Page 114 of Commanding Scythe and Sky

“Please. Take it.”

Take it? Take what?

My body screamed in protest as I pushed onto aching hands and knees. Dragged myself across the floor. Half praying those hands through the bars would close around my throat and end this.

But when my shaking hand found his, my fingers wrapped around… fabric.

“Take it,” he repeated. “I have a feeling I won’t need it for much longer anyway.”

There was something faintly familiar in the slant of his words, but I couldn’t place it.

Confused, I accepted his offering, falling back onto my bare, aching bones. A shirt. The newcomer had passed me a shirt.

“I’m privy to some fucked-up tactics,” he said, still leaning against the cage like a boy at his favorite animal enclosure. “But not even I would strip a woman bare and leave her that way.”

I looked, then.

Down at my naked body.

How long had I been that way? Wrong. It was wrong.

Swallowing, I dipped my chin in thanks and pulled the fabric over my head.

A shudder rocked through me as his lingering heat wrapped around me. Warm. The sweet musk of sweat and citrus. I wasn’t sure I could remember the last time I felt warm.

“Christ,” he breathed again. “You’re skin and bone. How long have you been here?”

I blinked. Scowled. Dug into the recesses of my mind, searching for anything before…

Came up empty. I retreated to the corner of my cell—as far away from the man with the shirt as I could get—and wrapped my arms around my knees.

“Can you talk?” he demanded, concern in his voice. “Hey, can you speak?”

Another blink. Working to gather enough saliva, I forced my cracked lips open. My voice rough with disuse, I could barely hear it as I said, “Thank you.”

“What’s your name?”

“I…”

Blank.

My mind went utterly blank.

Had I ever had one?

Blythe

A knock at the chamber door had me rising from the new plant babies my bullshit heroics had earned me—a gift from the ‘king’ himself.

After skeptically inspecting the offering and deeming them non-toxic, I allowed them into my room, deciding reluctant acceptance would garner more favor with the sadistic bastard than sending them to a soil-ridden graveyard.

Now they sat beside the chair I inhabited while weaving the energetic tapestry I’d started the day I’d saved the king—a fool’s hope that I could change things, that I could somehow help the woman a floor below me, in this life or the next. But I had an abundance of time and was depressingly short on company, so it seemed the least I could do.

A lifetime of training to become one of the world’s most elite healers, and here I sat, captive in the enemy’s mansion, tending plants and weaving the ropes of fate like I had any business touching them to begin with.

With a sigh, I turned, fighting back the terror immediately clawing up my throat—not for me. They’d never laid a finger on me. Not yet. It was what I might find when we descended into that godsdamned torture chamber.

“Witchling?” Barry asked as he pushed the door open, those dark eyes apologetic as they landed on me. “You’ve been summoned.”