Page 110 of Brutal Unionn
“She is valuable indeed. A subject worthy of a prince’s ransom” he says, voice calm. “Wouldn’t you agree son?”
I step forward before Bhon can stop me.
He catches the hood of my hoodie, but I pull loose without force. Every eye in the room snaps to me with the ripple of audible sounds of surprise, but I only look at one man.
“I mean…” I tilt my head with the smallest shrug, hands slipping into my pockets. “You’d know better than anyone what a prince is worth these days, wouldn’t you? I’d say your fifty best men to start.”
Takeda stares at me with a look that could split concrete. “All these years,” he says quietly, “and you still speak with the wit of a boy.” His eyes flick back to Nadia, and his lip curls faintly. “I don’t know how you stand to talk to him. His mouth runs faster than his brain.”
Nadia tilts her head toward him and smiles, this time with a little more fang in it.
“You’d be surprised,” she says. “You have to have a certain level of intelligence to keep up with Sho. There’s no shame if you can’t follow.”
My father’s expression doesn’t change, but I know that look. That’s the one he wore before he ordered my grandfather’s death with a bow and a polite smile.
“You defend him as if he were something more than a discarded name,” he says to her. “As if his bloodline has not been erased by his own hand.”
I step closer, the platform still between us but shrinking.
“I erasedyourname, old man,” I say, the edge finally creeping into my voice. “And if you want to see how far I’ll go to finish the job, keep talking.”
“So hot headed. So quick to react.” My father clicks his tongue, looking back to Nadia. “So quick to answer when it is the woman’s choice.” He lifts both of his hands and turns around to the public. “What is a child you love worth? The price of a queen, or a prince? The womb, or the heir?”
I take another step forward, the meaning behind his words becoming clearer by the second. Nadia looks at me, her eyes heavy with despair, and her lips already moving before I can stop her.
I want to tell her that I know she loves me now, and that there is no right price for Mia. That we are doomed. Star-crossed lovers and it was only a matter of time before someone killed one of us. Until one of us sacrificed ourselves for the other. There was no other way to do this. There is no other way to love each other.
“My subject is worth a queen’s ransom,” she says aloud, steady and clear, her voice carrying through the room without a tremble. “Isn’t it better to have a slew of heirs than just one?”
My father gives her a mocking three clap applause. “A benevolent queen, indeed,” he says.
The second his words land, I break into a run. I shove past the lunging of a guard and surge toward the stage. My heart pounds in my throat. I don’t care about the crowd. I don’t care about my plan going up in smoke before my eyes. I see only her—still and unflinching on that stage, the blood on her cheek now dried into a dark line that cuts down to her jaw.
But I don’t make it far.
Five men intercept me as if they were waiting for the signal. Suited, trained, and fast, they close around me before I reach the second step. Two grab my arms, another my chest. I drive my elbow into one’s ribs and drop the fourth with a knee to the groin, but the fifth wraps an arm around my throat and pulls me back in a chokehold. I thrash against them, legs scraping the floor, vision spotting at the edges.
On the stage, Nadia doesn’t move.
Two men in white gloves ascend the stairs from either side, framing her like a ritual procession. They don’t touch her roughly. There’s almost a reverence in the way they guide her—like they know she’s royalty, even if she’s walking into a cage.
I shout her name, but it comes out strangled against the arm tightening around my throat.
My vision clears just long enough to see her turn her head, giving me one last look. She doesn’t cry. Doesn’t scream. Just looks at me with that maddening calm, the one that says she’s already accepted the cost.
That again she has made the choice to keep us apart, despite how much this must kill her. My father is right about one thing. She is a benevolent queen indeed.
27
SHO
Every timeI wake up in this hell hole the cold hits first, and despite it being a week since I was brought back here I just can’t get used to the feeling.
It’s the type of chill that creeps beneath the skin and settles deep in the joints, spreading through the spine like a warning. I open my eyes and stare up at the ceiling, the same cracked concrete I know better than I know my own reflection. The smell tells me before my sight confirms it—mold, rust, dried blood, and that sterile chemical tang of disinfectant, the kind they only use after someone bleeds too much.
A thick iron cuff is locked tight around my ankle, chained to a bolt set into the center of the floor. The chain is long enough to stretch the exact length and width of the perfectly squared room and not a centimeter more. I don’t bother pulling at it, because any attempt to escape will end with a bruised ankle at least and a broken leg at worst and that’s just from the tightness of the cuff. If someone catches me, I’ll be lucky to be able to breathe without fluid filling my lungs.
I push myself into a seated position, moving slowly as the ache of bruised muscle and dull exhaustion spreads through my back and ribs. The cot behind me is as hard as I remember—just a flat slab of metal welded to the floor with no padding, no blanket, and barely enough space to lie flat without my feet hanging over the edge.
