Heartless

❆ Fourteen ❆

Fourteen

It had been a week since Gabriel had been thrown out and I'd avoided Beast at every turn. My stomach growled in quivering protests. You eat with my or not at all, he'd commanded. Fine, I had thought. I could always lose the extra weight.

    But who was I kidding? I had been skinnier than wire when we first arrived here. Not even a rat would bother to pick the shrivels of meat from my bones. But after weeks of being here I was starting to gain parts of a figure I never knew I had. And now, slowly but surely, I was losing it again. I hadn't eaten more than a morsel since Gabriel's failed rescue attempt, and I was starting to feel the effects of my intentional starvation. My body was sluggish and exhausted before I could even exert myself, my stomach constantly grasped at something to devour. It was maddening.

    On the fourth day of my strike, Mrs. Potter sneaked a small bowl of stew into my room, much to the Master's displeasure. What angered him even more was that I actually enjoyed her presence, unlike his. She accompanied me on my short visits outside, and though I could sense her urge to bring up my reluctance to talk about him, she made me laugh again. I never strayed too far from her partly due to the lingering fear of the pack of hungry wolves coming back. The other reason was that I felt his eyes on me every step of the way. I once summoned up the courage to search the windows, only to find them all empty. But I wasn't making it up. I could feel him watching me. No other person could make my skin buzz like he could.

    The days passed in fits of hunger and tiring strolls through the halls and, if the weather permitted it, outside. Lumea's visits had been twice as frequent as Mrs. Potter's, though she wasn't afraid to discuss the sensitive topic of her brother. She'd slip in through the door, toss me a stolen apple, and spread herself out on my unkempt bed. "He's angry," she'd say, picking at the strands of her white hair. I'd shrug. "Let him be angry," I said indifferently. "What do I care?" She'd drop the subject— for a while, at least.

    We'd sit up through most of the night babbling on about nothing in particular. She told me of her life growing up here in the palace and what it was like to be raised in complete isolation. She envied me, she said one night. I couldn't help but sputter a snort.

    "I'm serious," she whined. I'd suppressed my laughter and waved her to go on. "You grew up with other kids like you and had the freedom to do as you pleased. I never had that. Beast was all I knew growing up. Him and this godforsaken mountain."

    In that moment I felt sorry for her, but she was wrong. Where she saw freedom, I saw hell. Always fighting, always begging for food on the one crowded street filled with other children pleading, or sifting through snow with frozen fingers on the small chance that someone had dropped a coin. Where she hated her seclusion, I lusted for it. In Kinnot, there was no such thing as privacy. People stood too close and talked too loud. And while it seemed easy enough to live without, the lack of personal space was how the blood rose had ravaged our village in the first place. Had we lived on the other side of the mountain, nobody would have contracted the disease. Mama would still be alive, Papa wouldn't have been sacrificed, and Hendric wouldn't be dying. None of this would have ever happened.

    Tonight proceeded like any other night: Mrs. Potter stuffed a small roll of bread into my hands as she skated through my door. Her busty hips bounced as she walked over to the nightstand to collect the hoard of forbidden dishes. "I wish you would come out, dear," she moped dismally.

    I gave her a thin smile and opened the door for her again. I muttered the same excuse I'd told her every night this week: "Maybe tomorrow."

    She pouted, only half serious. Her lips tugged into a pout. "Maybe if you just talked to him."