Unbound by Emily Colin

Author:Emily Colin [& Madeline Dyer, Edited by Emily Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Five Points Press

CHAPTER SIX

The pain of childbirth was nothing compared to the ache in my heart—from losing Kennett, and from the knowledge that I would soon lose my son.

I saw my Lucien only once, just after he was born—when the midwife pulled him from my body and took him to the scale in the corner of my hospital room to be weighed. I wasn’t meant to see him, but I struggled to my elbows nonetheless and strained to look. Hungrily, I drank him in: the olive skin and high cheekbones so like my own, the shock of black hair and lucent green eyes that marked him as Kennett’s. He was beautiful, perfect. Mine, if only for that moment.

When he started to wail, the need to comfort him was visceral. I hated the clinical way the midwife prodded and poked him. I wanted to tear her hands from him, to hold him close. But I knew better than to move.

“Can I hold him?” I said, my voice cracked from screaming. “Just once?”

The midwife glared at me in silence, swaddling Lucien in a blanket. She swept my baby up, still wailing, and took him away without a word.

I knew I would never be allowed to see him again. Still, that didn’t stop me from pleading when Efraím Stinar entered my room hours later, doing the bellators’ regular sweep to ensure I hadn’t leapt out the window—which, in my current state, was a laughable proposition.

“Please,” I said, hating how pitiful I sounded. “Please let me see him one more time.”

Bellator Stinar paused, his hand on the doorknob. “I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to—which I most certainly do not.”

Something about the gleeful tone of his voice alarmed me. “What do you mean?”

“Your bastard son is dead.” He bared his teeth at me in a snarl. “And tomorrow at sunrise, you will be too—by my hand.”

I felt my heart thud to a stop—not at his casual mention of my execution, which was hardly a surprise, but at what he’d said about my beautiful Lucien. I’d heard my baby cry—loud and healthy, if gut-wrenching, like Kennett had told me he would. What could have happened to him?

“How?” I choked out the word.

Bellator Stinar took pleasure in my misery; I could see it in the expression of satisfaction that lit his eyes. “That’s none of your concern, girl,” he said. “But perhaps the Architect sensed the evil in his soul and snuffed it out before your bastard could bring a blight upon the world.” That malicious shark’s grin lifting his lips, he turned his back on me.

I thought of the single, shining moment when I’d been allowed to see Lucien. When those wide, green eyes had looked into mine, I hadn’t seen corruption. I’d seen pure, perfect innocence.

I refused to believe the Architect had taken Lucien because of my sins. Perhaps something invisible in his body had been broken. I wished more than anything that I could ask Kennett if such a thing were possible, but of course I could not.

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