Chapter Eight: A King's Ransom in Blood
582 Words
The Whip and the Wolf
The lash came down like judgment.
Crack.
Ermic didn't flinch. The scar tissue on his back was thicker than the warden's boot leather now. He'd learned to breathe through the pain, to turn each stripe into another link in the chain of his vengeance.
"Still playing the silent martyr?" Warden Le Roux sneered, coiling the bloody whip. "How poetic for a Count without lands."
Ermic lifted his head, eyes burning with something that made the guards shuffle back. "Again."
The whipmaster hesitated. That was new.
---
The Cardinal's Last Gift
Valmont was dying. Not the slow withering of prison life, but the swift, cruel kind—a lung punctured by splintered ribs from the tunnel collapse. Each breath bubbled like a drowning man's.
"You listen... with your bones now," Valmont gasped, clutching Ermic's hand hard enough to bruise. "Sparda's treasure... enough gold to drown kingdoms. Diamonds like pigeon eggs."
Ermic pressed a stolen cloth to the old man's lips. It came away scarlet. "Save your strength—"
"Silence!" The cardinal's voice rang with its old authority. From beneath his threadbare cassock, he produced a oilskin pouch, its contents clinking softly. "The last map... to the Vault of Drowned Kings."
Ermic's hands trembled as he unfolded the parchment. Not ink, but blood—old and flaking—marked the route to an uncharted island.
"One chest alone... could buy an army," Valmont whispered. "But the key—" A wracking cough. "The key is in the keeping of—"
The words dissolved into wet agony.
Ermic cradled the old man's head. "I'll get you out. We'll find it together—"
Valmont's skeletal fingers dug into his wrist. "You fool. I've been dead... since the day they threw me in here." With his last strength, he pressed a rusted key into Ermic's palm—its teeth filed into strange, jagged peaks. "South gate... every lock... click..."
The light left his eyes like a snuffed candle.
---
The Devil's Bargain
The guards came at dawn.
"Rotting already," muttered one, holding his nose as they rolled Valmont's body into a stitched-shut grain sack.
Ermic moved like shadow. A whispered prayer. A stolen knife. When the guards turned to haul their grim cargo, he was already inside the sack, his arms wrapped around the corpse in a macabre embrace.
Thud.
The impact with the Seine stole his breath. Icy water roared in his ears as the current grabbed them. Ermic held Valmont tight for three heartbeats—long enough to feel the old man's spirit slip away—then slashed the burlap with his hidden blade.
The cardinal drifted into the abyss, his robes billowing like a monarch's funeral shroud. Ermic watched until the dark swallowed him whole.
---
The Smuggler's Prize
He woke to firelight and the acrid tang of gunpowder.
"—not just some escaped convict. Look at his hands."
Ermic's vision swam into focus on a ring of weathered faces—Spanish smugglers by their garb, their pistols gleaming in the torchlight. A man with a gold-capped grin crouched before him, turning Valmont's key between his fingers.
"Madre de Dios," the smuggler breathed, examining the blood-map. "Do you know what this is, amigo?"
Ermic's cracked lips split in a smile more terrifying than any scream. "My destiny."
Behind them, the rising sun set the ocean aflame—a road of liquid gold leading east.
To France.
To vengeance.
To enough riches to make kings weep.
- Writer
