Page 24 of A Light So Blinding
Oh god.
She gagged, watching as he used his bare hand to dunk the cup into a bucket of what looked like vomit before holding it back to her. “This is what food is down here, Priestess. Eat up, or starvation will kill you before your troll’s lusts will.”
“This isn’t food,” she hissed, her decorum forgotten over the chunks of... whatever it was that floated on top of that sludge.
“Troll whores get the same as the rest of the prisoners.” He spat through her window, and she narrowly avoided it.
Thankfully, he didn’t look beyond her into the cell. Otherwise, he might have noticed the giant map she had drawn out on the floor. Not that he would have cared. The guards here all seemed to be very certain that no prisoner could escape, despite a few of them having done so only months ago.
But that had been within the arena, and no one had ever escaped from the cells. She was going to change that.
Glaring as they walked by, she held the cup in her hands and waited until everyone quieted down. It sounded like maybe people were eating, which was... horrific. She couldn’t imagine eating what was in her hands.
“Rabbit?” she tried again.
He grunted, clearly through a mouthful of food.
“What are you eating?”
“Scraps. Whatever they eat up above, they scrape the plates and leftovers into buckets for us.” He made a little “ooh” sound. “I got a bone!”
Her stomach rolled at the crunching sound that came after he said that. Was he... eating the bone? It sounded like many of them were. The horrible sounds of men eating made her even more nauseous than she had been before. She couldn’t even hold the cup because looking at it, smelling it, knowing that other people’s mouths had touched this food made everything in her revolt.
She would go hungry. She would starve. She wasn’t this desperate.
Setting it down next to the cot, Astrid crouched down in the corner where Bjorn usually was. Planting her hands over her ears, she tried to block out the sounds.
Her feet were on the cold ground. There was air in her lungs. She could breathe in deeply, but then all she could smell was thatfucking food. And it did smell like food. It wasn’t an unpleasant scent, and that was even more confusing. Her stomach was clenching now, desperate to eat something that wasn’t leftovers from other people who didn’t deserve to eat as lavishly as they did.
Panic set in. She couldn’t control her heart rate, and she had always been able to do that. Her carefully cultivated control was now gone. She had nobody, was no one, and nothing she did or begged for would be given to her.
Back to the street rat.
Only good enough to be a whore.
Warm hands covered hers, and then all the sound was actually gone. There was just silence, blissful silence without the constant sound of eating that somehow slipped through her fingers.
She blinked a few times, focusing on her breathing until she looked up. Bjorn must have returned at some point, although she couldn’t guess when. Crouched in front of her, wearing but a tattered loincloth to cover his lean, muscular body as he used his hands to block out the sound.
He watched her with dark eyes that saw far too much. It was like he knew she needed these few seconds of silence before she could pull herself back together again. And she did. She forced herself back to calm, even if it felt like she was kicking and screaming the whole way. Astrid rebuilt the shield she always kept up until she could be herself again.
She was the priestess who was affected by nothing. That was who she was. That was who she had always been. If she could just get control of her emotions, then she had control of something. Her fear eased enough to be reasonable again. She was Astrid. High priestess. Capable of handling this situation just like she had the moment he’d left. She had a map on the floor. She had a plan.
Except then she looked at the ground and all of her map had been wiped away. There were footprints through the whole thing, most likely his, because they were huge and claw-tipped. She’d spent hours on it. Hours and hours of work that were now destroyed.
Breathing in deeply, she pulled her hands away from her ears, forcing his hands to drop.
“It’s all right,” she told herself. “I can redraw it.”
He looked down at the markings on the floor and grunted. “Maps are no good.”
“Maps are helpful when you’re planning an escape.”
“I know how to get out of the labyrinth.” He stood, and once against she was faced with the looming man over her. He was massive. Far bigger than anyone she’d ever been close to, and all that glistening muscle...
Not shiny with sweat, she realized. With blood.
At her horrified expression, he glanced down at himself and winced. “Not mine.”
