Free The Misbegotten (An Assassin's Blade Book 1) by Justin DePaoli Page B

remember poking a blade in a man who quite resembled you—sweaty, oily face, two chins, scraggly patch of hair on his neck that looked like it belonged on the bottom of his ass. I bet he was your twin.”
    “Look at this,” the slaver said, cackling. “A funny man we got with us. I need to laugh, it’s good for you, yeah?” He cracked his whip across my face and bellowed a laugh that shook his shoulders. “Oh, it does feel good to laugh!”
    The whip snagged a thin film of flesh from my cheek. I touched it with my finger, only to receive another lashing, this time on my hand. I grunted, but managed a smile. “Tell me, when’s the last time you saw your cock?”
    The slaver closed that stupid, oversized mouth of his and nodded. He went off behind the building and emerged with an orange-tipped iron poker.
    “Usually we do this after, but you’re a special case, I see.”
    He walked up, leaned in and pressed the poker into my chest. I heard a sizzling sound, like skewered bacon with grease dripping into a fire. And then I felt it. And smelled it. The putridness of scorched skin made me retch, but bending over pushed the poker deeper into my chest.
    The pain… unimaginable. Felt it in my fingertips, burning in my eyes. It spread, coursing through and broiling every nerve in my body. I was being cooked alive, and wriggling, screaming, shrieking… none of it helped.
    Finally, the hissing fled and the poker was yanked away. And I lay on my side, gritting my teeth and crying.
    “You won’t last the week,” the slaver said. “Rise up, you’re all getting it now.”
    I lay there as those around me stood. My brother was first. He squealed like a stuck pig and jumped back, driving his foot into my shoulder and falling on top of me.
    “Why the fuck did you do that?” he asked me.
    Anton and I were thrown into the fields within the walls. Our first job was to group logs according to size. The logs had already been cut and hauled in by other slaves. Fairly easy job, except when the logs are thicker than you. From what I gleaned, the slavers didn’t much care if we talked, so I kept close to my brother.
    “Look for a way out,” I said.
    “I’m sure I’ll find one,” he snapped back.
    “There’s a reason I did what I did. Look around you.”
    His head swiveled around, jauntily looking every which way. The boy had the brain of a dog whose parents were siblings.
    “Subtly,” I snapped.
    “They’re looking this way,” he said.
    “At me. They’re watching me, not you, not anyone else. I didn’t take an extra ten seconds of a hot poker in the chest for the hell of it. You have a bit of freedom in here because of me. Scan the wall, check for weaknesses… look for a way out.”
    Anton nodded. Finally, he understood. Damn near had to hit him over the head with one of those logs, but he got it.
    We didn’t talk for the rest of the day, minding our own business, picking up logs, stacking them in place and wheelbarrowing them over to one of three enormous pits. One was for small logs, one for medium and the last for the large variety.
    Simple enough. For a lumberjack. I, unfortunately, was an assassin. My arms were nearly numb halfway into the day, and logs were dropping from my grasp like leaves from a tree in autumn. One almost landed on my foot. The slavers would laugh loud enough for everyone to hear and tell me to pick the damn thing up and get back to work.
    At night, we slept on the ground, where we worked. We must have looked like black birds sitting in rows along tree branches. In the morning, it was back to business. Slaves carried in logs from outside the walls, and we separated them again. We ate once a day, carrying shallow wooden bowls we were given during initiation and filling them up once — and only once — with broth. Sometimes the broth had bits of bread, sometimes bits of dirt.
    Filling our bowls with water from the wells was more common than filling them with food, but not enough to keep your