Voshak focused on the redhead. “Milhem, did I make you my second?”
Milhem looked down.
Ceyren, Voshak’s second, was likely dead; otherwise, he would be here pulling Milhem off his horse and beating him to a bloody pulp. Interesting.
“Then don’t open your trap,” Voshak said. “If I want your opinion, I’ll beat it out of you.” He surveyed the riders. “If any of you morons are worried, nobody’s following us. These are Edgers. They look out for number one, and none of them want to catch a bullet. It’s been twenty hours since we last slept, and I’m tired. Now make the damn camp.” He turned to an older, one-eyed slaver. “Crow, you’re my second now. See they get it done.”
Crow, a broad-shouldered, weather-beaten bastard, roared, “Get a move on!”
Reasonable choice for a second, Richard reflected. Crow was older, had experience, and he worked hard to inspire fear. If his eye patch and height didn’t do it, the heavy black leather and ponytail of jet-black hair decorated with finger bones would.
Voshak turned his horse. His gaze paused on Richard. “Awake, my gentle maid? You’ve got something right here.” The slaver touched the left corner of his mouth. “What is that? . . . Oh, that’s shit from the bottom of my boot.”
Laughter rang out.
Richard smiled, baring his teeth. “Always brightening the day with your humor, Leftie.”
A muscle jerked in Voshak’s face. He clenched his reins. “You sit in your cage, Hunter. When we get where we’re going, you’ll sing like a bird when I start cutting through your joints.”
“What was that? I didn’t quite hear.” Richard leaned forward, focusing on Voshak. A hint of fear shivered in the slaver’s eyes, and Richard drank it in. “Come closer to the cage, Voshak. Don’t cower like a little boy hiding from your daddy and his belt.”
Voshak dug his spurs into his horse’s flanks. The animal jumped, and he rode off. Coward. Most of them were cowards, cruel and vicious. Brave men didn’t kidnap children in the middle of the night and sell them to perverts to earn their drinking money.
The riders dismounted. Two secured the horses, keeping well away from his cage. Others began pulling tents from the saddlebags, olive and gray, with a red logo spelling out COLEMAN sewn on one side. The tents must’ve come from the Broken. A few slavers piled together some branches. A dark-haired man soaked them in fluid from a flask, struck a match, and dropped it on the fuel. Fire flared up like an orange mushroom. He shied back, rubbing his face.
“You got any eyebrows left, Pavel?” Crow called.
Pavel spat into the fire. “It’s burning, ain’t it?”
A slaver stopped by the cage. He was thin, with dirty brown hair and pale eyes. He climbed onto the wagon, opened a small door near the top of the cage, barely large enough to pass a bowl through, and dipped a ladle with a long handle into a bucket.
Richard waited. His mouth was so dry, he could almost taste the water.
The slaver passed the ladle through the window. “Why Leftie?” he murmured.
“It’s what his father used to call him before he beat him in his drunken rages,” Richard said. “His right testicle never dropped.”
The slaver held the ladle closer. Richard drank, three deep delicious gulps, then the man retracted the ladle and latched the window shut.
The slavers began to settle down. A pot was set over the fire; a couple of rabbits had been dressed and chopped into it. Voshak came to sit by the flames, facing the cage. He bent to poke at the coals, and Richard pondered the top of the man’s blond head. The human skull was such a fragile thing. If only his hands weren’t tied.
He had to survive and bide his time. The slavers were taking him to the Market, he was sure of it. Left to his own devices, Voshak would’ve strung him up on the first tree he saw. Richard grinned. And after his neck snapped, Voshak would probably stab his corpse a few times, drown it, then set it on fire. Just in case.
Someone near the top of the slaver food chain must’ve recognized that the rank-and-file slaver crews feared the Hunter. They wanted to boost morale by making a production out of killing him. Richard might have worked for a year to get to the Market, but he had no intention of arriving there on their terms. An opportunity would present itself. He just had to recognize it and make the best of it.
If he failed now, Sophie would take his place. The thought filled Richard with dread.
Revenge was an infectious disease. For a time it gave you the strength to go on, but it devoured you from the inside like a cancer, and when your target was finally destroyed, all that remained was a hollow shell of your former self. Then the target’s relatives began their own hunt, and the cycle continued. He’d learned that lesson at seventeen, when a feuding family’s bullet exploded in his father’s skull, spraying bloody mist all over the market stall. What he had lost was irreplaceable. No amount of death would bring his father back to life. Back then, Richard was already a warrior, a killer, and he continued to kill, but never out of revenge. He severed lives so the family would be safe, and the new generations would never feel the pain of having their parents ripped out of their lives. He fought to keep the rest of them safe.
He failed.
Richard’s memory resurrected Sophie the way she used to be—a funny, beautiful, fearless child. The muddy swamp flashed before Richard. When he had finally found Sophie in one of the holes, she was standing on the body of a slaver she had killed. As he pulled her out, her eyes burned with a fear and hate that had no place on the face of a twelve-year-old child. She had survived the slavers, but she would never be the same.