Page 19 of Bought by the Broken Beast
“You asked us to come, Saru,” Grak says, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that cuts through the tense silence. “So we have come. Now speak. Why have you dragged us from our beds and our cups?”
I step into the center of the room, the flickering lamplight casting my shadow, large and monstrous, on the walls around me. I am one of them. A disgraced warrior, a broken thing. I cannot command them as a Vakkak lord. I must appeal to them as an equal.
“I have not come to ask for your loyalty to the Zusvak,” I begin, my voice a low, steady thing. “I have not come to ask you to fight for the Zu Kus, or for the Vakkak lords who look down on you as dirt beneath their boots. The kingdom has forgotten you. It has cast you out, left you to rot in the arena or scrape a living from the mud. I know this. Because it has done the same to me.”
A murmur runs through the room. Hakar, the drunken ex-Vakkak, lets out a short, bitter laugh. “So what is this, then? A pity party for the fallen?”
“This,” I say, my voice rising, gaining a hard, sharp edge, “is about honor.”
Another bitter laugh from Hakar. “Honor? Look around you, Saru. There is no honor in this room. It was beaten out of us, bled out of us, and sold for the price of a ticket.”
“No,” I counter, my gaze sweeping over each of them, meeting their cynical, broken eyes. “The honor they took from uswas a title. A name. A piece of armor. It was a thing they gave, and a thing they could take away. It was a lie. True honor… true honor is not given. It is forged. It is forged in the dirt, in the blood, in the desperation of a fight you know you cannot win. It is the loyalty you show to the man fighting at your side. It is the courage to stand when every instinct tells you to run. It is the thing you earn for yourself, and it is the one thing they can never take from you.”
The room is silent now, the only sound is the hiss of the oil lamp.
“There is a serpent in the heart of this city,” I continue, my voice a low, dangerous growl. “A Vakkak lord who wears his honor like a fine cloak to hide the treason in his heart. His name is Malacc. He is planning to burn the kingdom to the ground, to murder the King and the entire Senate, so that he may rule over the ashes. He uses his title, hisgivenhonor, as a shield for his corruption.”
I gesture to Bella, who stands by the door, her small frame rigid, her expression fierce. “This human, this slave, she has more honor in her heart than Malacc has in his entire bloodline. She risked her life not for a title, not for coin, but because it was the right thing to do. Her courage… it reminded me of what it truly means to be Vakkak.”
Grak, the old hunter, takes a step forward, his gaze hard. “These are heavy words, Saru. You ask us to go to war against a High Lord of the Zu Kus. You ask us to die for a kingdom that would not spit on us if we were on fire.”
“I do not require you to die for the kingdom,” I say, my voice dropping, becoming a raw, personal plea. “I need you to fight for the honor you forged for yourselves. I ask you to stand against a man who represents the very corruption that cast you out. I request that you to fight for the soul of Milthar, the onethat exists not in the marble halls of the Senate, but here, in the hearts of its forgotten sons.”
The silence following is absolute. The weight of my request hangs, a tangible thing. I have offered them nothing but a chance to die for a cause they have no reason to believe in. I have offered them nothing but my own broken honor as a banner.
The grizzled leader of the hunters, Grak, steps forward. His gaze moves from me to Bella, his eyes lingering on her for a long, assessing moment. He sees not a weak human, but the source of this fire, this impossible hope. He sees the truth of my words reflected in her defiant stance.
He turns back to me, and a slow, grim smile spreads across his weathered face. He gives a single, sharp nod.
“For you, Saru,” he says in a gravelly voice, the name a restoration, a benediction. “We fight.”
15
BELLA
Tomorrow, we go to war.
The thought is a cold, hard stone in my gut. Tomorrow, we will take our tiny, cobbled-together army of forgotten souls and throw them against the might of a Vakkak Lord. We will likely die.
But tonight, in the quiet, smoky confines of the abandoned forge, there is a strange and fragile peace. The rain has stopped. The city outside is a distant murmur. A small fire crackles in the hearth, a defiant spark of warmth against the cold iron and stone. Votoi sits across from me, the firelight dancing on the planes of his face, turning his scars into a map of shadows. He has been cleaning the sword he took from Kairen’s guard, his movements slow, methodical, hypnotic.
We have not spoken of what happened between us after the fight. The raw, desperate claiming against the wall. It lingers in the air, an unspoken truth, a territory we are both too afraid to explore. The memory of it sends a shiver of heat through me, a deep, aching throb between my legs.
“We should eat,” I say, my voice sounding unnaturally loud in the quiet. It’s a mundane, practical thing to say when death is waiting for us at dawn, but it’s all I have.
He gives a slow, deliberate nod and sets the sword aside. I divide the last of the bread and cheese Lyra brought us. We eat in silence, the only sound the crackle of the fire and the soft chew of bread. The silence is different now. It’s not the angry, resentful quiet of our first few days together. It’s a shared space, heavy with unspoken thoughts, with the weight of what is to come.
“Before I was a slave,” I say, the words tumbling out of me before I can stop them, “I lived in a small settlement on the coast of Tlouz. My father was a scholar. He taught me to read, to love the weight of a book in my hands.”
Votoi stops chewing, his amber eyes fixed on me, listening.
“Our house was small,” I continue, a phantom ache in my chest for a life that feels like it belonged to someone else. “But it was filled with scrolls and parchments. I didn’t have toys. I had stories. Stories of ancient heroes, of faraway lands. I thought the world was as orderly as the words on a page.” A short, bitter laugh escapes me. “I was a fool.”
“It is not foolish to believe in order,” he says, voice a deep rumble. “It is the foundation of honor.”
“There was no honor in the raid that took my family,” I whisper, the memory a sharp, sudden pain. “Just fire, and screaming, and the butt of a slaver’s rifle against my temple.” My fingers drift to the small, faint scar he cannot see in the dim light. “I have not spoken of this to anyone.”
“And I have not spoken of my home,” he counters, his gaze dropping to the fire. “Not since I lost the right to bear its name.” He’s silent for a long moment, and I think that is all he will say. But then, he speaks again, his voice softer than I have ever heard it. “The Saru estate is on the western coast of the island. It is built into the cliffs, a fortress of white stone that has withstood athousand years of storms. From my window, I could see nothing but the endless expanse of the sea. The sound of the waves… it was the first sound I heard when I was born, and the sound I thought I would hear when I died.”
