Captivity Read Free

fingertips,
and was expired through my pores, the fits moderated, until I
regained a depleted equilibrium, drenched with sweat but alive.
    Captain Reynaldo had observed my paroxysm
with a dispassionate, almost scientific interest, holding my dagger
in his fist, the prism covered. “My father taught me that trick,”
he said in a conversational tone. “He did that to my mother, so
she’d know who was master, even without crypta . And it
worked.”
    I dared to take a deep breath, which made me
gag, leaning over the side of my horse and retching up the remains
of my breakfast onto the trail and the folds of my dress.
    “Until she killed herself,” Reynaldo said. He
stuck the dagger through his belt, concealing the handle under the
skirt of his leather coat.
    Despite my own pain, I felt sympathy for the
horror of some poor kidnapped noblewoman, at the mercy of
Reynaldo’s father, left to her fate, not rescued by her family.
Suicide is a ‘Gravina’s duty when honor and hope are gone. If all
else failed it would be up to me to liberate myself in the same
way, by choosing death. There was screaming in the background, what
I assumed was my own voice, not aloud, but in my head, my mind’s
expression of grief at the decision I might be forced to make.
    I was too weak to talk and I must have lost
my mental shield during my ordeal, because Reynaldo also picked up
my bleak question: What makes you think I, too, won’t kill
myself? and replied to it.
    “This,” he said. Reynaldo held my son up in
front of me, shaking him to make him cry, although Val was already
wailing with all the force his little lungs could muster,
windmilling his arms and kicking his legs in his attempts to free
himself.
    “ Mama! ” Val cried. “ MAMA, MAAAAA MAAAAAAA! ” until it wasn’t words, just the
pure sound of fear made real. That was what I had been hearing, all
the time I fought for life and breath—my son watching his mother
being tortured.
    “Gi’m t’me!” I said. My voice wouldn’t work
yet. I coughed and tried again. “Give my son to me!”
    “What will you do for me in return?” Reynaldo
said. He held Val in one hand and smacked his face with open palm.
Val, who had known nothing but the most indulgent tenderness his
entire life, gasped until he choked, then let out another howl of
outrage.
    “Anything,” I said, hating myself, hating the
man for making me crawl.
    Reynaldo dared to come a little closer, while
keeping Val just out of reach. “Listen carefully, little lady,” he
said. “You will not use your gift against me, or any of my men. Do
you understand?”
    I nodded my head, but that wasn’t good
enough. Reynaldo slapped Val again, harder this time, and my son
made a sound like a dying rabbit in a snare. “Say it. Say, ‘Yes,
Captain Reynaldo, I promise not to use my gift against you.’ ”
    I repeated the words, thinking slow death to
him, imagining gangrene moving up his body, from feet to legs to
belly, of cancer eating at his colon, and last and best, of Dominic
taking his revenge, as only Dominic would know how, so that
Reynaldo would be the one to crawl, begging to be put down like a
sick dog, until he would be unable to do anything but writhe in
agonizing pain.
    As I said the words, Reynaldo handed Val to
me. The man knew my thoughts that I was still too weak to shield.
“You may think all you like,” he said, smiling with false
magnanimity. “But remember, if you try to make any of those kind
thoughts real, I will know , and I will take the boy and
deliver him to his father, piece by piece.”
    I held Val tightly to my chest, rocking him,
kissing his tear-streaked face and stroking the bright red hair. In
his fright he had wet and soiled himself. “My brave boy. It’s all
right now. I won’t let him touch you again.” I could only lie to my
son. Although his own crypta was not yet fully active, he
could, like any young sentient being, detect his mother’s fear, but
I did not know what else to