Savage Bounty by Matt Wallace

Author:Matt Wallace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery / Saga Press
Published: 2021-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

HOSTAGE OF THE MIND

THERE IS NO ESCAPING THE thought for Lexi. She has been avoiding it since being released back into the world and the Gen Circus by her captors. She avoided it while picking up food in the Gen bazaar to restock the tower’s larders, something Lexi has done thousands of times before. She avoided it while walking, for the first time in weeks, through the doors of the tower in which she was born and raised and fell in love with her husband. She avoided it while tidying up the receiving room on the ground floor, where the most scrutinizing observer could find not a single hint that murdered bodies ever occupied the space.

That thought is the simple fact that the towers no longer feel like her home.

Lexi cannot locate what has changed within, much less around, her. She sits in the nook of her familiar parlor window, the one that faces its opposite in the sister tower where Brio grew up. She holds in her hands the reed-of-the-wind that Taru helped her repair after she bashed it over the skull of her would-be assassin. Everything is the same—all the sights and sounds and smells that have surrounded her for the whole of her life.

Yet everything is different. All that is familiar is now completely unfamiliar, or at least it feels so.

Lexi wonders if she is merely seeing the entire world through different eyes now, with a gaze that has beheld so much horror and truth. She has delved too deeply beneath the veneer of Crache, perhaps deeper than anyone not conspiring to bring down the nation. Her head is filled with too many plots, too much knowledge of the dark ambitions and actions of others.

She wonders when, not if, the Protectorate Ministry will come for her, to question her, to abduct her, or even, finally, to kill her.

She wonders what Burr will do with her if Lexi lives long enough to accomplish the purpose the Ignoble has laid before her, by whatever delusional standard Burr will consider that purpose achieved.

She also constantly wonders about Taru. Is her retainer enjoying the same treatment Lexi did in another castle in the hidden lands of some other Ignoble, concealed for centuries from the bureaucracy of Crache? Is Taru rotting in a dark and dank dungeon somewhere? Are they even alive? Is Burr merely lying to Lexi, dangling the false hope of Taru’s safety and return in front of her to subdue and compel Lexi to commit ultimately heinous acts?

It all feels so futile, yet she cannot bring herself to refuse Burr’s demands. Lexi only knows her spirit can ill afford living with the knowledge another person she loves has been taken from her and will not return. After months of resisting the idea Brio was dead and finally learning he is alive, only for his current status to be totally unknown to her, Lexi is compelled to do whatever she has to in order to keep Taru, or at the very least the idea of them, alive and well in her mind.

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