Spider's Game ((Book One) #Wattys2016 Winner!)

Chapter 7- Lovers & Guns

The garden outside the fluttering curtains was dotted with color. Flowers lined a cobbled landing and a walkway that stretched out of Darith's view. From composition and beauty alone the spot would have been a perfect strolling place for lovers, but no one ever walked the path but for a gardener. Trees stood in a line behind the flowers forming bright green bars that locked the outside world from him. The noonday sun pounded onto the stones causing a glare to warp the view and burn like probing fingers into Darith's skull.

He lifted a hand and tried to call the power to sooth away the throbbing but nothing responded inside him. The web the spiders left locked that part of him away. Yet when he reached down a voice thrummed in the distance, words indistinguishable and thousands of eyes stared into his mind.

Darith smacked his skull into the bedpost, and the flash of sharp pain dimmed the relentless headache for a moment.

Crippled. They've not only taken my legs but the only power that was mine.

The door opened and the curtains around the floor length window billowed at the change in pressure. He refrained from looking since only silent servants came and went. His mother's single visit had only reinforced for him that he could expect to remain a leper. It was not until tentative steps entered the room that he paid attention.

"Darith?" the whisper from the entrance accosted him. Driving into his solitude, making demands.

Darith gripped the sheets in a hand and turned. A neatly dressed girl with skin the color of molasses and full red lips wrung her hands as she approached. He assumed she had been cued by his mother's investigation into finding an heir among the village girls. On any normal occasion, Gretta would never have thought to visit him here. Even while their short-lived physical relationship thrived, she'd never come here.

The only place on the grounds peasants who were not employees were permitted was back in the warehouse, where all the farmers crops were gathered to export to other planets.

A questing smile formed on her painted lips. After their last encounter, he waited for her to gloat. In the field, she'd lacked a potent weapon and had hurled clods of grass from the field at him, accusing him of exaggerated cruelties. Now he was certainly at the disadvantage. But there was no triumph in her brown eyes, just sorrow.

"I am surprised the servants let you in. Am I so fallen in their eyes?" Darith asked.

Gretta smoothed her dress, an expensive creation, funded by the profits of her father's store. Not something any farmer's daughter could have afforded. Yet having money did not make her noble, and even the servants on the Cortanis estate could spot a peasant no matter how finely dressed.

"Hush. If ye talk cruel to me, I'll go."

"Why did you even come? Just to reassure yourself that you achieved a stroke of luck escaping being tied to me?"

"Has nothing to do with that. I heard of yer misfortune. I wanted to see how ye were."

"You've seen."

"Darith." She stepped further in, her cleavage rose and fell inside her tight bodice. Her breath fast, nervous. "I came because I care."

"Came to gloat."

She didn't lower her eyes and blush as a noble girl would but her eyebrows creased and her hands plunked on her hips. "You stop that business. Gloat over what? I don't want bad things fer ye. When ye discarded me, like some piece of trash stuck ta yer shoe, I was fit to strangle ye. But ye were right about our future together and a stern manner does not change noble intent. Can't ye let me be concerned?"