Page 6 of A Sword of Ice
“Shut the fuck up, Fae bitch. I gave you weeks. Now, do what I came here for.”
The rustling of clothes, a grunt. There was no mistaking the sight of thrusting hips into an open, unwilling mouth. The gags, crying through slurps. Every grunt was a whisper of violence in the night. The way the soldier’s nails curled into her long, bright green hair as he set an unrelenting pace.
Her pale green hands slid to the wall behind the soldier, palms bracing against crumbling brick to hold herself steady as he shot down her throat. Her nails curled against the wall, cracking, bleeding. And when he finished, he slumped backwards, his own hands pressing against her shoulders and shoving her away unkindly.
A look of disgust marred his features, and she turned away from the expression. For a split second her pale eyes met Iona’s and widened with shame.
Belinda.
She swiped a hand against her lips, and Iona wondered if there was any way she could ever get rid of the taste of the human soldier off her tongue, or if it would burn like ashwood in her throat. If she could ever get rid of the memories of this night. Of a night of promises that gave life for just another day. Because that’s what this was. A promise of life. A promise that she’d live to see tomorrow.
That she’d live another day to kick Rey out of their rented room, while he waited at the door, smoking, hoping she’d open it for him so he could stay for the night before they woke up and did it all over again.
Iona tried not to think about Rey’s broken wings against the floor, or the hopelessness in Belinda’s eyes, or the sounds of her crying as the soldier found pleasure in her body in exchange for protection against a much bigger threat.
Iona forced her gaze away, and though she knew she’d already sent her daily prayer out to Mana, she decided to send another out as she walked away from the scene. Not for her. Not for the world. Not for Tir na Faie.
But for Belinda, and the tears that glassed over pale green eyes, and the decisions she’d been forced to make in the shadows of an alleyway.
4
Scars and Stars
When she stepped into the hallway, Iona caught no sight of Rey on the floor. All that was left were a pile of ashes and a half smoked joint propped against the wall, as if he’d kept it there in case he found himself in the exact same position as the night before and needed an emergency smoke.
Her heart grew heavy as she made her way over to her door and opened it. She cocked her head to the side and listened for any sign of another body. Even though she locked her door, she wanted to be sure. There was nothing, so she closed and locked up and stepped into her room, shouldering off her fur coat.
She discarded her clothes as she went, piling them around her house. On the back of a chair. On the floor. Beneath her bed.
When she stood naked in the middle of her room, she turned to look at herself in the mirror. Her curls were frizzing above her head, hay and sticks caught between the tight spirals. They still covered her ears, though, and she shoved them aside to get a good look at the tips. They pulled back and up, like the sharp points of arrows.
After inspecting them, she let her dark eyes trail across the rest of her body in the single broken shard. Ebony skin expanded against her tall, strong figure. She wasn’t shaped like other women. She wasn’t soft and supple but muscular andstrong. She prided herself in her body because it was a testament to what she was and all that she had been. A warrior, a hard worker. The muscles of her thick legs reflected that.
There were other things besides the ears that reflected what she was, too. She turned, exposing her bare back to the reflective glass, revealing the cutting slashes of scars trailing down her spine.
A shade lighter than her skin, the scars started at the base of her neck and went down to her tailbone. The scars looked like stars; five adjacent figures trapped in circles down her spine.
She remembered the day she got them.
She remembered the pain.
Agony had splintered throughout her body, a sensation that had nothing to do with the frozen ocean that spit her out against the shore.
She’d stumbled away from sand and ice, hiding in the shadows of Porir. An unforgiving monster, the ice. It had her shivering as the cold seeped through her bones. She may have been an ice Fae, but she’d been used to the blistering, heated confines of the Jade Court, and she could still feel the cold if it was not of her own making.
For days she’d wandered, the Resistance and their failed war a plague on her mind. It was in those moments that her usual levity dissipated, and her own depression slipped through the cracks in her wounded soul. A dissonance between her heart and mind began, leaving behind broken bits of the past until she couldn’t pick apart the happiness or the tragedy at all.
Weeks passed of no food or water. And when the first wave of pain hit against her spine, she’d fallen to her knees, the impact jarring against her entire body as something against her back burned so hot, it feltcold.
The pain pervaded up to her skull and she tried to hold back her screams. Tried to bite her tongue, but only managed to choke on the copper of her own blood. She didn’t know how long she laid against the frigid ground, her cries barely muffled against the pavement. Blood and spit pooled from her mouth, her nails cracked as she clawed against the floor, drumming her fingers to the rhythm of every slicing pang of her skin.
It had felt like someone had taken a shard of ice to her back and began to carve at her flesh.
And it didn’t stop. Even when the first flares of agony died down, it hurt to move. The wounds tugged and blood pooled against her dark skin. She lay there for what felt like hours, but it could have very well been minutes.
That’s when Henry came upon her. She was vaguely aware of his footsteps, even when they appeared into her blurred line of vision. She didn’t know anything beyond the screaming of her body. When her mind finally cleared and she realized it was a human staring down at her, she wished for death. It would have been kinder than the pain.
But the young human man bent at her level and lifted her as though she weighed nothing at all, taking care with her newly wounded back that bled through her cold, stiff clothes. He took her to the zoo, into his office, and he healed her and let her sleep.
