The Pawn and The Puppet (The Pawn and The Puppet series Book 1)

After many days in many rooms, aside from Chekiss, Niles Offborth is the toughest to crack out of all the patients I’ve met.

Niles is twenty-three years old, believing himself to be Cupid. He was locked up for abducting people, usually a man and a woman, and trapping them in his basement so they’d fall in love. This went on for years until he was finally caught. He is convinced he was blessed with magical properties that give him the ability to know where love truly lies.

He is six feet and one inch of lean muscle, with the elegant posture of a warrior angel, cascading down from heaven on a wisp of a cloud. His eyes, lined with an unbreakable focus, are hazel, glowing in warm lighting like the gaslit sconces in the asylum lobby. His symmetrical face, angular cheeks, and golden hair styled in a swoop at the top of his head like he was molded out of clay by the hand of a meticulous artist—perfecting each detail in a thousand brush strokes.

A twenty-one-year-old man with a life sentence in this cage.

His mannerisms, his personality, his way of existing are the most fascinating to me. Unlike Chekiss, he has a short attention span and is severely consumed in his own fictional world.

From the moment I began speaking with him, he had refused to talk about himself. Only about me. Deflection. Only about who my perfect match would be. And since I myself am not fond of sharing personal details, this has been uncomfortable, to say the least.

But I let him poke, prod, and predict, anyway.

Niles is certain that a man within the iron bonds of the strict society we live in isn’t what I need. He believes I’m waiting for the rebel. The man that breaks the rules and can walk among the dirt and the trees without the need of a feather bed and a four-course meal.

And it’s the childish glint in his eyes that sparks a question.

“You know what would help me believe everything you’re saying right now?”

He raises a golden brow.

“If you told me how you knew all of these things. At what point in your life you changed into Cupid. How can I accept your words? What is it like being you?”

He strokes his fingers over his thin red lips, lowering his chin to look up through his thick lashes. A long stare of judgment.

“You want to know what it’s like to be the patient that everyone laughs at? Then why don’t you sleep in these rooms, wear these chains, and endure the torture we are sentenced to like animals? HOW ABOUT THAT?” Howling his last words at me before he slams his hands down on his chair.

I stare at him in shock, unable to move or even flinch at his sudden outburst. The truth to what he is suggesting was not out of line or out of the question. He has every right to demand this of me and lose his temper. He is tired of the treatments, the lack of compassion, and the underlying fact that he will never escape it.

Now more than ever, I need to prove myself.

I clear my throat. “You have a hydrotherapy treatment in about five minutes, don’t you?”

His expression is vengeful, wide eyed, red. He blinks away a tear, silently rolling down his cheek. “Yes,” He growls.

“Shall we?” I prompt. Signaling to the orderlies to come and release us.

Niles doesn’t say a word. He scowls past me, looking ahead now like I’m a clod of dirt at the bottom of his shoe.

My legs are shaking on the walk over, and the layer of skin stretched across my forehead burns with anticipation. Meridei shows up behind me with a smirk on her face.

“Now you’re starting to get it! Chatting is a waste of time. This”—she points to the hydrotherapy door—“this is the only way to correct the behavior.”

I refuse to meet her dark, disappointing eyes. “Then why don’t you stay for the show?” I say each word carefully, trying not to let my nerves bleed into my statements.

She shrugs and follows behind me.

We step inside the frigid room, with the daunting sound of water slipping from the mouth of the faucet in fat drops to the tile floor. Natural light snakes across the white room from the tall frosted windows, and the thick hose is strewn across the floor.

Niles stands in the doorway stoically, embracing the setting like a soldier riding into battle. But his hands tremble at his sides, and his neck is slick with moisture. I suppose it doesn’t matter how often you’re forced into a treatment—fear clouds your soul the same each time.

But he doesn’t know that I have no intention of allowing him to ride on to the battlefield today… No, today, I’ve armed myself for the front lines.

Niles stares into my eyes with malice, stinging like the strike of a whip. And with this stare, he removes his shirt, revealing a smooth muscular chest.

I put my hand up to stop him. Both him and Meridei stiffen.

I look at the hose that is meant to shame and defile patients. I look at it for a long moment. Starting with my shoes, I begin taking my clothes off.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Meridei gasps.

Niles doesn’t say anything. He watches in shock.

I pull my dress over my head and toss it to a dry spot in the corner. My brassiere and underwear come off next. And I cannot help but shudder and take pause. This treatment isn’t foreign to me. My father used to make me strip down to nothing and sit in the cold basement as a punishment for crying.

I swallow down this memory like a pill stuck in my throat. The cold air caresses my skin like the sharp edge of a knife. I walk over to the back wall and position myself the way the patients usually do. One hand covering my breasts, and the other covering my panty line.

“Start,” I bark at Meridei.

She stands there with her mouth hanging open. The ice water surrounds my feet in a glassy puddle, and I flex all of my muscles, getting a small taste of the discomfort that awaits.

“Have you gone mad?!”

“Maybe.”

“What is it you’re trying to prove?” Meridei takes quick looks between Niles and me. My glance falls to Niles one more time. The spite has dissipated, replaced with horror.

“DO IT!” I scream in her direction. My voice echoes the room a dozen times. I’m getting colder by the second and suddenly want this over as soon as possible.

Without another word, Meridei yanks the hose off the ground and points it in my direction. We exchange a look. A look that hardens the limp muscles in my legs and drains the blood from my cheeks.

She’s going to enjoy this.

She pulls the lever, and the hose blasts in my direction, like a bolt of lightning connecting its brazen force with a wilting tree. I fly off of my feet, my body spinning in the air, my cheekbone making first contact with the wall. The smack to my nose causes my eyes to water. The metallic taste of my blood mixed with the salty taste of my tears. The cold water is like tiny needles puncturing my skin. I try to hold in any signs of weakness, but the pressure is too powerful, the temperature is dancing on the line of freezing, and the fact that I am fighting to breathe is unbearable.

I scream as water jets into my mouth, tiny spurts escaping into my lungs.

I panic at the overwhelming sensation of drowning. Trying to cough it out, I turn around to face the wall, so I’m not in the direct line of fire. I manage to clear the pipes, but it hardly matters because the water bounces off the walls and comes from all directions.

Focus.

Focus on when it should be over. But I have no concept of time. I can’t tell if she’s been blasting me for thirty seconds or three minutes. Not knowing makes the panic spread through the rest of my body like a virus, injecting me with small doses of doom.

I hear my knees crack against the tile when I drop down. I brace my head between my knees, trying to find any position that makes this less painful. It helps me breathe; therefore, it helps me scream. I release another scream, even louder than the last, that dwindles to a whimper.

The water shuts off.

My skin stings and the pressure doesn’t go away. My body shakes violently like windows after a strong roll of thunder rattles the glass. A warm substance is wrapped around my shoulders and draped around my body. Pleasure and relief replace the doom, like old friends shooing away an enemy. I look up from my knees to see Council Member Judas—Judas is wrapping my naked body in a large white towel. Niles has lost the rosy shade to his cheeks and the tip of his nose. His skin is ashen, and his eyes are wide with tears.

Judas looks up at Meridei. “Please escort Niles back to his room.”

She looks at Judas, jaw hanging, and grunts in my direction. “Must you try anything for attention?”

“It’s His Grace,” Niles corrects Judas as he exits the room with Meridei.

Judas helps me stand and walks to the door to turn away while I dress. I can’t stop shaking. Violently shaking.

I dry myself off before I slip into my dress.

“Whose idea was this?” he finally asks.

I use the towel to soak up some of the water from my hair. “Mine.”

“This wasn’t some sort of hazing ritual?”

So he knows how Meridei can be then.

“No.”

“Then why did you do it?” he clips.

“I was making a point.”

“I gathered that much. What was the point?”

I walk up behind him to make him aware that he can turn around now. “They need to know they can trust me. How can I expect them to open up to me, disclose the terror and darkness in their lives, and let me help them if I’m an outsider?”

He has the face of a priest and a studious librarian, calm and curious.

“That’s an extreme point to make.” He furrows his brow in concentration.

“These are extreme cases.”

And before we leave, I could swear that the sparkle in his eye is pride.

~

I step into Niles’s room like an exposed nerve. Naked. Wearing my fear and trauma around my neck like a noose. And I know he sees it too.

“I am so sorry. You have to endure that daily, and I only had to do it once. I—I am so sorry.” I refrain from calling him Niles because I know he doesn’t like it. But I can’t take calling him Your Grace seriously right now, so I don’t use a name at all.

“I can’t believe you did that for me.” His eyes are still shiny and moist from the tears that once fled freely from his lids.

“I’ll do it again… If that’s what it takes.”

“Why are you here?” His eyes narrow and crinkle at the corners.

“I’ve come to save you. I want to end the cruelty here.”

“Why?”

“Do you remember an assistant named Scarlett?” Her name still pokes an unhealed ache in my chest.

“The girl who looked like you.”

I nod.

“They say you murdered her.” He studies me as if we’ve switched roles.

“When she was alive, she found a purpose in life, and that was to stop the treatments here. She wanted the people here to be treated humanely. And when she died, I’m certain that was her dying wish. It’s something I have to do.”

His hands twist in his lap as if he’s wringing out a wet towel. I’ve only seen his body language display confidence, never nerves.

“You want me to tell you the ugly moments in my life. The pieces people often judge. But I don’t like being judged, you see. Judgment is quite the opposite from love.”

But he tells me anyway.

He shares how his family lived on the outskirts of the city, his father being in lumbering, and his mother mangled from an accident with the ax. But eventually, his father left them, and they had no means of obtaining food or money. Niles had two other siblings and his disabled mother to care for.

At this point in his story, he glances up at me with caution pooling in the pits of his pupils. “I could be quietly executed for speaking of this next chapter,” he tells me with a warning embedded in his meaning.

I assure him that this may not be a safe place—but I am safe.

Niles was never taught to take up lumbering with his father, so he went searching for work in the city and was collected almost immediately for being dressed like a wild child. The people who ushered him off of the streets and out of the public eye offered him work. But this type of work is not spoken of out loud. In fact, most pretend it doesn’t exist. There’s a mansion in the city, with a glorious view of the castle, and a respectable owner—but under its weight and under its acres of land, children of all ages run a successful wheel of work. Their services are their bodies, and their consumers are adults. A special kind of adult—the kind that has a rare appetite that is frowned upon and never spoken out loud in the ear of society.

“As a child, I was taught how to lie with an adult. Both men and women. I was shown the ways of pleasure and quenching their appetites. It’s a trade that is taught for a plethora of preferences.”

Beads of sweat purge from the pores on the back of my neck, tickling my skin as they snake down my back like tiny spiders being hatched and stretching their new legs to race for food.

There isn’t a word for adults who lie with a child. At least, not in this city. Near the woods, where the working folk live, we call them cradle devils.

Niles spares me the details of his first time, spares me the skills he acquired, spares me the many stories he could go into. But he does mention that he was able to support his family, bring food to the table, and provide them with whatever they needed. And he was able to adjust to his new life with nothing but his bare skin, the unwanted touching, stroking, and noisemaking of strangers who could be parents—even grandparents to young Niles. He could handle it all, though the crying fits and notions of suicide lingered on his mind after a long and tiresome night. He persevered. That is until he was sixteen.

“I was reawakened to a new purpose the night Charlotte requested to be serviced by me for three days. She paid handsomely for my favors and even offered to leave me with fine jewelry to take home to my mother. But during those long hours over the course of those three long days and nights, I was quickly made aware that Charlotte was born a man.” Niles’s eyes glaze over, actively being dragged through a memory I’m sure he’d rather forget. “I’ve seen many odd things in my time at that mansion. Many. At the time, this wasn’t the strangest I’d seen, and so I was not bothered. Charlotte stayed in heavy makeup, asking all of the right questions about my life, about my family, all the while fueling me with flattering compliments on the beautiful young man I’d grown to be.”

He tightens his lips and sighs like a man about to tell his wife that he’s been unfaithful. Shame forcing his eyes to close for a moment while he finds his words.

“When I tell you what happened next—you will feel disgust in the softness of your belly and won’t be able to look me in the eye again. All you’ll see is the ugliness of what I have done.” For the first time, he looks human. He looks like a little boy, naive and afraid. There is no Cupid facade. There isn’t even a maniacal patient. Just Niles.

Before I can open my mouth to assure him otherwise, he continues.

“Charlotte left the jewelry and the money for me on the table when our time was up. I was thrilled when I discovered how much she overpaid… Until I saw the necklace that she left for my mother. A gold chain with a medallion that had a baby Cupid shooting an arrow on it. When I flipped it over, it read—Harmony & Charles Offborth.”

He watches me expectantly now, as if I’m supposed to catch on to a hidden clue.

“Charles Offborth is my father. He took the necklace with him when he left us. Charles Offborth became Charlotte.”