Page 46 of A Broken Promise (the Freckled Fate #1)

46

T remendous crowds were gathered around. Some came to celebrate Death Day, some came out to see the explosion and what was left of the ballroom hall. We snuck below the shadow of the wall until we were far enough from the gates that we could mingle with the crowd. Slowly squeezing in between the gawking, gossiping people, only occasionally glancing over our shoulder to make sure we weren’t followed.

The crowds slowly thinned out as we went further into the city. The well-taken-care-of shops and the neat townhomes were completely dark and only the tall streetlights lit up the curved cobbled streets.

I could no longer hear the noisy masses; now almost completely alone, Priya and I walked hastily down the streets of Svitar. I tensed, passing another group of drunk out-of-their-mind patrons. They were so blissfully unaware of the two assassins amidst them, so oblivious to the tight grip on our half-drawn daggers.

First, I heard the click of hooves; next Priya roughly shoved me through the door to the previously locked shop. The dark room encompassed us as we were plastered against the floor, hidden by the night.

I watched as a couple of Destroyers, dressed in their dark silver armor searched the street. My Basalt Glass dagger singing to my blood, turning it to lava. Fear mixed with wild anger caressed my veins.

“Calm down, Freckles. We’ve had enough drama for the day, don’t you think?” Priya whispered, rolling off me and now laying still next to me.

You think? I wanted to say to her but didn’t. Calmness, patience and restraint were much more useful tools than fear and anger. They were tools of precision and skill. Tools that I knew how to wield.

The two Destroyer soldiers were gone from my view, but we didn’t risk getting up just yet. I turned my head to Priya. Our eyes met for the first time after all the chaos.

She glanced away first.

“Who are you?”

“ Really ? You are going to ask me that? Now ?” she said, getting off the floor.

“Who are you?” I asked again, sitting up, determined to get an answer.

Though deep inside, I already knew.

I knew the answer but desperately wanted it not to be true.

Priya turned around the room. I kept my eyes on her.

“How convenient,” she said, coming up to the shelf. We were in a bakery. Though the shelves lay empty, there were a few well packaged bags of rolls in the cupboards. Priya ripped into one. “I am starving. Are you? You would think the Royals would have better food, wouldn’t you?” she said, stuffing a roll into her mouth. Her tone was so careless and upbeat like we hadn’t just walked out of the Royal Castle murdering people left and right. With her killing them with just a thought.

“Priya. I need you to answer,” I stated. My tone stern, though quiet.

“Why? Why would it matter? I told you I’d save your skinny ass and I kept my promise. I think that’s plenty of answers for you. Maybe you should try and be grateful.”

I was.

I was grateful. I knew full well that if it wasn’t for Priya, my fate would have been altered today, the same way it was altered when she found me exhausted on the riverbanks of the Dniar river.

“You are a Truth Teller.” My heart sank as I said those words out loud. Tuluma didn’t teach me much about the Magic Wielders, yet she warned me about Truth Tellers. They weren’t magic, no. It was a skill. A mind talent. Ability to read your thoughts, alter them. Human or mage, or even elven. Anyone could be a Truth Teller, yet they were so rare and dangerous. Very dangerous.

“And if I were, what is it to you?” she angrily spat.

My heart twisted as feelings of betrayal sunk in.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why would I?” Priya glared at me.

“So, I wouldn’t have to question what was true and what wasn’t during these past months,” I blurted out.

“You give yourself too much credit, Freckles. I wouldn’t waste my energy altering your rather pathetic memories of life. You were already obedient and pitiful all on your own.” She had drawn on those words on purpose, aware of their sting. I clenched my jaw.

“How often?” I asked, unsure if I even wanted to know. “How often have you read my thoughts, mingled in my memories? My feelings?”

“Well…” she casually said, as if we were discussing a play playing in the theaters and not her invading and potentially altering my inner being, betraying any kind of trust I had for her. “There were a few times,” she said, taking another bite of the roll.

“I listened to you, I obeyed you, I heeded your every command. I trusted you. That day by the river, you promised me that I would have my freedom and yet all I’ve had was just a better master and a nicer cage?” Hurt poured like hail bruising my soul.

“Oh, don’t go all righteous on me now, Freckles, you have not been the perfect little pet you portray yourself to be.”

“Which ones, Priya?” I asked her while devastation and complete defeat settled deep within me. She frustratingly glared at me. Those eyes though, sharp as her blades, warning me; one wrong word and it would be me who was bloodied up, grasping my head on the ground. “Gods, are you reading my mind now?”

“Relax. It requires a lot more to read someone else’s mind than glaring at them. It’s also rather exhausting, always leaves me so damn hungry and the headaches afterwards are really not worth it.” She rubbed her temples. “So, believe me when I say that when I have done it, I’ve only done it out of necessity,” she said, stuffing another roll.

Necessity.

Her necessity.

Her choice.

Never mine.

She would never answer me, I realized. She would never tell me, and I would never know. I would have to spend the rest of my life questioning it all and just accept it as is.

Maybe that was the price I had to pay for the comfortable life I lived in the past few months.

I was ignorant and unaware.

Anger rose within me but not at Priya. At myself. I knew better. I had seen the red flags. I should’ve connected the dots, but instead I was so focused on everything else.

I was a starved little mouse for so long that I didn’t realize I set my foot in a trap while chasing cheese.

No, she would never tell me. Not now, not later, not ever.

But this ignorance?

I was done with it now.

No more.

“What did you do to those guards?” I asked, sitting up on the ground, staring at my dust covered boots. Descending deep into the numb within me, while my world got torn apart in twisted realities.

“Oh them? Their brain just forgot how to function for a little bit. You’d be surprised how painful it is when your brain turns to mush,” Priya said feeling smug.

“I thought most Truth Tellers could only read thoughts, and skilled ones could alter memories. I don’t remember hearing about them turning brains to liquid,” I said, hiding my feelings, hiding my thoughts far behind the wall of anger. The creature awoke within me rattling its chain.

She threw her half empty bag of rolls on the floor, now scavenging the rest of the cupboards. I stood up, tugging on the ends of my ripped dress.

“Well turns out if you are any good at it, you can do a lot more than that. And I...” She pulled out a pack of cookies. “I am really, really good at it.”

A truth and a threat all in one.

The shattered heart within me ached. Not because she’d broken my trust, though that too hurt, but because I gave her that trust to begin with.

I cared for her.

Priya, twisted in her ways, was the closest thing to family that I had and maybe it was dishonest and even a little cruel, but she had saved me, she had given me a haven when I needed it the most.

I took a long breath, watching her shove cookies into her mouth one after another.

I cared for her .

“Come with me to find the Rebels, Priya,” I softly asked.

A lifeline.

One I deeply hoped she would take.

A chance for us to fix what was broken.

“I need to find the Rebels. Come with me. We could make a difference. We could make something good from all those killings.” I looked outside to an empty street, the Royal Castle far on the horizon. “Come with me, Priya. Please .”

Priya laughed. Gutturally. Wickedly. Her laugh landed like a knife, stabbing me.

“Oh Freckles, Truth Tellers were hunted long before Magic Wielders were. Maybe for once we enjoy not being the center of attention. Plus, I have no desire to become some Rebel tool of war until I get my throat sliced in my sleep.”

“Priya. You have a gift . You could do so much good with it!”

“ A gift ? You think Truth Telling is a gift ?!” She raised her voice as she turned to me sharply, her brows bunched up and eyes narrowed. “Do you know how one becomes a Truth Teller? How one can obtain such a gift to be in someone else’s mind? Do you know?!”

I stayed quiet, watching hatred rise within her darkened eyes.

“No? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Somehow people conveniently forget about the most important detail. You have to be tortured , but not one time kind of torture, but continual, daily torture for years so that eventually your mind and body are so exhausted, wanting to die so bad yet unable, so you make the jump.”

My eyes slightly widened.

I didn’t know.

Priya scowled but turned her eyes to the empty streets covered by the darkness.

“You have to be so painfully close to death yet so strikingly craving for survival that one day your mind just can’t go on anymore, so it jumps into someone else’s body. Dissociates so far from reality that you find yourself free of pain yet drowned in someone else’s thoughts. But do you know what happens next, Finn?”

She paused, twisting her neck and scoffing at me.

“Even if you made the jump, you were now being completely choked out by foreign thoughts, their memories, their feelings, and you have to claw yourself out of the quickly suffocating swamp. Did you know that many make the jump, but not many come back? It’s a torture of its own. And each time you make the jump it’s still painful. Your mind and body being ripped apart.”

“I am sorry, Priya.” My heart ached for her. With her.

“So no, don’t tell me it’s a fucking gift. Because it’s not. Would you like to know how I got this gift ? I’ll tell you since you always wanted to know. I was a child sex slave. My family was brutally murdered, and my sister and I were sold and trafficked for years. My baby sister didn’t make the jump. She died within her second year. A relief, I suppose, because she didn’t have to endure it any longer. I on the other hand? I wanted to. Everyday fucking day I begged for it, prayed and begged each time they showed up and ripped me to shreds. I begged to die. Until I realized that my will to survive triumphed over it all. So, I stopped begging and stayed alive. Raped and tortured multiple times a day for years, ever since I was five until I made my first jump at thirteen.

Have you ever been in a psychotic pedophile’s rotten mind as he was raping you, high from torturing you? No? Well, I have. I practiced jumping every time the men ravaged my little body. I willed my mind to stay there, to accept the waves of their foul feelings and thoughts. To wander their memories. To surround myself with their foul desires as if it was my cozy blanket. I willed myself to give in into their horror and…soon enough I learned that once you stop flopping like you are drowning, you can try and swim. So I did.

They were always so unaware. Until one day, I pulled on that little thread I knew would end him. And I watched him choke and die in his own blood as his mind became nothing . As I made him nothing . I ran away that day, living on my own ever since.

So no, it is no gift. I will not use it for anything or anyone but what it is created for. Me . My survival. I think I’ve paid a high enough price. I’ve lost my family, my sister, my childhood, my sanity and innocence to the bloodlust of men. I will never. Never . Be someone’s toy to handle when they need it.”

Our eyes met as she continued.

“The Rebels, the war, the Royals, it is all the same, Freckles, don’t you see? Hungry men hoping to get more power.”

I stood still, unsure of what to say. The air in the room felt even colder than before.

It all made sense to me then, the bitterness, the never-ending violence, the complete lack of sympathy, the constant craving for control, the sarcastic humor and that scar. Branded as an animal for everyone to know that she is a slave.

A child slave.

My heart broke in more pieces than I knew it could.

I knew the world was evil but the realization of how evil would never stop breaking me. “I am so sorry, Priya,” I said, knowing full well that those words were nothing, though I meant them with the entirety of my soul .

“I don’t need your pity,” she grumped back.

“The baker…he was one of them?” The words came out loud as I started piecing everything together.

She chuckled.

“Oh, the baker? Nah, he was just that. A baker. He used to bring me extra slices of cake and treats to our compound.” She paused, taking a look at the cookie she was devouring. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

She took another bite. “I killed them all, Freckles. Today, all of them are gone.” She paused as she stared at the wall, unsure of herself what to feel. “Ten years of me hunting and now the Baroness was the last one.” Priya lifted her hand, showing the exquisite ring on her finger. A Royal ring. “She orchestrated it all. I guess when your son is a pedophile and you have the means, you provide the perfect environment for the kidnapped pretty kids to indulge his needs.” She sadly chuckled. “All of them are gone. Each one of them. Even the staff that cooked us meals, the ones that ironed our cutesy dresses, that brought the toys and gifts for us.”

“They brought you gifts?”

“Don’t be so surprised. They kept us ‘happy.’ Broken in. Rape you in the morning, make you cake and bring you a new doll at lunch time. Rape and cut and choke you in the afternoon, a new dress and nice care by the nurse two hours later.” She smiled tensely. “Messed up fucks are gone, but I wish I could say that justice was served. But scars never go away…”

She chucked a cookie at me, and I caught it, though I couldn’t bring myself to take a bite as bile rose high in my throat burning me from within.

“You know,” she said, taking another look outside as another group of drunks passed. “I came back after a while to the compound where they kept us. A nice little manor it was, secluded, away from anyone. It was run down since my first kill but a few girls were still there.” She took another bite. “I murdered them all there that day. I did what I hoped someone would do for me and set me free; so they would never have to figure out how to live their lives so broken. I left everyone to rot, except those girls. Them, I buried in my overgrown garden. ”

I was going to throw up. Nausea held me as a prisoner as I thought of those young girls enduring so much only to be brutally killed by their savior . Shoved into the cold ground to never see the world again. My eyes filled with tears, and I blinked faster to stop them from pouring down my cheeks.

“Oh yeah, I used to have a garden there. If I had any time, I used to go to the garden. My keepers would get so mad since the dirt would get under my little nails, and we were to be kept pristine.” Priya smiled at that memory. “Then I asked the baker to bring me gloves, and he did. And so, I gardened every single day. That book you’ve read? ‘Plants and Poisons around the world?’ I asked for it as a gift from the Baronesses’ son. I was his favorite to take, and he almost thought we had a connection. It was the last birthday of mine that I remember or chose to remember.”

My chest ached as I tried to take a long breath. So many questions lingered within me. Why? Why would the gods allow this to happen?! Screw the gods, why were there so many people aware of it and yet not saving those girls? How many people were okay with the wrong, knowing that they should’ve done something yet closed their eyes and choose to not intervene.

“You know, at first, I asked for the book to learn about poisons so I could kill myself or at least learn which plants would get me the highest of highs enough to numb myself or let me have a nightmare free sleep once in a while.” She smirked. “Isn’t it funny how things turn out in the end? All of them dead with poison in their blood from me? I outlasted them all. I killed them all. ”

“Why me?” I asked her.

“Why not? I needed laundry done and you seemed fit for the job.” She shrugged, finishing up another cookie.

I ignored that deflective answer.

“That day, by that river. Why me, Priya? Why did you help me?” I knew it wasn’t sympathy, I was sure she didn’t feel those emotions. I wasn’t sure why I needed to know that answer. Why I cared, but something inside of me did. Maybe it was the last thread connecting me with her, begging me to stay with her .

Priya snarled but replied.

“Because that day on that beach, I looked at your memories. I looked deep inside of you, and you know what I saw? I saw the same craving for survival and the same wish for Death I had. I also saw the kindness and love that I could never feel, and it reminded me of her. And I thought, what would it be like if my baby sister had survived? If we both went along and killed our enemies, if I made you into a perfect little assassin of mine. And for once I could have the family I wanted.”

My heart broke once more with realization.

“The Royal sailor...You orchestrated that Royal sailor to rape me that day in the Port City, didn’t you,” I stated, my chest squeezing tighter.

Priya rolled her eyes at me.

“He was never going to rape you, Freckles. But I think you would agree that you needed a little push.”

My mouth opened then closed, unable to say the things I needed.

“You are going to leave me, aren’t you?” Priya said, turning to me. “You are going to leave. Me,” she said, her voice filled with betrayal and sadness.

“I have to find them, Priya. I promised.”

Priya’s face slashed with bitterness.

“Oh, just like you promised Viyak that you’ll come back for him? Or just like you’ve promised to kill the Destroyer General? Or how would your dead elven maid feel about your promise to live a better life when you are signing off on your own death by joining the Rebels? And for what? A hope for a better world ? There is no such thing!” she snarled. Each word filled with poison.

Like a whip, her words ripped the pieces of my soul. I didn’t bother asking how she knew all about those promises. About things I never told her, things I never told anyone.

Things that haunted my soul every day.

“That is exactly why I am doing that,” I fought back. I was broken and beaten. So damned defeated, but I would fight back for the only thing I had left. “The world might not be a better world. But hope ; hope is what I am fighting for. I’ve lived my life ignorant, unaware, on the sidelines for too damn long, and now I have a chance to make a difference. You have a chance too, Priya.”

“Leave,” Priya commanded as she pointed to the door, her face flashed with anger and hate. “Leave and never come back.” I didn’t move until she pulled both of her daggers out. I pulled mine but I wouldn’t fight her. No, I couldn’t do it.

She closed the space between us, and I tightened the grip on my dagger. Now just a few inches away from my face, she uttered.

“I cared for you, Finn. Despite it all, I really really cared for you. I thought we were meant to be sisters. I thought we would be a family. But now...Now, I see that I was wrong. I could never be sisters with some elven raised trash. I could never be family with someone who doesn’t even know what that means. I did everything for you, but it turns out you are just an ungrateful pig.” She narrowed her eyes on me. “Go and never come back because if I see you again, I will not just alter your memories but make your life a living nightmare and you will wish you’d never escaped from the Destroyers.”

My mind was silent, as if it had completely abandoned me today. Maybe it made me a coward, but I wasn’t going to question Priya’s intentions. I wasn’t going to wait for her to deliver on her threat. I pushed the door open. The freezing cold air should’ve frosted my lungs, but all I felt was numb.

I stopped in the door frame to give her a last glance.

My friend, my family, and yet also my oppressor and captor.

“Priya,” I whispered. My only goodbye.

“Goodbye, Freckles.”