Delilah
“No.” My vision swam, warping Vandekamp’s office furniture until I could have been looking into the mirror maze at the menagerie. “No. Gallagher would never sacrifice his honor like that, and I wouldn’t either. We wouldn’t... He couldn’t. He swore to protect...”
Understanding hit me like a punch to the gut. “That’s what he was doing, wasn’t he? Protecting me?”
Tabitha shrugged. “My understanding is that if it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else.”
Gallagher. My sworn champion and best friend, who chafed at the misconception that our relationship was based on anything as trivial and fleeting as physical attraction, might be the father of a baby neither of us ever meant to have. A child that could be human or fear dearg or some unprecedented combination of the two.
“I don’t...” I closed my eyes, trying to block the Vandekamps out. I wanted nothing else in the world but to be alone. To process my shock and trauma away from cruel mouths and prying eyes.
“We’ll know how to proceed in a month,” Tabitha said in a tone that fell horrifically short of the comfort she obviously thought she was providing. Protecting my baby in case it was human didn’t absolve her of her willingness to kill that same child if Gallagher turned out to be the father.
I opened my eyes, and all I could think about was how badly I wanted to claw their eyes out and spit on their corpses, and how little help the furiae would be in that endeavor.
“I want the test. Now.” I hadn’t even known what I was going to say until the words were out, and I didn’t realize I meant them until I heard them. “The amniocentesis.”
“But there’s a risk for the baby,” Tabitha protested.
“Life is a risk for this baby.”
“What’s the biggest risk from amniocentesis? Miscarriage?” Vandekamp asked. Tabitha nodded. “What’s the risk? Give me the numbers.”
“Not quite a one percent chance.”
“And probably less, under ideal circumstances, which we can easily provide,” he said. “I want to know now. Call Dr. Grantham and schedule the test for tomorrow.” Before she could argue further, he twisted to push a button on his desk phone. “Send Pagano back in.”
My guard stepped into the office behind me and closed the door.
“Pagano, are you married?” Vandekamp asked. “Have kids?”
“No, sir.”
“Excellent. You are now assigned to Delilah exclusively, so we’re going to need you here around the clock until further notice. My assistant will set up a room for you and see that your salary is doubled. Any objection?”
Pagano hesitated, but just for a moment. “No, sir.”
“Take her back to her cell,” Vandekamp ordered. “She’ll be seeing Dr. Grantham tomorrow, and you are not to tell him about Dr. Hill. Nor will you tell anyone else about the pregnancy. Do you understand?”
“Of course, sir,” Pagano said from behind me. “Any change to her diet or exercise program?”
“No. Keep everything as is, and notify me personally of any change at all in her condition or health. Dismissed.”
Pagano pulled me up by one arm.
“Send Gallagher to me,” I said, as he escorted me out of the room. “I need to talk to him.”
Vandekamp didn’t reply, but I could feel his gaze following me until we turned the corner out of sight.
* * *
“You knew about Gallagher, didn’t you?” I demanded as Pagano led me through the topiary. The sun still rode high in the sky, though it felt like I’d spent forever in Vandekamp’s office, watching while what little life I still had was ripped apart at the seams. “That’s what you didn’t want to tell me?” What no one, evidently, wanted to tell me.
“I wasn’t there. I just heard about it.”
And he couldn’t have been the only one.
A strange sound caught in my throat when I tried to swallow a sob. I stopped walking, but Pagano didn’t reach for me.
“You weren’t alone. That kind of engagement takes a toll on the cryptids, which is why the boss charges so much for them.”
“He charges a lot because he likes money.” I walked on, and Pagano matched me step by step without touching me, even though he wore gloves.
“So, Dr. Hill?”
“What about him?” I stared at the cold, rough sidewalk as we stepped onto it, headed down a curving path toward the isolated building where my cell was.
“Will he survive?”
“Rommily says he won’t.” I shrugged. “They don’t typically give me updates on those who draw the furiae’s wrath, but I’m guessing it won’t do them any good to stuff his guts back in and sew him shut unless they figure out how to stop him from slicing himself open again.”
Pagano seemed to think about that in silence until we got to my building. “How does it work?” he asked as he pulled the door open. “I mean how do you decide who...deserves it?”
“I don’t.” I stood still while he programmed my collar to stop me from leaving the building. “No knife chooses its own target.”
“You’re saying someone else is wielding you?”
“Something else. Something bigger. Something wiser.”
“So...how can I stay on the good side of this something bigger?”
I stopped to look up at him as he led me down the hall toward my cell. “If you keep working here, you can’t. Eventually Vandekamp will ask you to do something horrible. If you do it, the furiae will come for you. If you don’t, you’ll lose your job.”
He opened his mouth, and I could see the protest coming.
Instead of listening to how unfair a choice that was, I walked down the hall and into my cell, leaving him staring after me.
A second later, the light over the door flashed red.
* * *
I sat with my back to the window, watching the square of fading daylight shift across the floor with the sun’s slow descent. Trying not to obsess over answers I didn’t have. Footsteps clomped in the hall, and my cell door opened. Gallagher stepped inside, wearing only a pair of threadbare pants and his traditional red cap. Behind him, Pagano was already programming his collar to lock him in my cell.
The door closed, and Gallagher studied my face. “They said you asked for me. Why would they oblige?”
“I have something they want.” That wouldn’t buy me endless requests, but it would apparently get me this one, at least.
“What’s wrong?” Gallagher tried to pull me into a hug, but I backed away from him. I didn’t know how to be touched by him anymore.
Hurt flitted across his normally unreadable features.
“Sit down.” I glanced at the stack of mats, my only furnishing, other than the toilet. “Please.”
“You remember.” The pain in his voice seemed to bring the earth to a grinding halt beneath us. As hard as this was for me, it was hard for him too.
“No. But I’ve heard.”
“That’s worse,” he growled. “I’m so sorry. It was difficult enough the first time around, but to have to hear about it...” His brow furrowed and his fists clenched. “Who told you?”
“The Vandekamps.”
“So, they know about your memory?”
I nodded. “So does Pagano.”
“Did you figure out what happened? How you lost the memories?”
Another nod. I sank onto the mats with my back against the wall, but still he stood. “Gallagher, I need to know what happened that night.”
“You’re better off without the memory.”
“That’s not your choice to make.” He flinched, and I exhaled slowly. “I know you were trying to protect me. I know you wouldn’t have... Unless the alternative would have been worse. For me.”
He nodded. “And when the time comes, everyone who played a part will die a slow and painful death for what they did to you.”
“They did it to you too.”
Gallagher frowned. He seemed unable to understand that he too had been a victim. “I am a warrior, even in chains.”
“I know.” The canvas of scars his torso had become would never let either of us forget that. “Tell me what happened. Please.”
He sighed and finally sank onto the stack of mats, maintaining as much respectful space between us as he could. “I don’t want you to hate me, but I’ll understand if you do. However, that won’t change anything for me. My oath can’t be broken. Even if you loathe the very sight of me, I will protect you with my dying breath.”
“I understand.” But I also understood that he wasn’t yet armed with all the facts. If I was carrying his child, would that complicate his oath? It would certainly complicate everything else. “Start from the beginning. Please. When did it happen?”
Gallagher took a deep breath, and his thick chest swelled. “It was my second night in the arena. Our second week here. After the fight, two guards took me back to my cell, but you weren’t there. They stayed while I showered, then they gave me a clean pair of pants and said I’d been requested for a private engagement.
“I didn’t even know what that meant. I had done nothing but fight since the bachelor party. But they wouldn’t answer any of my questions. They just said that if I cared about you, I’d do whatever the client told me to. When I arrived, there you were, standing with two other women.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. It was a small room, with thick rugs and pillows all over the floor. The lights were dim. They lined me up between a shifter I’d never seen and Drusus.” The incubus from Metzger’s.
“Who was the client?”
“They didn’t tell me his name. He was tall, for a human, and painfully thin, and he obviously had a good deal of money. The handlers said no one had ever requested a champion before, and that Vandekamp charged him a fortune.”
That was no surprise. The Spectacle’s clientele could afford anything they wanted, and all they seemed to want was something no one else had ever had. Like a fae champion who drew his lifeblood from the gaping wounds of his victims.
“He paired the others on rugs arranged around the room, while he stood in the middle. Then he turned to us. I thought it was coincidence that he’d paired us, but finally I realized he’d overheard something at the fight. Something about you and me.”
“He heard that you would only fight for me.” The same thing I’d heard in the private viewing box. “We’ve become some kind of a Savage Spectacle legend, and Vandekamp plays it up.”
Gallagher nodded. “I told him that our relationship wasn’t sexual in nature. That to even imply such a thing was an insult to both of us, and could not be suffered.
“You started crying, and I wanted to rip his head from his body, but he wasn’t threatening your life, so I couldn’t, and I felt so...”
“Helpless?” I said, and he nodded. He didn’t have easy access to that word.
“When I refused, he put you with the incubus. Drusus promised you’d like it. He was trying to comfort you, but you didn’t want to like it.”
Of course not. I wouldn’t have wanted him inside my head any more than I wanted him inside my body. Being forced to enjoy something I didn’t want would have been another choice taken from me. Another humiliation.
“He... Drusus reached for you. He was just trying to save you both. But you started screaming.” Gallagher’s voice sounded thick, as if each word had to be forced from his throat. “You were terrified, but I’d promised you I wouldn’t kill anyone who wasn’t threatening your life. So I did the only thing I could think of.”
“You took his place,” I whispered.
“It was the best I could do.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and suddenly the memory was there.
Cushions and pillows. Thick rugs in shades of blue and purple, as if the room is one big bruise. Tear-streaked faces and bare bodies. Guards standing against the wall, watching with various levels of disgust and fascination.
Gallagher, naked, his face a mask of self-loathing, looking at me as if I were the source of all his pain, yet his only hope of redemption.
“Forgive me,” he whispers.
Then he reaches for me—
I opened my eyes, and the images were gone. And suddenly I was terrified to close them. I’d needed to know, and now I was ready to forget again.
“You remember?” Gallagher said.
“Some of it.”
His gray-eyed gaze captured mine, and the fear swimming in them was unprecedented. “Do you hate me?”
I hated everything that had happened in that room. Everything that had ever taken place at the Savage Spectacle. Everyone who’d ever worn the uniform or handed over a credit card. But Gallagher?
“No.” The truth was there, sitting right on the surface of our shared trauma. “You had no choice. The crime is theirs.” But I didn’t know how to look at him anymore. I didn’t know how to be near him.
“Indeed. Release me from my promise and let me rend limbs from the people who would send you on such an engagement, as well as any man who would pay to see you abused in such a manner.”
“Gallagher...”
His brow furrowed and his thick fists tensed with pent-up wrath. “Delilah. I cannot stand by and watch while you suffer.” Outrage burned deep in his eyes. “Let me do what I was born to do.”
Every muscle in his body strained against the promise he’d made me. He actually shook with rage, but beneath that was something even more visceral. Some combination of intense pain, profound affection and acute distress. And that’s when I finally understood.
It wasn’t just that the promise I’d demanded from him was in direct opposition to his oath to protect me. It was that with or without his oath, beyond the respect he had for my calling, he cared about me as a person. Probably in some honorable fear dearg manner that defied human understanding and vocabulary.
And watching me suffer—becoming a part of my suffering—was killing him.
If he knew I’d been sent on another engagement of a similar nature...
Oh, shit.
Suddenly the memory was there, disinterred by digging through my own psyche.
I’d realized that breaking his oath to me to keep a lesser promise was literally killing him. That’s why I’d had my own memory wiped.
I hadn’t been trying to forget what Gallagher and I were forced to do. I’d been trying to forget the other engagement, because if I didn’t know about it, he wouldn’t know. And if he didn’t know, he wouldn’t have to choose between slaughtering everyone involved—and getting himself killed in the process—or dying from breaching his own oath to do that very thing.
“Soon,” I promised. “Soon. We’ll get our chance to escape, and you’ll be free to tear the entire world in two, if that’s what it takes to get us all out of here. But that time hasn’t come yet.” And it couldn’t, at least until I knew about the baby. If it was Gallagher’s, he would never have to know about that other engagement.
“The time for patience has passed. Vandekamp doesn’t deserve to live, much less profit from what he’s doing to you. To all of us.”
“You won’t have to wait much longer. You have my word. Okay?”
Gallagher nodded reluctantly. “Until then, I will sate my thirst for blood on the memory of past vengeance and the promise of more to come.”