Romanowski and Rosemary

15. The eye sellers

Coretta

Hot blood trickled below my right eye as I turned to see who had stopped the priest.

A cult member, studying me with his curious gaze.

Every cell in my body was crying out because stopping a full-blown electric compulsion midway took a massive toll on the body.

When I was still in training, where they'd pass a bearable amount of electricity through our bodies, and stop right at the point when we couldn't take it anymore, we became useless for the rest of the day, the intensity of the current was so strong. The harshest part of the training.

And when the priest took the knife out of my eye socket, just as he had put it in, in a way, he had started the electric compulsion, only to stop it right away.

I was so thankful that my body estimated a knife in my eye socket as a near-death situation, and started the electric compulsion. I believed I'd reach home in no time, just when someone asked the priest to stop, and so did the electric compulsion.

Electricity consumed an enormous amount of energy from the human body; a reason why a person wasn't able to detach from a live electric shock unless the current had sucked up each of his living cells dry.

But I couldn't pass out. Not now.

"What the fuck, father?!" Nael snarled, holding onto my shoulders to keep me from falling. "It was going so well and you had to barge in!"

"It was going so well was the reason I interrupted, son," the grisly old man, a lookalike of his monstrous son, continued his keen gaze on me, reclining against his seat to rub a finger over his chin.

He then looked at another woman thrashing and crying out as her eyes were being taken out, and then at me again. A cruel smile came over his face.

"Didn't you notice, Bijan? How calm was she, barely moving, when you were about to cut her eye?" he asked the priest in front of me.

"That's true," he hummed, cleaning the bloodied knife, the knife that had my blood on it. "I've rarely seen anyone so calm during this."

Nael's father laughed. "Now just imagine if she's so docile during her eye removal, how submissive of a slave she can be, huh?"

"What in Hades do you think I want to make her, then?!" Nael spat.

"There's no use removing her eyes. That'll just ruin her beauty and decrease her market value." The man tched. And I didn't know if I should be happy or sad. Because I was so close to going home.

"Fuck market value! I want her for my own self!"

"And who allowed you to do that?"

I didn't realise I was really chanting Aphrodite's name in my mind. And it seemed like invisibly, she was somewhere, helping me... helping her priestess out of this hell...

21st century people may call these gods a myth and a product of mere stories. But I was feeling their presence. In this time and age, it felt like they really were here, listening to whoever prayed to them.

"Because I want to?" he retorted.

"And you very well forgot that slave allocation is in my hands?" Nael's father tapped his hand impatiently on the armrest. "You've already killed countless slaves, Nael. I get you inherited this sick pleasure from me, but now it's costing us."

Nael jerked my head aside, grasping my face as he gritted his teeth. "Her face's already fucking damaged, father! Who the fuck would buy her?!" he faced me ahead, barely any emotions within him.