Page 89 of Dark Destiny: The Fates' Bargain

Navuh in the wheelchair, Areana behind him with her hands on the grips, Daniel beside them. Three people, one corridor, the same forty meters of reproduction-lined wall between the apartment and the elevator bank, traversed the same hour every day.

Navuh had come to think of it as his daily royal parade. A lord, his goddess, and his guard, marching in state toward a swimming pool.

On his wrists, the cuffs gleamed under the recessed lights, and to anyone who didn't know better, they looked like large silver bracelets, like he was some genie who'd emerged from a bottle. But the cuffs were not ornamental pieces, and they weren't only tracking devices either. They contained a neurotoxin, and its release was controlled by Daniel and the other Guardians watching the surveillance feed. If Navuh tried to leave his little jail apartment outside the approved pool rehabilitation schedule or did anything that was deemed dangerous, the toxin would release and he would suffer excruciating pain.

He had never tested it, but he had no doubt that it was true. It was just the kind of thing Kian would do.

Areana suddenly stopped walking. "I forgot the lotion. We need to go back."

"Forget the lotion. You can massage my legs when we come back."

"It's best when I do that between exercises. You last longer."

There'd been a time when lasting as long as it took had not been a problem. There had been a time when he'd always exhausted Areana, bringing her to a state of bliss that she couldn't take anymore. Now it was just a memory of better times.

"Fine," he said. "Go. We can wait out here for you."

"I'll only be a moment."

She turned the chair so he could watch her go and hurried back down the corridor. Daniel lifted his phone, tapped on it, and the apartment's heavy door released with a hiss and swung open for her.

As the Guardian returned the phone to his pocket, Navuh fantasized about getting his hands on the device. The phone opened the door. The phone programmed the cuffs. The phone was the scepter of his little underground kingdom, and it belonged to a polite Guardian who never let it out of arm's reach.

If only he could bribe Daniel. Everyone had a price, and so did his guard, but Navuh didn't have money, and he hadn't found out what other currency Daniel might accept.

He'd found nothing else to work with either.

Over the weeks, he'd catalogued every clan member who came near him, and everyone without exception wore the filtering devices in their ears. Bridget, Gertrude, the Guardians, and even Kian and Annani when they had visited him.

The clan was thorough, and his compulsion ability, his greatest weapon, was worthless here. He'd accepted that the way a chained dog accepts its shackles, which was to say, by testing it on every new face that entered his shrinking world, waiting for the day someone forgot.

Someone would forget. Eventually. Some new nurse, some careless Guardian, one unfiltered ear, and then he'd have a hand in this fortress that answered to him.

He couldn't compel anyone to free him, though, because the damned cuffs made escape a fantasy. The moment he rolled past his permitted boundary, the neurotoxin would drop him twitching to the floor.

Then again, freedom wasn't the only thing worth commanding.

What if he sent his one unfiltered fool to kill Kian?

The idea brought a smile to his face.

He'd never get another army, but one soldier, one knife, one moment of Kian's arrogant certainty that his prisoner had been rendered harmless, and he would get revenge on Annani and her entire clan.

It would cost Navuh everything, of course. Areana would never forgive him. The clan would execute him or entomb him. But on the bad days, in the dark hours when the ceiling of the windowless apartment pressed down on him like a coffin lid, the fantasy felt good.

The problem was that he hadn't seen another living soul besides Areana and Daniel in two weeks. Bridget and her staff had decamped to their village, where the clan kept its real treasures, leaving his rehabilitation in Areana's hands, and his world had contracted to an apartment, a corridor, and a rectangle of chlorinated water.

On the other hand, his legs were getting stronger, and that wasn't a fantasy. The water work was doing what Bridget had promised it would, and sensation had climbed past his knees, and yesterday he'd stood in the shallow end, bearing most of his own weight for a count of thirty without Areana's support.

Soon he'd stand, and after that, walk.

He was collecting these small victories the way he'd once collected nations under his influence, and even though the scale of his ambitions had become pathetic, at least the trajectory pointed upward.

Besides, the pool exercises were no hardship. An hour in warm water with Areana's hands on him, her wet hair clinging to her shoulders, her laughter echoing off the tiles when he grumbled. There'd been a time when an hour like that would've ended very differently, and his body's continued refusal to properly respond to his mate was a crueler fate than the weakness of his legs.

Bridget had assured him that the condition wasn't permanent, that the nerve damage was healing on its own schedule, but Navuh was beginning to suspect the nerves weren't the problem. He'd lost everything he'd spent his life working for, and once he'd realized that he had no bargaining chips left, melancholy had taken root in his psyche.

Perhaps the failure lived in his head rather than his spine.