TRIBES by Mia Frances

Author:Mia Frances [Frances, Mia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-08-12T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

Alex sat beside the fireplace, her bare skin shimmering in the pink-orange glow. She bent forward, her damp hair brushing her cheek. It smelled of lavender, her skin of perfume. She looked at the door nervously, then bowed her head, covering her face with her hands. Alex had done what he'd told her. Her body was scrubbed clean, hair washed. Now there was little to do but wait. She wrapped the sheet around her and tried to keep from crying. That's what he wanted: to see her teary-eyed and quaking in fear. He'd stripped her of everything else in the past few weeks, her pride, her self-respect, but she wouldn't give him the satisfaction of seeing her cower like a whipped dog.

Her courage had deserted her, her will broken, yet hidden beneath the submissive demeanor she'd been forced to adopt, there remained a spark of defiance. She daydreamed about him dying. Sometimes she killed him or drove him off into the snow to freeze to death. Other times he was murdered by marauders. Her reveries always ended with Wolf dead. As much as she hated him, Alex couldn't bring herself to do anything about it, knowing full well it would spell the end of her little tribe. His prowess as a hunter kept them alive. Snowdrifts reached the window sashes, the ponds and streams were covered with an impenetrable layer of ice. The landscape had become Arctic, the temperature subzero. It seemed hard to believe that anything could still be alive out there. Their food reserves were running low, but she suspected he'd planned it that way, insisting they eat three meals a day instead of one, and larger portions too. The man was cunning. They were dependent on him for their survival. Once their food was gone, without him, there'd be nothing left to eat but the trees; and that wouldn't keep them alive for long if the snow was so deep they couldn't go outside to harvest the bark. Any hope of escaping his iron-fisted rule would vanish as the supply of food dwindled. Wolf had played his hand well. He was all that stood between them and certain starvation.

The canned goods he'd brought only saw them through the first two weeks of his occupation. That was all he could salvage from his cache at the museum he told her. He insisted the rest had been plundered by others. She didn't believe him. He was too smart to have allowed something like that to happen. She suspected that the rest of it was safely stashed away someplace. He was partial to hiding things in the woods. Though they always had meat on the table for their evening meal, she'd yet to see the animals the cuts came from. Every morning he left the camp to check his traps and hunt. He'd return later in the day sometimes with a fresh killed rabbit or squirrel, but mostly with a hunk of meat from a larger animal, probably a deer.

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