“Why can’t you ever be nice to me?” Fire, where it came from, Maryanne didn’t know, but it came and burned where she’d been colder than a Thólos corpse. “I follow your orders day in and day out. I obey. I pace, and jump, and wash, and organize. I give you the lives of what might be decent people if they so much as breathe the wrong phrase in passing. What the fuck do you want from me, Shepherd?”
“I want you dead.”
Snuffed out, not even a trace of smoke. Frigid, a living corpse. A tired, lonely woman who could really use a drink offered no reply.
Silence was the appropriate response.
With obedience came a sort of mercy. Honesty.
Shepherd, cutting a glance over his shoulder, said, “It frustrates that I can’t kill you. Me, because I despise you. You, because you know how close to the grave you will always be. You’ll never be a Follower, Maryanne. You’re too selfish. Too empty for even me to fill.”
“Too useful, you mean.”
“You have your uses.”
Was that… was that a concession? “I have five more years left in these rooms. I just want to know how Claire is doing.”
A flicker of light came to a very dark man. “She is painting today.”
Done with her, with her reports, her efforts, her endless toil staring at people free to do as they wished, Shepherd faded back into the shadows. Leaving Maryanne with nothing but her screens.
Dinner arrived. She ate. At the appointed hour, she lay down on her cot, warmed by a colorful blanket in a dreary room.
When the chime woke her so she might slog through another day of endless watching, something new shone like a beacon.
On the wall… a fresh painting of flowers.
For the first time since Thólos fell, Maryanne cried.
And then she threw up.
5
There was dry toast for breakfast.
Maryanne followed protocol: she tidied her sleeping quarters—first cleaning up the drying pool of stale vomit. Afterward, she made the bed with sharp lines. Once bed-making precision had been achieved, she washed her body until her skin stung from the abrasive rag and scentless soap.
Mustering enthusiasm was dreary, her body dragging as she pulled clothing over her limbs.
Entering the arena of her misery—the room of screens—fresh, uninvited tears fell.
Not a single monitor fed her. There was no life to be seen. She had no window…
Maryanne was trapped in a gray prison with nothing but four walls and the lingering stench of barf. There was nothing for her anywhere. An Alpha female who had flouted Shepherd’s dominion of Thólos. Who had prepared for a long life of solitude. Who had swept the feet out from under a giant when his mate rebelled. Had nothing.
But dry toast and solitude.
And a painting of flowers she could neither bring herself to look at or avoid.
Lunch was bland tomato soup.
Dinner consisted of… she didn’t know. Maryanne had not even looked before she lifted her plate from the slot and sent it crashing against the opposite wall.
“GODS DAMN YOU!”
Two days. No food was sent.
Water, she drank from the tap, its coolness cupped in her palms as she slurped.
On the third day, the darkness lifted. Ten screens came to life.
Only ten.
Each one drab. The display no longer featured the fantastical people of Greth with their bright colors and zest for life. Strange-looking multitudes dressed in gray jumpsuits—characterless, colorless drones going about their day—in a creepy harmony of boring absoluteness.
Two more days, she watched in solitude, forgetting to sleep, to wash, eating her food without tasting as she stared into a mundane, endless caricature of life.
It was sad to see. It was confusing.
The monitors were no longer a game; they were work. There were no trysts or secrets to devour. There was conformity and peace.
As if he sensed the moment Maryanne was at her lowest, the darkness parted, and a massive walking nightmare appeared. “Your feed is now keyed to Bernard Dome, located in the former country of France.”
France? There had been some information about the place when she’d been the terrible student of her childhood… a history of something? Maryanne could not recall, yet she knew the name and had tuned her ears to the song of a language she did not understand.
Strange as it was, behind the accord and utter boringness of the display, beautiful things made up their architecture and squares. Fountains, cobblestone streets, white, glittering buildings. And she had watched without sleeping. Because the people did not represent the art of the structure. Same haircut, same pasted blandness of expression. Same uniform.
Where were the pickpockets? Where was the lust?
A clock rang, and everyone stood in unison, marched to eat, marched to shit, marched to work, marched to eat.
Did they march to fuck?
Where was that monitor?
A sweet Beta lover she had once been faithful to for over a month had called Maryanne’s eyes enigmatic. He had loved her eyes, not just because they were beautiful, but because they were devious. Playful.
Beyond her pouty lips, they were perhaps her best feature.
How long had it been since she’d seen mascara or fluttered her lashes at some potential paramour?
Why did it feel ugly to lift her gaze to acknowledge Shepherd, knowing he found nothing about her appealing? That it didn’t matter that her eyes were enigmatic, just as it didn’t matter that his whole person was basically disfigured by Da’rin.
Both of them were basically hideous, outward appearances aside.
Acknowledging that for the first time, more than a year into her sentence as Shepherd’s indentured prisoner, Maryanne had finally grown a semblance of a spine relating to this man. There was only so much she had left to lose… and it was starting to look more worthless by the minute. “I saved your life in Thólos. I dragged your huge, lumbering body to your men.”
As if he might actually be offering comfort, the walking terror put a single hand on her shoulder, reciting a speech as if he had memorized the day they landed on this new ground. “To save yourself and only yourself, Maryanne. Yet I live. Subsequently, Claire lives, so you serve your sentence in luxury. You possess a soft bed outfitted with blankets. From your taps flows clean running water. Unlike your few months in the Undercroft, you have a toilet, a bathing cubical, and a purpose. Daily, you are fed a perfectly balanced diet, delivered to you three times a day, when you are not unwell.”
If they were going to talk truths, then she had a word or two to add. “I hate it in here.”
“Good.” Shepherd didn’t care, would never care about her impulses or her urges. In fact, there was an odd respect for how well they understood one another in that sense. The conqueror, the king, held all the power. She held all the resentment. Should she not survive the years of her sentence, Maryanne would die alone, forgotten, with nothing but screens and her hand to see her through.
The idea had flittered through here and there over the ages under Shepherd’s thumb. But she had always brushed it off, because there was an end date. There were passions to pursue.
Glorious irresponsibility waited on the other side of that door. She would eat and drink and fuck her way through Greth until the glory of this new place was saturated into her cells.