Tainted blood

Thalia

The lark is back again.

It must be nearly dusk.

I watch as the little brown bird hops his usual path along the alabaster stone ledge outside our prison cell. With no clocks in this room, he’s all we have to stop time sliding into a black hole.

He’s here at daybreak.

He’s here at the end of the day when it’s our hope that is breaking.

The lark pauses suddenly, cocking his head to listen to the blood-curdling screams rising up from the castle’s grounds below us. It’s an ugly sound that not even his sweet lullaby can remedy—a sound that has haunted me, ever since we arrived at this hellhole yesterday.

For a while, the bird remains a twitching silhouette against the bars at our window. I hate those bars, not so much for what they represent as for the perfect vista they crisscross with black metal. Closed shutters and total darkness would have been less cruel. I don’t want to see paradise. I don’t want to see the wildflowers and the sweeping lines of poplar and cypress trees that border the sun-soaked hills—a view that, no doubt, graces a billion holiday postcards from Florence to Rome.

We’re in Italy: a beautiful country with a hidden dark corner that's reserved just for us.

We’ve yet to face the evil that orchestrated our capture, but I sense him all the time. He hangs like a thick fog over everything—even thicker than the white mist that smothers those hilltops every morning before the hot Tuscan sun burns it away.

Eventually, the lark starts hopping again, taunting us with his frantic movements. Only one of us has their freedom, and it isn’t me.

Or Lola.

She’s lying on the bed next to me, curled up in a ball to protect herself. She tells me she’s always slept that way. Her father calls it autodefena mental. I call it preemptive, and it frightens me more than anything. It’s like her subconscious knows what’s lurking around the corner for us.

She coughs in her sleep—her slim body rattling with the violence of it. I hold my breath as I wait for hers to even out again. She’s been throwing up all day. She finally passed out from exhaustion around an hour ago.

My gaze switches to the locked door, and I utter a silent prayer for it to stay shut. So far, the men with empty eyes have left us alone, but their absence is nothing more than a stay of execution. The screams below us are never at the same pitch.

Different girls.

Different hours.

Soon, those screams will be ours.  

I dared myself to look outside earlier. That’s when I saw the lines and lines of neat, green, yaupon holly hedges for the first time—as sinisterly uniformed as they were terrifying. The garden maze was a myriad of brutal twists that turned my stomach into knots, and every instinct I had, every instinct my father’s world has forced me to nurture, told me that this was a place I needed to fear.

The screams were coming from the center of it. The pleading went on and on…

Lola coughs again. She needs to be stronger before they attempt to destroy us with whatever sick perversion they have pla

Since we were taken, it’s been one inescapable cage after another—from the dirty shipping container to the private plane, to the black van that wound spirals out of the narrow roads up to this creepy-as-fuck hilltop town, with the thick stone perimeter wall. Presently, we’re in a shitty room with bars on the window and bolts on the door.

I dread to think how many women must have been held captive here before us. Our mattress was threadbare with desperation when we arrived. The pillowcases were still damp with another’s tears…

“Larks can only sing when they’re in flight,” comes a weak voice as Lola rolls over to face me, her eyelids fluttering open. “Did you know that?”

Firebirds can only sing when their wings haven’t been pulled off.

Tonight, in the fading light, she looks so much like Santi it stings my eyes.

I try not to think about him here, despite the constant reminder. It makes me weaker and more vulnerable. When he finally manages to hijack my thoughts, I tell myself I hate everything about him to toughen up what’s left of my heart.

I hate the power he wields over me, his viciousness, his filthy mouth… I hate how his kisses are like the sweetest lie and his fucking, as hard as the truth. He knew how worried I was about Ella. He knew how sick she was. He could have set my fears to rest at any time by telling me he had the tape.

But I also know why he didn’t. Because it’s the same reason why I can’t bring myself to hate him as much as I desperately want to.

It’s a reason I refuse to acknowledge, and one I refuse to accept.

“I’m amazed anything can sing around here,” I say, pulling her arm around my waist, welcoming the extra heat, even though the humidity in the air is crushing my lungs.

I remember reading about a derelict Second World War concentration camp in Poland once. There was never any birdsong in the trees surrounding it. Some wickedness was built to endure.

We lie like statues until the little lark flies off into a world that we don’t belong to anymore. Lola’s silence is agony. The pieces of her broken heart are even more jagged than mine. When I told her about Sam getting shot in Legado’s parking lot, something about the way her face crumpled tore their year and a half deception to pieces.

The truth fell like dominoes after that.

The man she loves is dead.

The man she loves will never hold their child.  

She hasn’t confirmed her pregnancy to me yet, but it’s obvious from the way her hand hovers over her stomach, and from her never-ending bouts of sickness. There’s no bump, but it’s only a matter of time.

It makes me so full of fear for her.

We hardly know each other, but I feel a fierce, almost violent protectiveness toward her and her baby. I’m stepping up to fulfill Santi’s role. We’re sisters now. We’re family. I’m quickly learning that a Santiago and a Carrera are so much stronger together than when they’re ripping each other apart.

Maybe if Santi and I hadn’t been fighting like cats and dogs all the time, we might have seen this hell coming.

“Shit, what’s that?”

Lola sits up in a rush, and I scramble to follow. There are loud male voices in the hallway outside, speaking a language that neither of us understand. The bolts groan in protest. The lock in the heavy wooden door turns. A beat later, a young woman with matted dark curls is being pushed into our room.

With a muffled cry, she lands on the cold flagstones as the door slams shut again.

At first, she doesn’t move. She’s dressed in a dirty white slip dress like us, but every inch of her bare skin is covered in cuts and bruises. She’s shaking like a leaf, the strands of black hair slithering free across her shoulders to reveal six jagged welts. They’re all around ten inches in length, interlacing a crimson pattern into her tan skin.

My blood turns cold.

Whip lashes. 

“Who did this to you?” I whisper in horror, sliding from the bed.

She raises her face to us, and I stop dead. One cheek is swollen purple, and her lower lip is split and bleeding. There’s still a flame of defiance in her dark eyes, though... A burning hate for the men who did this to her. They may have crushed her body, but her soul is still fighting.