Chapter 135: Kidnapped

Chapter 135: Chapter 135: Kidnapped

The shattered building had fallen silent again.

Dust motes drifted through shafts of pale light that pierced the broken ceiling, suspended in the stillness like tiny constellations trapped between earth and sky. The air carried the metallic tang of old blood, the mustiness of decay, and something else—something that smelled like fear that had seeped into the walls themselves and refused to leave.

Pronoia remained alone inside.

She sat with her back pressed against a crumbling pillar, her small body folded into itself as though she could make herself invisible through sheer will. The rough stone bit into her shoulder blades through the thin fabric of her dress, but she didn’t shift. She had learned long ago that stillness was survival.

Her mother had left only moments earlier.

The memory of her mother’s voice still echoed in the hollow spaces of the ruined building. Stay here. Don’t move. I’ll be back before you know it. The words had been soft, meant to soothe, but Pronoia had heard the strain beneath them—the way her mother’s voice had cracked on the final syllable, the way her footsteps had faltered at the threshold before she’d forced herself to walk away.

She could still smell the blood.

It clung to her mother’s clothes, to her skin, to the air that lingered in the space where she had stood. Pronoia had wanted to reach out, to touch her mother’s wounds, to do something—anything—but her hands had hung uselessly at her sides. What could she do? What could a blind girl offer except another burden to carry?

Her stomach growled, and she pressed her palm against it.

The steamed bread.

She could still taste it on her tongue—soft, warm, impossibly sweet. Her mother had placed it in her hands with trembling fingers, guiding them to the small bundle wrapped in cloth. Eat slowly, she had said. There’s no rush. But Pronoia had heard the lie in her mother’s careful tone, the same lie that lived in the spaces between all her mother’s reassurances.

She knew what her mother had done to obtain it.

The thought made her chest hurt—a sharp, twisting pain that had nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with the weight of a debt she could never repay. Her mother had sold her body in order to be able to get the bread for her.

*I’m sorry,* she thought, though she didn’t know who she was apologizing to. *I’m sorry I’m so useless.*

She lowered her head, her chin brushing against her collarbone.

The cloth covering her eyes shifted slightly, and she felt the familiar pressure of it against her lids—the constant reminder of what she was and what she would never be. The fabric was worn thin from years of use, washed so many times that it had become as soft as a second skin. Her mother had made it for her when she was small, after the healers had said there was nothing to be done, and the priests had whispered about curses and divine punishment, after everyone had given up on the strange child with the too-bright eyes.

Her mother had never given up.

*I wish I could do something for her.* The thought burned in her chest like a coal she couldn’t swallow. Something that could make everything easier. Something that could take away the exhaustion I hear in her voice every night. Something that could stop the way she flinches when she thinks I’m not paying attention.

But she was only a little girl.

The truth of it sat heavy in her bones. She couldn’t work like her mother, couldn’t lift heavy things or run errands or do any of the jobs that the other children in the village had done to earn their keep.

She couldn’t protect her mother from the men who looked at her with hungry eyes, couldn’t stand between her mother and the world that seemed determined to grind them both into dust.

She couldn’t even see.

The darkness was her constant companion, her only true friend. She had learned to navigate it with her ears, her nose, her fingers—learned to read the world through vibrations and scents and the subtle shifts of air against her skin. But there were things she would never know. Faces. Colors. The way her mother looked when she smiled.

The only thing she possessed that was different was her ability.

Her foresight.

But she still didn’t completely understand it.

The visions came without warning or pattern, without mercy. Sometimes they arrived as flashes of sensation—a smell that didn’t belong to the present, a sound from a place that didn’t exist yet. Sometimes they lasted for hours, pulling her under like a tide she couldn’t fight, showing her things she couldn’t understand.

And sometimes, they showed her things that had happened in the past.

Those were the worst and the ones that left her gasping and trembling, her small body drenched in sweat, her mind reeling with images she couldn’t interpret. Her mother had tried to help her make sense of them at first, had asked her questions and listened patiently to her halting descriptions. But even her mother had eventually grown quiet and stopped asking, and learned to simply hold her until the shaking stopped.

The visions were a gift, her mother said but Pronoia wasn’t so sure.

*Please*, she thought, though she didn’t know who she was praying to. *Please let me be useful. Please let me help her. Please—*

She heard footsteps.

Her head snapped up, every muscle in her body going rigid. The sound was wrong—too heavy, too many, moving with the kind of careless confidence that spoke of power and cruelty. These were not her mother’s footsteps.

One.

She counted them the way her mother had taught her, the way she counted everything in the darkness.

Two.

They were getting closer.

Three.

The ground vibrated beneath her, and she felt the subtle shift of pressure in the air—the entrance opening, the space expanding, the intruders stepping through the threshold and into the place that had been their refuge.

She pressed herself back against the pillar, her fingers digging into the rough stone behind her. Her sensitive ears picked up details that others would have missed—the creak of leather as they moved, the clink of metal against metal, the low murmur of voices that sounded like distant thunder.

Then she heard something else.

A struggle.

She froze.

Someone was fighting them, from the sound of it—the footsteps were lighter, the movements quicker, the resistance desperate. She heard a thud, a gasp, the wet sound of a fist connecting with flesh.

"Let me go!"

The voice was young. Male. And filled with a fury that made Pronoia’s blood run cold.

"Shut up."

The responding voice was deeper, rougher, and it carried the weight of casual brutality. She heard the strike—the sharp crack of knuckles against a jaw—and flinched as though she had been the one who was hit.

The boy fell.

Another blow. A kick this time, from the sound of it.

Pronoia covered her mouth with both hands, pressing her palms flat against her lips to hold back the whimper that threatened to escape. Her heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat, in her temples, in the tips of her fingers.

*Don’t move*, she told herself. *Don’t breathe.*

The men grabbed the boy. She heard the rough scrape of rope against skin, the boy’s grunts of pain as they tied him. His struggles grew weaker, more desperate, and something in her chest ached at the sound.

"Laugh."

The men laughed.

One of them spoke, and his voice carried the oiled smoothness of greed. "This young prince is going to sell for a lot of money, don’t you think?"

Prince?

Pronoia’s mind snagged on the word like a thorn catching on cloth.

Another man laughed—a harsh, barking sound. "Of course." A pause. "After all, he’s the prince of this kingdom."

She froze.

A prince.

She had never met a prince before. She had barely even entered the capital, had spent her entire life on the edges of things—the edges of villages, the edges of society, the edges of a world that had no place for blind girls with strange abilities and even stranger eyes.

Yet somehow, a prince had been brought into the same ruined building where she and her mother were hiding.

The absurdity of it struck her, and she felt a hysterical laugh bubbling up in her throat. She swallowed it down.

The men continued talking, their voices low and conspiratorial. They spoke of money, of buyers, of the price that a young prince would fetch in the right market. Pronoia listened with half an ear, her mind racing and her body coiled tight with fear.

*Where is Mother?*

The thought was like a knife in her chest.

*Please come back. Please come back now. Please—*

Then something happened.

A vision struck her and the world around her disappeared.