Owned By The Irish Mafia Boss

The cold is the first thing. It is always the first thing.

I pull my knees tighter against my chest, pressing my spine into the corner where two stone walls meet, and I breathe. In. Out. Slow. The trick, I've learned, is to make yourself very small. Small things require less warmth. Small things take up less space. Small things are easier to forget,and being forgotten, here, is the only mercy available to me.

I am twelve years old, and I have been forgotten for eight months.

The window across the room is a mouth that swallows heat and spits back nothing. The glass cracked sometime in the autumn,I heard it split in the night like a gunshot and lay very still on my cot, waiting to understand what the sound meant. What it meant was wind. What it meant was that the cold now lives inside the room with me, a permanent roommate I never invited and cannot evict.

I don't want to die. The thought surfaces without my permission, the way it always does when my body starts to shake. I don't want to die. Please. Someone. Please help me.

No one answers. No one ever answers. The gods, if they exist, have made their position on the matter of Ilara Valerius very clear.

I press my forehead against my knees and breathe.

The cot behind me is a skeleton of rotting wood and a mattress so thin I can feel the slats through it even when I curl small. There is no fireplace in this room,there was, once, the outline of one bricked over in the far wall, as if someone decided the luxury of warmth was too good for whoever ended up here. The single tapestry hanging from the ceiling does almost nothing against the drafts. I've pulled threads from it to mend the worst tears in my dress. Three layers of dress now, one atop the other, all of them the same shade of gray, all of them three sizes too large for the body I used to have.

The body I used to have ate three meals a day and slept in sheets that smelled of lavender.

Don't think about that.

I press my thumbnail into my palm until the pain cuts through the shivering.

Don't think about that. Think about now. Think about breathing.

The porridge comes once a day. Morning, usually, though sometimes the light through the cracked window has already turned amber by the time I hear footsteps in the corridor. I've learned to ration it,three slow spoonfuls, pause, three more,stretching it into something that feels like a meal rather than a mockery of one. My stomach stopped believing in meals about four months ago. Now it simply accepts what it's given and says nothing.

I have been given very little.

I am still here.

That's something, I tell myself on the bad days, when my hands shake too hard to hold the bowl and the cold has gotten into my teeth so they ache with it. You're still here. You're still breathing. That's something that matters.

Whether it matters to anyone else is a different question, and one I've stopped asking.

The footsteps that morning are the same as every morning,a single set, unhurried, the particular flat tread of someone who considers this errand an insult to their time. I've memorized every sound in this hallway the way other people memorize prayers. The rattle of the tray. The pause before the door. The way the lock turns,quick, as if she can't stand to be on this side of it any longer than necessary.

The woman is young. Younger than me, maybe, though hunger does strange things to age, and I'm not confident in my guesses anymore. She has a wide, blank face and the efficient movements of someone who has decided the world is a series of tasks to complete and nothing more.

She sets the bowl on the floor. She doesn't cross to the small table. She doesn't look at me.

"Thank you," I say.

She still doesn't look at me.

I cross the room and take the bowl with both hands, pressing the warmth of it against my palms, holding it against my chest before I begin. The soup is thin today,almost entirely water, a few root vegetables cut so small they've basically dissolved. But it's warm, and the warmth is everything.

I drink slowly, methodically, letting each mouthful sit on my tongue before I swallow.

"You're still alive."

I glance up. She's watching me now, arms folded, her expression somewhere between curious and contemptuous.

"Yes," I say.

"Why?"

The question lands flat, without cruelty but without kindness either,purely practical, the way one might ask why a plant was still alive after months without proper sunlight.

I finish another mouthful before I answer. "Why not?"

"You'd stop hurting." She shrugs, one shoulder. "You'd stop being cold. There are ways, in a tower like this. It wouldn't take much."

I look at her for a long moment. Then I look down at the bowl in my hands.

'At least let me finish eating first.'

"There are ways for you, too," I say. "I've heard the south tower has a widow's walk. Good height. Wind would be cold at the top this time of year, but not for long."

She blinks.

"Your life is precious to you," I continue, keeping my voice even, keeping my hands around the warmth of the bowl. "I can tell,you take care of yourself. Good clothes. Clean hair. You value being alive." I take another slow sip. "Mine is precious to me in exactly the same way. The fact that neither of us particularly enjoys the other's presence doesn't change what our lives are worth to us. Does it?"

The silence stretches long enough that I've nearly finished the bowl before she moves toward the door.

She doesn't say anything.

She doesn't come back for the bowl.

I hold it against my chest long after the warmth has leached out of it, and I close my eyes, and I breathe.

I'm still here. I'm still here. I'm still,

Three years is a long time.

Three years is long enough to memorize every crack in every wall, every draft from every direction, the exact sound of wind through broken glass in every kind of weather. Long enough to unpick threads from a tapestry and learn to re-weave them into something marginally warmer. Long enough for a body to forget, mostly, what it felt like to be fed.

Long enough for a girl to become something that merely resembles one.

I am fifteen when they come with the dresses.

It is spring,the kind that comes hesitant and apologetic after a long winter, thin pale light through my cracked window, a smell in the air that might be flowers if I lean close enough to the glass. I am sitting on my cot mending the hem of my outermost dress when I hear it: not one set of footsteps in the corridor, but many.

I set down my needle and wait.

The door opens without knocking.

There are four of them. Four women carrying things,boxes, fabrics, bags that clink with the sound of glass bottles. The one who leads them has a face trained into professional neutrality, the expression of a woman executing a commission she finds distasteful.

They set everything down on the floor, on the table, on the cot beside me without asking me to move.

I look at what they've brought.

Silk. Real silk, pale cream, shot through with silver thread. A gown I couldn't afford to breathe on in my previous life. Jewelry in a velvet case,sapphires set in silver, or what passes for silver here. Bottles of perfume. Combs with teeth of actual ivory.

And folded at the center of all of it, still wrapped in its protective linen: white.

Pure, absolute, ceremonial white.

Something in my chest goes very quiet.

'Ah,' I think. 'So that's how it is.'

The bath they run for me is cold. Not accidentally,I watch the woman direct the others to fill the basin with water drawn from the winter well, and I understand that this, too, is a message. I am being cleaned the way one cleans an object before presenting it. Not for my comfort.

I don't flinch when I step in.

Cold is familiar. Cold is something I know intimately, have made my peace with the way you make peace with a difficult neighbor. I stand in the water and let them work,rough hands with soap that smells of roses, scrubbing at three years of inadequate cleaning with the brisk efficiency of women who want to be done and gone.

My body in their hands is a different body than the one I remember.

I catch my reflection in the basin's surface before it stirs,a pale face, cheekbones that stand too far forward, hair that someone has just begun to unsnarl, dark red against white hands and white water. There is a girl there who does not quite look like anyone I know.

'You look almost presentable,' I think at her. 'Almost like something worth selling.'

She looks back at me with my eyes.

They dress me. The gown is too large,everything is always too large,but they pin and tuck with practiced hands until it sits correctly on my shoulders. The jewelry goes on. The veil settles over my red hair like a surrender flag, white against red, and I watch my reflection in the hand mirror one of them holds up with the detached interest of someone watching weather.

A bride.

I look like a bride.

The white veil means one thing, in every kingdom that shares a border with another. It means a treaty. It means a daughter. It means a father who has something to offer and something to gain.

'Well,' I think, watching the woman in the mirror stand very straight and breathe very steadily through the tight bodice, 'at least it's a decision. At least it's a direction.'

Better to be traded than to simply rot.

The throne room is warm.

That is the first thing I notice,the warmth of it, the way heat rises from the great fireplaces along the walls and wraps around me like something I'd forgotten how to expect. I walk through it with my hands at my sides and my eyes forward and I don't let myself react to the warmth, because reaction is something I can no longer afford.

My father sits on his throne the way he always has,the way mountains sit: immovable, certain of their own significance. He is a handsome man, my father. Everyone says so. He has the kind of face that reads as authority, as history, as the weight of a dynasty behind it.

I look at him and feel nothing. Not even the thin warmth of hate.

There are courtiers. There are witnesses. There are men in ceremonial dress on both sides of the wide aisle, and I walk between them in my white gown with my veil falling straight behind me and I do not bow when I reach the dais.

I just stand there.

A muscle in my father's jaw moves.

He speaks for a long time. I hear the words the way you hear rain through thick walls,present, registered, ultimately irrelevant. Great sacrifice. Sacred duty. A father's anguish. His voice carries the particular resonance of a man who has practiced this speech and found it satisfying. Peace between kingdoms. The dearest thing to his heart.

I watch his eyes.

His eyes say something else entirely.

They say: finally.

They say: this problem is almost solved.

When it is time to leave, he says it: "May Lumino, God of Light, walk beside you, Ilara."

He says it the way priests say it. The way people say it to those they will not see again.

May Lumino walk beside you.

In the old tongue,in the version they don't teach in court,the phrase has a second meaning, used for the gravely ill, for those walking into battle with poor odds. Used for people you don't expect to return.

May you find your peace quickly.

May you not suffer long.

My father meets my eyes for exactly one second, and then looks past me.

'Got it,' I think. 'Loud and clear.'

I turn and walk toward the door.

The carriage is waiting in the courtyard. The morning air hits me after the throne room's warmth and I breathe it in,cool, spring-sharp, smelling of horses and distant rain. I step up into the carriage without assistance and settle against the cushioned seat, and the door closes behind me.

The wheels begin to move.

I don't look back.

I press my hands flat against my thighs and I watch the courtyard pass and then the walls and then the gates and then the open road beyond them, and I think, very clearly:

Alive. You're still alive. Whatever comes next, that's the baseline. You've managed worse.

The road unreels ahead of me like a sentence that hasn't yet found its end.

I watch it, and breathe, and wait.