Page 29 of The Pawn

Enzo: I’m fine. Where do you need me?

He’s eager to prove himself. He knows I have my doubts about everyone. I’m analyzing everyone’s motivation, everyone’s actions.

Me: Devil’s Peak. Call a doctor in. Female.

Enzo: Done

I add that last part thinking Allegra will feel safer with a woman doctor. I want her examined thoroughly. I want toknow where that bastard laid his hands before I cut them off. Because I will cut them off. And that will be the beginning of what I do to him.

But all that can wait. I glance down at Allegra sleeping, her head in my lap, the bruises on her face.

I have her. She’s here with me. Everything else I will fix. I have her now and she’s safe.

10

ALLEGRA

Iwake violently unable to separate the nightmare from the reality of this heavy, drug-induced sleep. It’s pitch black. I sit up, but I don’t know where I am. Sweat trickles down my back. My breaths come short and ragged, keeping time with my pounding heart.

I look around the dark space as my eyes adjust. I’m not cold. Not freezing. Not shivering in that damp, wet-earth cold. No smell of spilled wine. I look up at the prisms of light filtering in through stained glass and I know where I am. I remember.

My racing heart slows to thuds.

I remember.

As if on cue, my hand begins to throb. Because I remember that, too.

Pain.

A sob breaks the utter stillness of the place, and it takes me a moment to realize that that sound? It’s me.

I’m afraid to look down.

Afraid to see what I know I’ll find.

But I have to make myself do it. I have to make myself look. It would be weakness not to.

The thick duvet covers me, warm and soft and safe.

No. Not safe. Nothing is safe. Nothing has been safe for a very, very long time.

The space beside me is empty. His place. He didn’t sleep here last night.

But he came for me.

I recall the war of bullets and when that door opened, when I heard again the terrible sound of heavy metal creaking along that filthy floor, how I wanted to die. Oh, how I wanted to die.

My unbandaged hand throbs. I take a deep breath in and I turn my gaze down. This pain isn’t from a knife wound. It’s bruised from when Malek forced the ring.

Uncurling my fingers, I look for it now. My mother’s ring. Her blood still on it, after all those years. Cruel that. The cruelest thing he did. He who professed to have loved her had hated her more than any of the other monsters in her life.

But the ring isn’t there. It’s gone. I ripped it from my finger.

Four fingers on each hand now. Matchy-matchy.

I close my eyes. The place where my little finger was throbs. Phantom pain. Sensation when there is nothing there. Did my mother feel it every time they took another one? No. She would have only felt real pain. I shake my head to rid myself of the memories. To let them go. To make them let me go. I don’t know what’s real, what’s not. Did she know what was real? What wasn’t? I think she’d gone half-mad by the time they’d finished with her.

I don’t want to think about that now. I don’t wantto remember it. Why do I remember it so clearly? Like it just happened. Like five years haven’t passed. It’s the drugs. It must be. They’re confusing past and present, memory and reality.