Chapter 619: They Have No Idea What’s Coming

Fin watched time speed forward. The man named Charlie checked on them every single day. Every. Single. Day. Through the lashings and the silver and the starvation and the labor and every horror a slave kingdom could manufacture for two girls whose crime was existing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Two girls. One healer. A slave quarter in a kingdom built on cruelty. And the only thing standing between them and death was a man named Charlie whose weapons were bread and bandages and the specific, quiet heroism of someone who had decided that helping was worth dying for and then got up every morning and proved it.

Fin had commanded armies. He had never seen bravery like this.

Charlie kept them alive the way an engineer keeps a bridge standing: through daily inspection, constant maintenance, and the stubborn, structural refusal to let the thing he was maintaining collapse on his watch.

Fin wanted to find this man. The real one. The present-day version, if one existed. He wanted to find him and shake his hand and tell him that the two girls he’d kept alive in a slave quarter had become the most important women on the continent, and the becoming had started with boiled water and stolen bread and a healer who chose execution over abandonment.

The memory lurched forward and time compressed. Fin’s gut told him what was coming before the memory showed it. The gut had been right about every terrible thing so far and Fin was starting to hate his own instincts for their accuracy.

What he saw next made him wish for the lashing square because at least the lashing had an end.

✦✦✦

Serena hung from the ceiling by her wrists. Silver chains coiled around her torso.

She was a little older. The cell was windowless. Stone walls. A drain in the floor whose purpose Fin refused to examine.

His stomach turned. The turning was violent, physical, the kind that started below the ribs and climbed toward the throat with intent. He had walked battlefields. He had seen what war did to bodies. But a battlefield was chaos and a cell was deliberate, and the deliberate was worse by a magnitude that no military training had prepared him for.

The chains were wrapped tight, crossing her chest, her ribs, her stomach, each point of contact producing a burn that was visible in the inflammation and the blistering and the specific, wet rawness of skin that had been in contact with silver for so long it had stopped being an injury and become a condition.

She stared at the wall. Tears falling.

Fin fell to his knees. His body made the decision without consulting him, the way bodies do when what the eyes are seeing exceeds the structural capacity of the knees to keep standing. He was on the ground, eye level with a girl hanging from chains, and the sound that came from his chest was not a word. It was the sound a man makes when something inside him breaks and the breaking is permanent.

He wanted to break the chains. He wanted it with a violence so total it consumed every other thought in his head.

He tried the collar first. The silver band around her throat, the one that was eating into her skin one hour at a time. But his hands passed through it and the passing was the cruelest thing the memory had done to him yet, because the reaching was reflex and the failing was physics and the gap between what his body wanted and what the memory allowed was a space filled entirely with rage.

He tried again with the chains wrapped around her. But his arms went through her body and closed around nothing, leaving him kneeling on a stone floor holding air while the girl who would become his mate hung from chains three inches from his face.

"Aurelia, are you there? I’m so sorry."

She was talking to her wolf. Her wolf, who was being poisoned by the silver wrapped around every inch of her body. She was apologizing to the animal inside her chest for something that wasn’t her fault.

Fin’s fist hit the stone wall. It passed through. He hit it again anyway.

The memory shifted.

✦✦✦

Weeks later. Same cell. She was curled on the stone floor. Her cheekbones were sharper. Silver cuffs circled her wrists and a collar sat tight around her throat. She was thinner than the lashing. Thinner than the water-carrying. A body that had crossed the threshold from underfed to dying and was operating on whatever fumes the soul produced when the body ran out of its own.

"Aurelia. Please don’t die on me too." Her voice cracked.

Fin tried to wipe her tears on instinct. His thumb aimed for her cheek the way it had a hundred times in his own bed, in his own castle, in the life where she was his and he could touch her whenever the touching was needed.

His thumb passed through her face. The tear kept falling. It hit the stone floor and he watched it land and the landing was the loneliest sound he had ever heard.

This was his mate. The woman who faced kings without flinching. The woman whose poise he had admired and whose strength he had leaned on. The woman who was so fierce that sometimes it was easy to forget what she had been through because she never talked about it or carried it.

Fin knew she was locked up for a year in silver. But he hadn’t known it was this bad. There was no question she had minimized it when he asked. She did not want him to know and the distance between what he had imagined and what was in front of him was so vast, it made his chest feel hollow.

But even if she would have told him the details, this was on a level that required seeing it to fully understand. These conditions were worse than any prisoner of war cell Fin had ever seen. It was inhumane and the fact that Viremont did it to a woman was absolutely disgusting.

Another reason to burn that kingdom to the ground.

Shadowclaw would take every slave in Viremont. Every collar would come off. Every chain would be melted down. Every man, woman, and child who had ever been called property would be given a pack, rights, wages, and the one thing Viremont had stolen from them that no policy could return but he was going to try anyway: the knowledge that someone with an army gave a damn.

Finnick Shadowclaw would make it happen.