Page 11 of Immortal Rose

He will not touch me, I told myself, wrapping my arms around my knees.

My whole life, I’d managed to dodge every cruel trap the world set for women, but at the end of all that running, I’d managed to fall into the worst of cages. God, or fate, or whatever greater force loomed beyond death must have had a wicked sense of humor—that, or he truly despised women. Why else would men be born to live, while women existed only to be punished?

Stop this, I told myself, squeezing my eyes shut. Self-pity will get you nowhere here.

I leaned against the wall, just to the right of where someone had, intriguingly, carved hell’s tits into the stone. Just that, and nothing more.

Hell’s tits. I sighed, sliding my back down the wall. It was as good a descriptor as any for the situation I found myself in.

I curled around my knees like an old piece of parchment, letting the stagnant water and filth seep into my ruined skirts. The chill gnawed on my skin with needlelike teeth, and I couldn’t gather enough warmth to my center to ward it off.

I touched the iron shackle around my ankle, flinching at the burn of raw skin beneath it. As I lifted the attached chain, testing the weight, nausea swelled in me, roiling my empty stomach.

Arabella had told me once that the difference between hunger and starvation was a willingness to kill for a meal, of choosing your life over another’s. It was why so many of the long-term residents of Fairgate became expert ratcatchers, and why one never saw anything but the quickest and most wily of street cats in the Brickbats.

I wasn’t sure I was there yet. As hard as I’d fought to survive in the years since Mama’s death, I was equally uncertain I’d be up for the challenge when the time came I was forced to try.

The thought of Arabella drew up that same fear, the same questions that had been haunting me since that night. Had she gotten away? Or was she only a few cells down, her essence swamped by the seething stench of the prison?

Pressing my face to my knees did nothing to smother the rolling tide of horrors that assaulted my nose: unwashed bodies, human filth, rotting food, desperation. Hell couldn’t reek half as badly as this place. It terrified me to imagine that this stench could linger in my hair, on my skin, marking me forever.

Think, I told myself. Think . . .

If Branson came for me, would I be able to take him by surprise—cut him deep enough to take his key, unchain myself, and flee through the cell door? Were there other guards posted at the end of the hall, or upstairs, near the entrance? Even if I did get away, could I disappear the way I’d need to, becoming someone else?

Isn’t that what you’ve always done?

I felt blindly across the ground, slipping my hand beneath the pile of wet straw that served as my bed. My fingers closed around Sweetie.

And to think I’d laughed when one of the other women had found it hidden behind the waste bucket, a gift from a previous occupant of the cell. Somehow, someone—through means I preferred not to contemplate too deeply, given how thoroughly the guards had searched me—had smuggled a gentleman’s smoking pipe into Fairgate.

While our mystery benefactor had likely hoped to trade it for better food or privileges, one of the doxies, Sally, had seen the true opportunity it presented: she’d pressed its narrow lip against the stone ground, grinding and grinding it until it became a sharp point.

Well. If I did manage to walk away from this festering pit of misery, I’d know a thing or two about improvised weapons.

Hours passed. That single, frail beam of sunlight that sneaked into the cell through a crack in the ceiling found me again, and I lifted my hand, trying to catch the motes of dust drifting through it.

Then, as though I had sunk into an even deeper layer of hell, the putrid air warmed with nutmeg.

“No,” I huffed out, pushing unsteadily to my feet. My stiff, bruised body protested every movement, from trying to smooth the tangle of loose curls around my shoulders to futilely beating the grime off my skirt. No, no, no—he couldn’t be here—

Prisoners jeered and wailed as the new arrival passed their cells, hooting with laughter at whatever reaction they’d received. Panicked and mortified, I kicked some of the straw over the disgusting bucket we’d used as a chamber pot, but there was no hiding the leg-iron that chained me to the bolt on the wall.

I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing the shadows would just devour me, the way they’d been trying to for days.

“Oh, Vi,” came the wrenching whisper.

I forced myself to look, a helpless anger working my lungs like bellows.

“Ye got five minutes,” Branson sneered, holding up the gold mark he’d been handed.

The world seemed to sharpen painfully, as if to cut from every angle. Because there, standing a short distance away, as if he couldn’t bring himself even a step closer to the bars, was Oliver.

What little light I’d managed to keep alive in my chest guttered and died.

I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it before, his essence. Leather reins, sweet apple, and nutmeg cologne, the smoky traces of a gentleman’s club, a warm eagerness. There had been so many times over the last two days that I’d been tempted to search for any hint of him in the air, but I’d never let myself imagine, not for a moment, the image of him striding down the hall to save me. I knew it would shatter me when he didn’t come—because why would he?

And yet, somehow, it was a worse agony to have that phantom hope realized. The thought of him seeing me like this was too much to bear. Him, one of the few people in the world who held me in something like esteem. Who . . .