out loud, hoping that soon the sound of it, the rhythm of the syllables, would stoke in her not a hollow, numb despair but rather a rage, cold and clean.
“Simon,” she whispered. She stared into the relentless darkness. “Simon. Simon.”
She pushed hard against her bindings, rubbing, twisting.
Maybe she would hit bone, if she worked hard enough at it.
Maybe she would bleed herself dry.
• • •
One of them must have reported to him what she was doing.
Keys jangled in the lock. The door to her cell opened, and clipped bootsteps approached her. She recognized those footfalls. They tore her from a fitful sleep, and she watched in breathless horror as he crouched before her, arms resting lazily on his knees. He was in silhouette, his shape black against the lamplit corridor outside her cell, but she caught the faint gleam of his eyes.
She made herself stare at him, unblinking and unafraid, though that was a lie she was certain he could see through. Her body was weak, malnourished, and the sight of him sparked in her a rage too violent to bear. She quaked at his nearness. Her fingers twitched. She imagined clawing at him.
“Simon,” she said, and her voice, at least, emerged steady and flat, as she had intended.
“You’re hurting yourself,” he observed. “I cannot allow that.”
The sound of his voice was both familiar and utterly, horribly foreign. She had never heard it so cold, so devoid of passion, humor, anger. It held only brisk efficiency, his every word clipped and unfeeling.
“I don’t care,” she replied—a sulky child’s response, but she could manage nothing better.
“The Emperor has requested that you arrive unmarred and healthy.”
“The Emperor can go fuck himself, and you can join him.”
She looked for the man she knew in his shadowed face and saw nothing, not even a ripple of scornful amusement. He rose to his feet and stepped aside as the pair of imperial guards waiting at the door entered in silence.
“Take her to B Deck,” he ordered. “The Blue Room.”
Then Simon turned on his heel and strode away, his long, lean body moving with the same sinuous grace it always had. His departure made her wild. If she’d had the freedom to do it, if she had been sure it wouldn’t result in some awful fate for Remy, she would’ve launched herself at him, wedged her fingernails into the scarred furrows on his face, torn strips of flesh from his neck, and ripped out his throat.
Leaving her only seconds after showing himself for the first time in days? That she could not abide.
“Don’t go,” she blurted, desperate. Awful as he was, he was the only thing she knew in this terrible place. She felt that she had begun to lose pieces of herself, huddled in the dark like a kicked animal, but seeing him kneel before her, wishing viciously for his death—and to be its dealer—had awakened her.
He ignored her, striding on.
Frantic, she lunged against the guards’ grips on her elbows. “I assume the Emperor has plans for me. Won’t those proceed more quickly if I come to him informed of my situation rather than ignorant of it?”
He paused a few paces from the door and glanced back over his shoulder. “The Emperor’s plans will proceed quickly, regardless of your ignorance.” Then, to the guards, he said, “You have your orders.”
He was gone soon after, and as Eliana was escorted out of her cell and through an endless, softly rocking maze of carpeted hallways, she began to doubt that he had ever been there at all.
• • •
After that, she was never alone.
They brought her to a spacious apartment on one of the upper decks. A plush carpet of midnight blue stretched beneath a pale violet ceiling, the painted wood embellished with depictions of unfamiliar constellations. A chandelier hung from the rafters, links of crystal shivering as the boat rocked and hummed, and the bed was massive, a monstrosity of periwinkle and indigo satin that seemed to leer as a trio of angelic attendants undid Eliana’s chains and tugged off her clothes.
Two guards watched the doors, and four more were stationed at the windows, past which stretched a glimmering blackness—the ceaseless waves, a touch of moonlight. The sight of the world beyond the ship shattered something fragile and tender in Eliana’s throat, and as the attendants cleaned and bandaged her wrists, she swallowed hard against tears.
In the adjacent bathing room, they scrubbed her from head to toe with steaming water that poured from a gleaming brass