To The Princess Bound (20 page)

“Please let me go,” Victory whimpered.  She could not meet his eyes, her whole body trembling with her fear.  “Please.”

His face melted in a wave of anguish.  “Oh, Victory.”  He hauled her into his arms, rocking her against his chest.

She shuddered and felt him grab her in some distant corner of her brain. 
Too close,
she thought. 
He’s too close.
  It was then that her mind simply began to shut down, seeing nothing but the soapy water swirling against the far wall of the tub. 

As she had done countless times in the past, Victory prepared herself for the horror that she knew would come.

Too late, Dragomir realized that his own anger had clouded his sensing of the princess’s oncoming panic.  Holding her tightly in his arms, Dragomir tried to push the raging hurricane back out of sight, but the princess’s
gi
meridians were completely stagnant, locked down by a mind-rama that had switched her body on autopilot.

Oh gods,
he thought, pulling her back, looking into her vacant eyes. 
Oh gods, you fool…  What have you done?
  He wished he could take the last few minutes back, wished he could somehow repair the damage that he could already see in her empty stare.

“Victory?” he asked, gently setting her on a ledge in the tub.  “You’ve gotta come back, love.”

She stared at a point across the wall, rocking slowly.

Oh gods,
he thought.  He glanced at the soaped-up sponge, then at the water.  Knowing he had already come this far, he decided to save her the horror of another bath. 

“Okay, Victory, love, I’m going to wash you up so we don’t have to go through this again for awhile, all right?” 

Her gaze never shifted, fixed on some random point on the far wall.  He could see the silver core of her energy, detached and disassociated, hovering at arm’s-length from her physical form, just within the outer shell of her
au.

Anguished, not knowing what else to do, Dragomir grabbed the sponge and, as quickly as he could, washed her limp body.  Then, once she was rinsed and clean, he dumped a fistful of shampoo in her hair and started massaging it through her scalp, all the while talking to her, trying to bring her out of her trance.

She never moved, never spoke, never reacted in any way.

Gently, Dragomir held a clean rag over her face as he poured water over her hair to rinse it.  She never blinked.

“I’m so sorry, sweetie,” he said, lifting her to sit on the rim of the tub.  She didn’t fight him in any way—her arms hung at her sides, her eyes unfocused and staring.

Grabbing towels, he wrapped her in them, then lifted her from the tub and carried her out of the bathroom and back to the bed.  There, he slid her under the blankets and tucked her in.

“Victory?” he asked softly.

She stared at the canopy, unresponsive.

Finally, Dragomir settled himself on the floor, still wet and covered with goosebumps, watching her
au
for some sign of change.

It came four hours later, when her mind-rama slowly began to open again, and the energy mass that was her consciousness began to slide back into place at the seat of the brain.  She heard her sharp inhalation, saw her eyes twitch to the blankets.

For a long time, he said nothing, dreading the next words he knew were coming out of her mouth.

“I’m having the Praetorian replace your cuffs.”  Her voice was cold, calculated, utterly emotionless.

Dragomir hung his head.  He said nothing.

Without sitting up or moving in any way, Victory said, “If you touch me like that again, I will tell the Inquisitors about you and take a front seat at your execution.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

She didn’t respond.  She sat up and raised her voice in Imperial.

A moment later, two Praetorian marched inside.  Dragomir didn’t struggle as they grabbed his wrists and wrenched them behind his back.  He felt the cold bite of steel snap shut around them and he closed his eyes against tears.  “I’m sorry, Princess,” he said.

She ignored him completely.

Victory let her chambermaids dress her, no longer caring about the slave on the floor.  He hadn’t moved in hours, nor did she care.  For all intents and purposes, he no longer existed for her—he was a piece of furniture, that was all.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, once Carrie and Jolene had curtsied and taken their leave.

Victory peered at her reflection in the mirror, tracing the dark rings that were the only remaining outwardly physical sign of her years of captivity.  Her body had regained its lost weight, her skin had lost the sickly boils, her hair had started growing again.  It was just the rings, dark and brown, that was a daily physical reminder her of six years of starvation, torture, and rape.

“I’m sorry, Victory,” he said, for the thousandth time.

Picking at a stray hair to rearrange it behind her ear, Victory said, “You may refer to me as mistress or Your Royal Highness.  I hear that word uttered from your lips again and I will have my Praetorian come in here and gag you.”

Setting the mirror down, she turned to the nightstand.  On it, she found a porcelain figurine of a beautiful mermaid, swirling amongst a school of fish.  The workmanship and detail were exquisite, the piece an acquisition from an Imperial museum.  She picked it up, thoughtfully.  Then, twisting so that it was hovering over the bare marble floor, dropped it.

The white porcelain shattered over the black stone with a thousand tinkling shards, and the slave winced where he sat on a rug.  “That was pretty,” he said.

“It was useless,” she said, picking up another one.  This time, it was of a mermaid playing a harp.  She turned and dropped it with the other.

The slave watched the second statuette shatter and turned away.  She felt a warmth begin tracing around her, trying to cradle her.

Victory seized a third statuette and, whirling, flung it at him as hard as she could manage.

It missed, streaking past his head to shatter on the wall behind him.  The slave jerked, his eyes flashing open, startled.

“
Don’t
,” she said, trembling in her fury.  “Don’t
ever
do that again.”

He bowed his head to look at the floor between his knees.  For a long time, he said nothing, and Victory went back to relieving her room of unwanted pieces of her past. 

Behind her, he softly said, “You were a mermaid, many lifetimes ago.  You enjoyed that life very much.”

Victory stopped, a statue in one fist.  She turned to him, slowly.  “What did you say?”

He must have seen the rage, there, because he lowered his head and whispered, “They were a genetic mutation created to help colonize a water planet.”

“Let me guess,” Victoria sneered.  “You were in that one, too?”

His lack of response was all she needed.  “Stop
lying
to me!” she snarled, hurling the figurine at him.  It caught him full in the chest and he grunted.  The tiny statue fell into the rug between his knees, where its delicate tail snapped off and tinkled across the floor.  She turned back to her dresser and, with her arm, slid her entire collection off of the surface, flinging it across the room in a scream of rage.

There came a gentle knock on the door.  “Are you all right, Princess?”

“
Stay out!
” she screamed.  She went to another shelf, threw the mermaids across the floor, and went to another.  She went to every shelf, every open surface, and swept the clutter of useless artifacts of her past onto the black marble floor.  Then she plucked up a wooden mermaid statue that hadn’t shattered on impact and threw it across the room.  It bounced harmlessly off of the wall, skittering under the bed.  In a fury, she snatched it out from under the bed and started toward the fire with it.

Just before she threw it in, she hesitated.  It was an ironwood carving of a mermaid reading a book, something that her mother had given her in the last months before she had packed up to fly to the Academy.

Victoria felt her hand spasm around it. 
Mother,
she thought, remembering her loving arms, her warm embrace.  Her mother had died within the first year of Victoria’s captivity.  Heartbreak, her maids had said.  Sorrow that ate at the heart.  The doctors hadn’t been able to establish a cause.  She had simply…died.

Victoria glanced at the destruction behind her, then again at the statue.

Slowly, her legs gave out beneath her.  She sank to the floor, clutching the statue to her chest.  She closed her eyes and leaned over it, a low moan of despair sliding from her lips.  She felt tears of loss, then, the first tears of loss since she had realized she was in her own bed, her body an emaciated jumble of bones and protruding ribs.

Mother,
she thought again.  She had asked for her repeatedly in those first few days.  She had called out her name in her sleep, babbled it in her bouts of terror.  They hadn’t told her she was dead until she’d been home almost a month.  By then, that last avenue of hope had closed, and, without her mother’s shoulder to whimper her fears into, she had simply retreated further into herself.

Victoria cried, then.  All the tears that she had waited to shed in her mother’s arms, they came pouring out of her in a wave of grief and loss. 
I miss you,
she thought,
I miss you so much.

She felt the soft golden warmth blanketing her again, but she ignored it, too carried away by her anguish to care.

When she could finally find the will to wipe the tears off of her face, she called for her chambermaids and watched in a numb silence as they swept up the scattered remnants of her childhood collection.  Many of them had been priceless relics from before the Fall, and she felt a pang of loathing at herself for destroying such treasures in a tantrum. 

She knew what her mother would say.  She would shoo the maids out of the room and make Victory clean it up herself.  Then she would order her gifts from family and suitors diverted, donated to some charity while Victory suffered through an empty room for a year or two.

Victory pushed the grief back down and stood up, a new strength flooding her.  She wasn’t a child anymore.  The last six years had taken that from her as brutally as the blue-eyed weasel had taken her virginity.  She was done hiding.  She was going to find her father and tell him he could take this slave off of her or she could cut off his head and remove the collar herself.

She was also going to find Matt.

Pacing to the doorway, she gave the slave just enough time to get to his feet before yanking the door open and striding through it, forcing him to struggle against his hobbles to keep up.

She found her father first.  She pushed through the outer hall, ignored the two male house Praetorian standing at attention outside his chamber, and threw the doors open, despite the babbling protests from his butler.

“Father!” she snarled, storming up to him, where he was working over his desk, a goblet of wine at his right hand.  “You will take this man from my waist.  Now.”  She grabbed the chain and tugged hard, making the man on the other end grunt and stumble.

Her father took his time in finishing the marks he was making on his ledgers before carefully setting his pen aside, taking off his reading glasses, and looking up at her.  “So,” he said.  “The rabbit has finally come out of her hole.”