I looked at her face.
“How many what?”
“How many omegas have been sent down here to you?”
“You can do the math yourself,” I said.
“I have been chained in this spot for a hundred years. Every five years, they send one omega down.”
She stood still and counted silently on her fingers.
Her eyes grew wider as she finished.
“Twenty.”
I nodded my head once.
“Twenty women have been sent down into this hole?” she asked, her voice turning lower.
“Yes.”
She looked across the stone floor again.
“There are so many clothes here.”
I raised one eyebrow at her.
“You ask too many questions.”
She ignored my words completely.
“Did you watch them rot?”
I stared right into her eyes without turning away.
“Do you think watching a body rot is something new to me?”
She frowned at me.
“During the war, I sat in the ground and watched soldiers rot where they fell,” I said, keeping my voice steady and cold.
“Watching a body fall apart is not something new to my eyes.”
She looked at me in a different way now, her posture shifting.
“Wow.”
“What?” I asked.
“You must be really strong,” she said.
I did not give her an answer.
She looked down at her damp arms, then looked back at my face and the heavy chains wrapping around my wrists.
“So you think I was sent down here as a sacrifice too?”
That was the exact question I wanted her to answer. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
“Yes.”
Her eyes went wide again.
“That is why I held back from touching you when you were asleep,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on her.
“I needed to know whether you were sent here by them or if you fell in by mistake. That is why I did not take you.”
She blinked fast, pointing a thumb at her own chest.
“Wait. You held back?”
“Yes.”
“From mating with me?”
I sat there and stared at her.
She looked completely shocked, her brows pulling together.
“That is the reason you did not mate with me?”
She shook her head back and forth.
“Wow.” A look of disgust washed over her face.
“You are disgusting.”
I almost let out a small laugh at her expression.
“Do not get ahead of yourself. I do not mate with dead bodies. I like hearing them scream my name while they are alive.”
Her face twisted up.
“Ew. That is disgusting.”
“You will not say that when I am on top of you,” I said.
She rolled her eyes up toward the stone ceiling.
“Whatever.”
She turned her head and looked toward the dark passageway that led out of the cavern.
“Instead of sitting here wasting time talking about that, why do we not figure out a way to get out of this place?”
I shifted my weight on the stone floor and pointed my gaze directly at the metal object on her neck.
“That heirloom.”
She followed my eyes down to her chest.
“I recognize it,” I said.
“I saw that exact piece more than two hundred years ago.”
Her eyes narrowed at me.
“You mean the Kingmaker’s heirloom?”
I looked straight at the shiny metal.
“Yes.”
She took two steps closer to where my chains hit the floor.
“How do you know about the Kingmaker’s heirloom?, by the way my name is Jessica”
It was such a nice name but wasn’t as important as that heirloom, I stared at the piece of metal, letting memories I had buried for hundreds of years come back to the top of my mind.
“There was a woman once,” I said quietly.
Jessica stopped moving and stayed completely silent, waiting for me to speak.
“A woman I loved,” I said, turning my gaze toward the dark rock wall.
“This was back when I sat on the throne as king.”
I remembered her face clearly.
I remembered the sound of her voice and the way she used to look at me across the large stone rooms of the palace.
“She kept getting pregnant,” I told Jessica.
“Every single time she carried a child, the baby died inside her before it could be born. It happened again, and again, and again. It was as if someone inside the court was using poison to make sure she suffered. Someone wanted to make sure she could never give birth to a child who would take my crown.”
I paused, feeling the old weight in my chest.
“I could not sit on the throne and watch her suffer like that every year,” I said.
“So I divorced her. I stripped her title away and sent her out of the palace in La Fita, far away from the court and all the lords who wanted to use her.”
Jessica did not move a muscle.
She stood on the stone floor, her eyes glued to my face.
“Before she walked out of the city gates, I spoke a spell over her blood,” I said.
“I said that whoever she gives birth to in the lands outside will become king. No matter what happens in the future, even if I am no longer alive, her bloodline will take the crown.”
I looked back at Jessica’s face.
“I wanted to make sure the kingdom stayed in the right hands. I wanted my blood to carry on. Before she left, I placed that heirloom into her hands. After that day, she walked away, and I never saw her again. I never went looking for her.”
I stopped speaking and let the silence fill the space between us.
Jessica stared down at the heirloom resting in her palm, her fingers tightening around the metal.
“Then Something Happened”