Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(83)
“I don’t.” I stood still while he programmed my collar to stop me from leaving the building. “No knife chooses its own target.”
“You’re saying someone else is wielding you?”
“Something else. Something bigger. Something wiser.”
“So...how can I stay on the good side of this something bigger?”
I stopped to look up at him as he led me down the hall toward my cell. “If you keep working here, you can’t. Eventually Vandekamp will ask you to do something horrible. If you do it, the furiae will come for you. If you don’t, you’ll lose your job.”
He opened his mouth, and I could see the protest coming.
Instead of listening to how unfair a choice that was, I walked down the hall and into my cell, leaving him staring after me.
A second later, the light over the door flashed red.
*
I sat with my back to the window, watching the square of fading daylight shift across the floor with the sun’s slow descent. Trying not to obsess over answers I didn’t have. Footsteps clomped in the hall, and my cell door opened. Gallagher stepped inside, wearing only a pair of threadbare pants and his traditional red cap. Behind him, Pagano was already programming his collar to lock him in my cell.
The door closed, and Gallagher studied my face. “They said you asked for me. Why would they oblige?”
“I have something they want.” That wouldn’t buy me endless requests, but it would apparently get me this one, at least.
“What’s wrong?” Gallagher tried to pull me into a hug, but I backed away from him. I didn’t know how to be touched by him anymore.
Hurt flitted across his normally unreadable features.
“Sit down.” I glanced at the stack of mats, my only furnishing, other than the toilet. “Please.”
“You remember.” The pain in his voice seemed to bring the earth to a grinding halt beneath us. As hard as this was for me, it was hard for him too.
“No. But I’ve heard.”
“That’s worse,” he growled. “I’m so sorry. It was difficult enough the first time around, but to have to hear about it...” His brow furrowed and his fists clenched. “Who told you?”
“The Vandekamps.”
“So, they know about your memory?”
I nodded. “So does Pagano.”
“Did you figure out what happened? How you lost the memories?”
Another nod. I sank onto the mats with my back against the wall, but still he stood. “Gallagher, I need to know what happened that night.”
“You’re better off without the memory.”
“That’s not your choice to make.” He flinched, and I exhaled slowly. “I know you were trying to protect me. I know you wouldn’t have... Unless the alternative would have been worse. For me.”
He nodded. “And when the time comes, everyone who played a part will die a slow and painful death for what they did to you.”
“They did it to you too.”
Gallagher frowned. He seemed unable to understand that he too had been a victim. “I am a warrior, even in chains.”
“I know.” The canvas of scars his torso had become would never let either of us forget that. “Tell me what happened. Please.”
He sighed and finally sank onto the stack of mats, maintaining as much respectful space between us as he could. “I don’t want you to hate me, but I’ll understand if you do. However, that won’t change anything for me. My oath can’t be broken. Even if you loathe the very sight of me, I will protect you with my dying breath.”
“I understand.” But I also understood that he wasn’t yet armed with all the facts. If I was carrying his child, would that complicate his oath? It would certainly complicate everything else. “Start from the beginning. Please. When did it happen?”
Gallagher took a deep breath, and his thick chest swelled. “It was my second night in the arena. Our second week here. After the fight, two guards took me back to my cell, but you weren’t there. They stayed while I showered, then they gave me a clean pair of pants and said I’d been requested for a private engagement.
“I didn’t even know what that meant. I had done nothing but fight since the bachelor party. But they wouldn’t answer any of my questions. They just said that if I cared about you, I’d do whatever the client told me to. When I arrived, there you were, standing with two other women.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. It was a small room, with thick rugs and pillows all over the floor. The lights were dim. They lined me up between a shifter I’d never seen and Drusus.” The incubus from Metzger’s.
“Who was the client?”
“They didn’t tell me his name. He was tall, for a human, and painfully thin, and he obviously had a good deal of money. The handlers said no one had ever requested a champion before, and that Vandekamp charged him a fortune.”
That was no surprise. The Spectacle’s clientele could afford anything they wanted, and all they seemed to want was something no one else had ever had. Like a fae champion who drew his lifeblood from the gaping wounds of his victims.
“He paired the others on rugs arranged around the room, while he stood in the middle. Then he turned to us. I thought it was coincidence that he’d paired us, but finally I realized he’d overheard something at the fight. Something about you and me.”