was poked in the back by what felt like a finger, but she suspected was a gun. As she passed by the closed doors, she could smell the drugs, the chemical sting in the air making her eyes water—and she thought about the prisoners who were forced to sit at tables and add compounds to raw cocaine and heroin, and then package the powders into saleable units. For hours. For no pay and little food.
At the wall, the guard’s hard hands spun her around and put her back against the plaster and the felt. Chains seethed with a metal chorus as her wrists were locked on the wooden pegs. She didn’t fight him. There was no way she could overpower the guard in any way that would work in her favor, and she was already bruised and fighting for breath from pain.
As the guard stepped back, there was a pause—perhaps he expected her to beg him for mercy, or at the very least ask him why again—
The knife came out of a holster at his waist, and as its blade caught the light with a flash, she began to tremble.
Leaning into her, he put the sharp edge to her throat, the hood’s folds providing no protection at all. Underneath her robing, she closed her eyes and realized she had always been waiting for death to come to her, but as a far-off kind of thing. She had lived through an attempt on her life already; she’d assumed old age would get her—
The male jerked his arm, the blade slicing through the hood.
“No!” But she wasn’t begging for her life. “No—”
As he peeled the folds back, Nadya ducked her head and leaned to the side, chasing the covering until it was gone. And then the lights were too bright for her eyes. Turning her face to her shoulder, she did what she could to hide herself.
“Jesus… Christ,” the guard whispered.
When he stepped back, she wanted to tell him to stop staring. But she couldn’t speak.
And then someone approached.
The footfalls were heavy, the pace quick, the arrival imminent. Nadya guessed who it was, and was not wrong.
The head of the guards stopped next to her male with the knife—and for a moment, all she did was stare.
“My hood,” Nadya said hoarsely. “Please… give it back to me.”
The other female cleared her throat. “You know why you’re here.”
“No, I do not.” Nadya squeezed her eyes closed, as if she could make the world go away if she just didn’t see anything. “Why.”
There was more silence, but she wasn’t going to solve that problem. It would just be a waste of energy.
“You killed my guard,” the female in charge said in a low voice.
“I most certainly did not. You will find all your males doing well, with several having already left—”
“No, the one whose corpse was removed. I have an eyewitness.”
Nadya frowned into the shoulder of her robe. “Then he doesn’t know what he saw—”