Gleam (The Plated Prisoner Series Book 3) Read online

  RAVEN KENNEDY

  Gleam

  Copyright © 2021 by Raven Kennedy

  All Rights Reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales, is entirely coincidental. This work, or any portion thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, or used in any manner whatsoever, without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Design by Maria Spada

  Formatting by Imagine Ink Designs

  Editing by Helayna Trask

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Epilogue

  Golden Gold Vine

  Acknowledgements

  Also By Raven Kennedy

  About the Author

  To those who were kept in the dark.

  May you smile at the sun.

  Prologue

  AUREN

  Ten years ago

  The sky doesn’t sing here.

  It doesn’t dance or play, it doesn’t sink against my skin with a sweet perfume, or breeze through my hair with a fresh kiss.

  Not like it did in Annwyn.

  The rain weeps down, and water floods the ground, but even that doesn’t sweep away the stench of this place. The sun dips and the moon crests, but there is no harmony with the goddesses slumbering in their eggshell stars. This horizon is tepid and lacking.

  Nothing feels as alive here as it did at home. But then, maybe those are just the make-believe memories of a little girl. Maybe Annwyn wasn’t like that at all, and I’ve forgotten.

  If I have, I’d rather keep pretending. I like the way it is in my mind—overflowing with a vivaciousness that saturated my every sense.

  Here, my senses are saturated too, but not in a good way.

  Derfort Harbor is still drenched from this morning’s showers. Everything here is always waterlogged from either the sea or the sky. Sometimes both. There isn’t a single wood-pitched roof that isn’t sodden or a weathered door that isn’t peeling from the oppressive moisture.

  The clouds often pull in storms from the ocean and toss them here. There’s nothing cleansing about the rain, though. It simply dumps back into the sea that fed it, reeking of fish while it floods the muddy streets.

  The air is claggy today with a humidity that soaks through my dress and weighs down my lungs. I’ll be lucky if my clothes dry once I hang them up tonight, lucky if my hair is anything other than damp and frizzed.

  But no one looks at my hair or clothes anyway. Greedy eyes always fall against my gold-pinched cheeks, roam over my skin that’s ten shades too gleaming to be real. That’s why I’m known as the painted girl. The golden orphan of Derfort Harbor. No matter what rags I wear, there’s absurd richness that sits beneath my sodden clothes. A worthless wealth of my skin that does nothing, yet has caused everything.

  All along the market street, the vendor tarps are still dark, burlap sacks saturated, carts covered and dripping. I close my eyes and breathe, trying to pretend that I’m not smelling the sharp iron from the anchor maker. I’m not smelling the drenched wooden planks on the moored ships. I’m not smelling the crates of flailing fish mixed with the brined sand from the shore.

  My imagination isn’t quite enough to stave off the stench.

  Of course, the air would probably smell a little better if I weren’t sitting on top of the pub’s refuse bin. As terrible as the scent of old ale is, this spot is one of the driest and most shadowed, making it valuable real estate.

  I shift my weight on the metal lid as I lean against the building at my back, gaze scanning the market alley. I shouldn’t be here. I should keep moving, but even that’s a major risk. Zakir has too many eyes in the city. It’s just a matter of time before I’m caught, whether I stay in one spot or not. I’m hiding from him, from the duties he’s placed upon me. I’m hiding from his thugs who roam the streets, keeping watch on the beggar children—not for their safety, but to make sure no one else encroaches on Zakir’s territory or steals from his thieves.

  I’m hiding in a place where there is no hope of staying hidden.

  Like a tug against my eyes, my gaze lifts, going between two vendor tents to see the ocean beyond. I watch the sails of the docked ships, their shapes like tethered clouds that try to pull toward the sky. My stomach squeezes at the sight of them, at their taunt of escape. A bobbing temptation of freedom that’s right there on the horizon.

  It’s a lie.

  Stowaways are punished severely in Derfort, and I’d be a fool to try it. More than a handful of kids at Zakir’s have tried it, and didn’t live to tell the tale. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the way the gulls pecked at their flayed flesh from where they hung, their bodies left to sway in the tidal breeze and pucker beneath salted rain.

  That smell, above all others, is by far the worst.

  “What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?”

  I flinch so badly that I scrape my arm on the rough limestone bricks at my back as Zakir appears in my shadowed spot, looming over me like a threat.

  Brown eyes glare out of a ruddy face, his chin prickled with week-old hair like spines on a cactus. I can smell the alcohol on him, so strong it overpowers the trash beneath me. He’s probably been into the cups for hours.

  “Zakir.” I can’t keep the guilt out of my voice, am barely able to look him in the eye as I slide down from my spot to stand in front of him.

  He puts his hands on his hips, making the sage-colored vest he’s wearing gape at his hairy chest. “You got wax in your ears? I said what the hell are you doing?”

  Hiding. Dreaming. Pretending. Avoiding.

  As if he can hear the silent answer in my head, he sneers at me, teeth stained from pipe smoke and pints of henade. Lips cracked from too many curses and verbal kicks and cruel deals.

  Ever since the long moon came and marked the new year, Zakir’s duties for me have changed. By his count, I’m fifteen years old. An Orean adult.

  “I was just...” An excuse doesn’t come to my tongue quick enough.

  Zakir slaps me on the back of my head, making my neck snap forward. It’s the only place he ever hits me now. My gold sk
in bruises a dark, burnished color rather easily, but no one can see the marks beneath my hair.

  “You were supposed to be at The Solitude an hour ago!” he snarls, getting down close to my face. “Bastard came in hollering to me that you never showed, and the guy I had watching you said you must’ve snuck out the back door.”

  Wrong. I climbed out the broken window in the cellar. Easier for me to make my escape down the back street behind the inn. The other option would’ve been the side alley, and that’s always full of feral dogs fighting for the scraps left in the bins.

  “You fucking hearing me?”

  I grab my dirty skirts and squeeze, as if I’m trying to pop the sound right out of his voice until it bursts like a grape. “I don’t want to go to The Solitude again.”

  My voice trundles out like the roll of an uneven marble across the ground. I don’t even like to think about the inn, let alone talk about it. Despite its name, solitude is the last thing I’ll find there. There, where my innocence was stolen like grubby fingers dipped into strangers’ pockets on the street. All I’ll find in The Solitude is the oppression of unwelcome gazes, the trappings of repulsive touch.

  Zakir’s face hardens, and I think he’s going to smack my head again with his meaty, ringed fingers, but he doesn’t. I wonder how much of my hard-earned coin went into buying him those encrusted gold gems.

  “I don’t give a fish-frying shit what you want. You work for me, Auren.”

  Desperation tightens my throat, cutting off my air with its grip. “Then send me back to the streets to beg on the corner or pickpocket the marketers,” I plead. “Just don’t send me there. I can’t do that again.” My eyes inadvertently fill up. Another thing in Derfort that floods.

  Zakir sighs, but that hateful sneer doesn’t loose from his face. “Ech, don’t give me that weepy act. I kept you off your back for this long, which is more than I can say most flesh traders would’ve done. If I’m not making a profit off you, then I have no need to keep you,” he warns. “You got it good with me. Remember that, girl.”

  Good.

  That word trills through my head as I think of my life for the past ten years. Lots of other kids have come and gone, but I’ve stayed the longest because my strange golden skin attracts him the kind of attention that he’s made profitable. But not once, in all of that time, would I ever say I’ve had it good.

  Forced to beg on the streets all day and pickpocket at night, I had to learn to make my strange looks work for me while I roamed the port city. It was either that or I had to clean Zakir’s house top to bottom, scrubbing surfaces until my fingers cracked and my knees hurt. Though, there was never really getting the cellar clean. It always dripped with cold and mildew and loneliness.

  There are usually ten to thirty of us down there, crammed together beneath rotting blankets and old sacks. Kids sold and purchased and worked. Kids who never play or learn or laugh. We sleep and we earn coin, and that’s pretty much it. Friendship is always squashed, nonexistent, while meanness and a competitive edge is constantly cultivated under Zakir’s watchful eyes. Just dogs kept salivating to fight each other over a bone.

  But I have to look on the bright side. Because even though it’s not good...it could be worse.

  “What’d you think was gonna happen?” he huffs out, like I’m a naive idiot. “You knew this was coming, because you’ve seen the other girls. You know the rule, Auren.”

  I look him steadily in the eye. “Earn my keep.”

  “That’s right. You earn your keep.” Zakir checks me over, gaze stopping on my muddied hem as a frustrated cough puffs up from his pipe-burnt throat. “You’re a damn mess, girl.”

  Normally, being a mess is part of the orphan beggar child act, but I’ve moved on from that. Being fifteen meant Zakir changed my clothes from patched up scraps to ladies’ dresses.

  When he brought me my first dress, I thought I looked pretty. I was actually stupid enough to think he’d given it to me as a birthday gift. There were real pink laces at the front and a bow at the back, and it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen since I’ve lived here.

  But that was before I realized that pretty dress meant something ugly.

  “Get to The Solitude,” Zakir tells me, his tone elbowing aside any room for argument.

  Dread settles in my stomach as his eyes drag back up. “But—”

  A yellow-nailed finger points in my face. “The customer paid for you, and that’s what he’ll get. Locals have been waiting years for the painted gold girl to grow up. You’re in high demand, Auren. A demand that I’ve grown even more by making them wait—another fact you should be grateful for.”

  Good. Grateful. Zakir uses these words, but I’m not sure he knows what they mean.

  “Because of me, I’ve made you the most expensive whore in Derfort, and you’re not even in a brothel. The saddles are boiling with jealousy.” He says this like it’s something to be proud of, as if he’s giddy that even other whores don’t like me.

  He scratches at a spot on his cheek, eyes gone greedy. “The gold-painted beggar girl of Derfort Harbor is finally old enough to buy for a night to get between her legs. I won’t let you ruin my chance at earning those coins or ruin my reputation on the streets,” he says, voice as rough as storm-chopped waters.

  My fingernails prick into my palm as I fist my hands, and the space between my shoulder blades tingles, itching. If it would make any difference to scrape off my skin and pluck out my hair, I would do it. I would do anything to get rid of the gleam of my body.

  There have been nights where I’ve tried to do just that while the other kids slept. But unlike the rumors that run rampant in Derfort, I’m not painted. This gold will never come off, no matter how many times I wash or scrub myself raw. The new skin and hair always grows in gleaming just like before.

  My parents called me their little sun, and I used to be proud of the shine. Yet in this world full of gawking Oreans and a bereft sky, all I want to do is go dull. To finally find a hiding spot where no one can find me.

  Zakir shakes his head at me, eyes bloodshot from late nights of gambling, a perpetual cloud of smoke hovering around him like always. He seems to hesitate for a moment before he leans back with his arms crossed and says, “Barden East has his feelers out for you.”

  My eyes go wide. “Wh-what?” I ask, the fearful whisper puffing past my lips.

  Barden is another flesh trader here at the port. He runs the eastside—thus the second name that he adopted—but unlike Zakir, who’s somewhat tolerable, I’ve heard that Barden is...not.

  Zakir had the decency to wait until I was considered an adult before he made me a saddle for passing sailors and townies. But word around Derfort is that Barden is the worst kind of flesh trader, who has no such decency. He doesn’t deal in punitive child beggars and pickpockets. His wealth is made from cutthroats and pirates, from flesh trading and whoring. I’ve never traveled to the east side, but it’s rumored that the way Barden runs his business makes Zakir look like a saint.

  “Why?” I ask, though the word comes out garbled, throat too tight with a threatening noose that seems to be wrapped around my neck.

  He gives me a dry look. “You know why. It’s for the same reason the saddles in the brothel started painting their skin different colors. You have a certain...appeal, and now that you’re a woman...”

  Bile rises to my throat. Funny how it seems to taste of seawater. “Please don’t sell me to him.”

  Zakir takes a step forward, crowding me against the side of the building. My neck prickles with his nearness, the skin along my spine jumping like my fear wants to sprout out.

  “I’ve been lenient, because out of all the others, you’ve always made me the most on the streets,” he tells me. “People loved giving coin to the painted girl. And if they didn’t, you could distract them enough to pluck it from their pockets later.”

  Shame crawls up my throat. What would my parents think of me
if they saw me now? What would they think of the begging, of the stealing, of the scrapping in fistfights with the other kids?

  “But you’re not a kid anymore.” Zakir runs his tongue over his teeth before spitting a polluted glob onto the ground. “If you disobey me again, I’ll wash my hands of you and sell you to Barden East. And I’m telling you now, if that happens, you’ll wish you’d stayed with me and behaved.”

  Tears prickle in my eyes. My back muscles flinch so hard that my spine stiffens.

  Zakir digs into the pocket of his vest and pulls out his wooden pipe. Once he puts it in his mouth and lights up, he levels me with a look. “So? What’s it going to be, Auren?”

  For a split second, my eyes move past him to look over his shoulder, to the ships at the harbor again. To those billowing sail clouds tied to the sea.

  I was my parents’ little sun.

  I used to dance beneath a sky that sang.

  Now, here I am, a painted whore in the slums of a sodden harbor, with filth in the air and a silent cry in my throat, and no amount of rain will ever wash the curse of my goldenness away.

  Zakir sucks on his pipe, blue smoke wringing out through his teeth with a grunt. He’s getting impatient now. “For fuck’s sake. All you have to do is lie there.”

  My body shudders, tears threatening to spill. That’s what the first man told me. “Just lie down on the pallet, girl. This will be quick.” He dropped a coin on the mattress when he was done with me. I left it there, metal worn and tainted with the passing of too many hands, though it wasn’t nearly as tarnished as I was.

  Just lie there. Just lie there and chip away, little by little. Just lie there and feel yourself die from the inside out.

  “Please, Zakir.”

  My plea makes his teeth grind on the tip of his pipe. “It’s going to be Barden, then? You’d rather live on Eastside?”

  I shake my head emphatically. “No.”

  Not even the people on Eastside want to live on Eastside, but most of them have no way of leaving. With trash at my back, puddles at my feet, and my owner blocking my way, I know the feeling. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.