“Uh, hold on a minute,” Lilah let those words roll around in her head. She knew she heard them wrong. “Could you please expand on what you’re saying.”
Shinni leaned closer to the bars and whispered, “Those who are mates—the males spend the night with their mates in her room.”
Daphne glanced at her with a frown. Her cousin said, “I thought I heard something about men deciding who they sleep with?”
Fuck. Lilah knew she heard that too. But she needed to verify just to make sure.
“Valori, are you saying the women have no say in whether they want to sleep alone or who sleeps with them?” She tried like hell to keep her voice steady.
“Hey,” the guard shouted from the entrance, “you females be quiet. You shouldn’t be talking anyway. Don’t you have something to do except gab all day?”
Lilah’s jaw clenched. That was it. She couldn’t stand it anymore. She breathed in deeply, expelling the fury inside her chest little by little.
“Valori,” Daphne said, “you cannot live like that. If the woman doesn’t want sex and the man makes her, that’s called rape, which is punished severely where we come from.”
Lilah had calmed enough to speak. “You have to put a stop to it. All of it. The cover-ups, the oppression, rape, and the boys in the mine. Oh my god. I forgot about them.” She took another breath. “Valori, women receive no respect here. The men are taking advantage of you in every way they can. It has to stop.”
Valori’s eyes widened. “It’s the king’s rule. How am I to go against the king? They will have me punished.”
Lilah thought about the circumstances. What would she suggest if her client wasn’t able to get away from the injustice? In the past, she had driven to a woman’s home to help her escape an abusive situation. It didn’t seem like a big deal until her car was shot at. But she got the abuser on a prior and domestic abuse charges, which put him away for a max of five years.
That’s what they needed, someone to help them get away. To escape. But where would they all stay? She turned to Zee with a smile.
“Ladies,” Lilah said, “let me introduce you to the alpha of the forest dwellers. They have a very lovely new home. Would you like to visit?”
Chapter Thirteen
Lilah paced outside the jail cell. While the guard they had tied up and gagged sat glowering at her from inside the bars.
“Stop staring at me like you want to chop my head off. We’re going on strike for your own good. You’ll thank me later.” The guard mumbled, and she was sure he said something along the lines of he wasn’t buying it. “Send someone to the forest dwellers’ village when the king wants to talk about changes that must be made before we come back.”
Valori hurried around the corner with a few sleepy-eyed boys who still had dust on their clothes. “This is everyone. Let’s go.”
Holding a torch, Ferra led the group down the tunnel from the holding room. Down, down, down. Lilah wondered if they were going down to the lava pits again. She looked around to make sure the young lady she met there was in the group. The girl was up in front with a few others following along.
Finally, they slowed as they came to a dead-end rock wall.
What the hell? All this way just to go back?
Ferra placed the torch in a holder then placed her hands side by side on the wall. As she pushed her hands to both sides, the wall split and slid to the side just like yanking open a set of curtains. Lilah couldn’t keep her jaw closed. Seeing it up close was fascinating. Though it was probably easy for them, it looked like a miracle, like Moses splitting the water of the Red Sea.
On the other side stood a grinning Xenos and Wren. Valori had snuck them out earlier to alert the village of their arrival. A few Gnoleon women were there also. When the first of the Citogen stepped out, brown fae and red fae stared at each other.
Was this the first time the two species had met? She hadn’t thought about how they would react to each other. Would their coloring define how they felt about each other?
Xenos pulled his sister Iridia, the leader of the Gnoleon, to his side and introduced her to Ferra. The significance of this meeting wasn’t lost on Lilah. These two were the next generation of leaders among their people. They would shape the future, and that forthcoming time would be based on what happened in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.
God, Lilah hoped this was the right move. If not, she single-handedly doomed an entire female population to a living hell.
Ferra and Iridia motioned the group forward, and quietly, they disappeared into the forest on the trek to the village. The sun hadn’t topped the horizon yet, but the first rays had lit the sky. The air was crisp and invigorating. Energy and excitement rolled through her. The only thing that could’ve made it better was to have Ferrus with her.
She stopped in her tracks. That thought was unexpected. She searched her heart and realized it was true. The man wasn’t as bad as she had made the males out to be in her mind. He was nothing like the asshole in the dining room, the prince. Ferrus seemed like any other guy on Earth. Except he was nice to her.
But he hadn’t done anything to stop the injustices the females had been enduring for years. But as a lowly warrior, how could he help with change? He didn’t see his home as the toxic environment that it was. It was what he was used to. He wasn’t experiencing the bad. Well, if he mediated between her and the king, he’d know exactly what the problems were. He’d know what needed to change, and what needed to happen now.
Lilah would stand for these women who didn’t have a voice in their lives. She would make sure the children, girls and boys, didn’t suffer as their mothers had.
By the time Lilah reached the village, some were already mingling. She noted that many of the red Fae Citogen had brought stone bowls and dishes and kitchen knives. The Gnoleon village was in the middle of preparing breakfast, and the visiting women jumped right in.
The mountain women marveled over the berries and nuts that the forest held. She heard Valori say that she remembered eating the exotic foods when she was little. For some reason, no one came out to collect such delicacies any longer. Lilah doubted the king would let them out to gather anything.
Iridia told her that she was welcome to gather at any time. In fact, the female alpha said she would have the gardeners plant several of the bushes on the forest perimeter to the mountain, so they had easy access. They would make sure every year that the plants remained healthy and abundant just in case the Mother of the Land needed a little help.
The Citogen stared at Iridia. “Do you mean Mother of the Mountain?”
The female alpha tipped her head to the left. “No. Mother of the Land.”
Valori smiled. “We need to share stories on our beginnings. I think we may find many similarities.”
Lilah moved through the village to see how the rest of the Citogen were. If the tension was thick somewhere, she was the one to smooth things over. Oddly enough, she found Ferra surrounded by men and their weapons.
The girl appeared to be a little young to look for a mate, maybe in a couple years. At the rate they were going, it wouldn’t matter if she found a mate or not. She’d be condemned to no love or joy.
Ferra held an arrow with a stone arrowhead the forest people used to hunt. The edges were sharp, as sharp as rock pounding on a rock could get. Ferra pinched the edges between two fingers and ran them around the perimeter of the triangle. When she pulled her hand away, the edges were razor sharp and smooth. The men gasped and pushed all of their arrows at her to do. The girl laughed. That was something Lilah hadn’t seen from the princess. Happiness.