Chapter 455: A Simple Stick
It took several minutes for Samira to explain everything that had happened to bring her to this point, long enough for Noomi to finish her meal and to tend to little Saku as well. Thankfully, her baby boy was well behaved and nodded back off to sleep as soon as he’d finished nursing, though she wasn’t sure how much longer that would last.
"I don’t know what you expect me to say, Lady Jailor," Noomi said at the end of it as she folded away the cloth that had contained her meal and handed it back through the bars to Samira. It was a measure of the disdain that her captives held for her that no one had noticed Samira’s routine trips to the dungeons at night to supplement the meager meals she was given by the guards each day, but she wasn’t about to be careless enough to keep things around that could expose the other woman’s actions.
"You seem to think that the man who murdered my husband and killed anyone he could find in my village will somehow be kind to you for bearing his child," she said, her tail thumping the cold ground of her cell in disbelief. "That man has no kindness in him. Only a mask he wears to conceal his cruelty from the world."
The look of satisfaction on Owain Lothian’s face when he drove his sword through her husband’s chest before turning to her and commanding his men to take her alive was one that she would never forget for the rest of her days. He wasn’t triumphant or exultant at winning a victory against a challenging foe. He’d slaughtered a basket weaver and captured a pregnant woman and, doing so, left him... satisfied, as though he’d done a good day’s work in the forest chopping down trees.
"I, that is," Samira started with some difficulty. "He was kind to me at first," she said awkwardly. "Sometimes, when he made love to me, I felt like I was already his wife..."
"But you said he called you that other woman’s name," Noomi said, shaking her head. "Any man who cries out another woman’s name in the depths of pleasure should have his three treasures bitten off," she said, snapping her sharp teeth fiercely to make her point. "That’s a man who doesn’t see you at all, just a convenient field to plow."
"I, I think... I think you’re right," Samira said softly. "Once Lady Jocelynn arrived, he stopped seeing me. Not, not immediately," she added quickly. "We still made love once or twice more, and he said that he’d keep me at his side along with Lady Jocelynn, but... I don’t think she likes the idea. And now, now that he has a real Lady at his side..."
"He has no need of a fake," Noomi said with a conflicted look at the other woman. "So run away from here. Raise up your child to remember your dream of him. But I doubt you’ll be as lucky as you think you are," she added, choosing to pay back the sustenance she’d received with a small measure of advice. "If he wants this other Lady to be his ’public wife,’ then you won’t enjoy being a ’little wife’ if you have the oldest child. That other lady won’t stand for it."
"And that man," the captive woman said, remembering the look of flames reflected in Owain’s eyes as her village burned. "That man won’t hesitate to burn you and your little one alive if he thinks he needs to."
"I still have some time," Samira said, gently stroking her belly. "Three months more before the little one is due. Just after the new year begins. Maybe, maybe he’ll visit me, and I can see what he thinks," she said, though her voice was uncertain.
"I think you’re a fool for it," Noomi said, shaking her head. "But who knows. Perhaps you can keep me company from the cell next door if you try," she said with a dark laugh. "Then we’d really be a perfect pair."
"I, I don’t want that," Samira said, clutching at the bars as she felt her knees go weak at the thought of being confined to this damp, abysmal place, forced to give birth to her child on a bed of soiled straw the way Noomi had been. "I, I’ll think of something. Something for both of us," she added.