Ruthless (A Born Assassin Book 3) by Jacqueline Pawl

Author:Jacqueline Pawl [Pawl, Jacqueline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

Footsteps tapping up the stairs wake Mercy from a fitful sleep a few hours later. She jumps to her feet, instantly alert, and presses her back to the wall beside the door, waiting for the intruder to appear. Her grip on her dagger tightens as she listens to the person step onto the landing, huffing slightly after three flights of stairs.

“Bareea?”

“Cassia?” She hadn’t expected to hear her sister’s voice again so soon—not after their argument earlier that day. She backs away from the door and sheathes her dagger. “What are you doing here?”

“Nynev sent a note telling us what happened.” Her sister nudges the door open and pulls a letter bearing Nynev’s familiar scrawl from her pocket, the ink slightly smudged from her rain-soaked clothes. “She thought I might be able to talk some sense into you.”

“I’m not leaving the capital.”

“I know.” Cassia grabs her hand and leads her to the bed, the sheets rumpled from her thrashing. Her sleep had been plagued by nightmares of nobles chasing her through the darkened halls of the castle, some armed with knives and swords, others holding chains with which to string her body across the gates, right next to her sister’s corpse. She shudders at the memory. Her friends’ paranoia is getting to her.

“After you left,” her sister begins, fidgeting with one end of the scarf wrapped around her head, “Ino, Matthias, and I agreed you need to know what our lives were like after Liselle’s death. It’s a long story, and a painful one, but you need to understand what standing against the nobles means, how cruel they can be to people like us.” She takes a steadying breath and continues, “The only good thing which came of our kidnapping was that we were bought from the slaver together. Our master had a share in one of the mines in Ospia, and we were to live with him on his estate—me as a housemaid, servant, and plaything for his young daughter, and Ino and Matthias as workers in the factories he owned for smelting ore.

“Honestly, I don’t know how we made it through that first year of slavery. We were still children, still aching after being torn away from our parents, from our home, from losing our eldest sister. Liselle had been . . . she’d been my everything. Until those last few months of her life, when we’d begged her to leave court life behind and accept her place as Elisora’s slave, she could do no wrong in my eyes. I’d wanted to be just like her when I grew up. When I saw what those bastards did to her, I died inside. Ino and Matthias were no better off.

“One night, when I was seventeen and Leopold—our master’s son—almost twenty, he and some of his school friends got obnoxiously drunk while our master and his wife were on holiday in Rivosa. They liked toying with the female slaves, so they—they called me in and held me down on the table while they took turns kissing and .

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