Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

An impossible task

FARAH

After he leaves, the door clicking shut behind him with a finality that seems to echo longer than it should, I’m left alone with nothing but my own thoughts and the dull, throbbing ache still radiating from my throat where his fingers pressed in only minutes ago.

I lift a hand and touch the skin there gently, wincing at the tenderness, half expecting to feel the shape of his fingers still burned into me like a brand.

Underneath the pain, fear coils tight in my chest, thick and heavy, twined together with something closer to dread—the kind that settles into your bones and refuses to leave no matter how many times you tell yourself to breathe through it.

I’ve never been afraid like this before. Not exam-week afraid, not walking-alone-at-night afraid. This is a different animal entirely, something that lives low in my stomach and never fully quiets, not even when he’s not in the room.

But I don’t let myself sink into it. I can’t.

Feeling things fully has never once helped me survive anything, and survival is the only thing that matters right now—not dignity, not fairness, not the aching need to understand why any of this is happening to me.

I have to make it through today, and then tomorrow, and then whatever comes after that, and hope something, anything, eventually shifts in my favor, because I already know with total certainty that I’m not getting out of here on my own.

Not weak like this. Not starved and bruised and friendless in a place where even the walls seem to know more about me than I do.

My throat still aches, a raw, bruised soreness that makes even swallowing unpleasant, but I reach for the porridge anyway and force it down in quick, graceless mouthfuls, barely tasting it.

It’s bland and lumpy and gone cold by now, nothing close to appetizing, but it’s calories, and calories are the one thing in this entire nightmare I still have some control over.

I clean the bowl like it might be my last meal, because for all I know, it might be.

Once it’s empty, I push myself up from the table, and my legs feel unsteady beneath me in a way that has nothing to do with the short walk and everything to do with how utterly wrung out I am.

I make my way back to the bed, and the mattress swallows me the second I sink into it, my limbs suddenly, overwhelmingly heavy, like every ounce of adrenaline that’s kept me upright since I arrived here has finally, all at once, run dry.

I don’t fight the exhaustion.

I let my eyes fall shut, telling myself it’s only for a moment, that I’ll rest just long enough to think clearly again.

But sleep comes for me differently than it used to.

The edges of the present start to blur first, thinning out like smoke caught in a draft, and something else rises to take their place—fragments, half-formed and strange.

A woman’s laugh I don’t recognize but somehow ache at hearing.

The scent of something floral and unfamiliar, thick in air that doesn’t belong to any place I’ve ever been.

A hand—not mine—reaching for something wrapped in cloth, careful, reverent.

Voices murmuring in a language I shouldn’t understand and yet somehow do, the meaning arriving in my chest before it arrives in my ears.

It isn’t like dreaming.

It’s like remembering something that never happened to me at all, the past and the present bleeding together at the seams until I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.

I don’t know how long I sleep.

Long enough that when I wake, the light through the window has shifted, thin and gray, morning instead of night.

And he’s already there.

Caspian steps into the room without knocking, the way he always does, like the very concept of privacy has simply never applied to me since the moment I crossed into his territory.

I push myself upright, my body protesting in places I didn’t even know could ache, and watch him cross the room with that same unhurried, deliberate stride, the one that makes it feel like he owns not just the space but the air inside it too.

“I agreed to leave you unrestrained,” he says, without preamble, without so much as a glance at the state of me.

“That doesn’t mean you’re owed anything else.”

I sit up straighter, bracing myself, because I can already tell from the flatness in his voice that whatever’s coming isn’t going to be kind.

“From now on, you’ll earn every meal in this place,” he continues.

“Nothing comes free. Not food, not comfort, not my patience.”

“Fine,” I say, because what else is there to say.

“What do you want from me?”

“Your first assignment,” he says, “is to clean every room in this palace.”

I blink, certain I’ve misheard him.

“Every room?”

“Every room,” he confirms, and there isn’t a trace of humor anywhere in it, nothing that suggests he’s testing me for effect or expecting me to laugh it off as an exaggeration.

“Top to bottom. Before the sun sets.”

“That’s—” I start, then stop myself, because arguing with him has never once worked in my favor, and I doubt today will be the day that changes.

“That’s an entire palace.”

“Then I’d suggest you start now,” he says, unmoved, “instead of wasting daylight arguing with me.”

I stare at him, at the utter lack of give in his expression, and something hot and furious rises in my throat, quickly swallowed down beside the porridge still sitting heavy in my stomach.

“And if I fail?” I ask, even though some small, exhausted part of me already knows I won’t like the answer.

His eyes hold mine, cold and unblinking.

“Then you’ll receive a punishment of my choosing,” he says.

“And trust me. You won’t enjoy finding out what that means.”