The First Whisper

The door slammed behind me.

The sound travelled through the cell and seemed to settle somewhere inside my chest.

For a few seconds, I didn't move.

I stayed on the floor where the guards had thrown me, one hand pressed against the cold stone while the other rested over the iron chain around my wrist. My breathing was uneven. My shoulder hurt where I had hit the ground.

“Lock her in.”

The order came from outside.

Then that screeching sound, the kind that could hurt anyone's eardrum.

The lock was in place.

They were gone – the guards.

The awful people that threw me here like a bag of thrash.

I lifted my head.

The cell was smaller than I had imagined a place meant to hold someone like me would be.

There was a narrow bed against the wall. A bucket in the corner. A small opening high above me where a strip of grey light slipped through the stone.

No window. No sign of escape, just walls and silence.

Funny. They had always been so afraid of silence yet they had built an entire world around it.

I pulled myself onto the edge of the bed and looked down at my hand which were trembling nonstop.

I curled them into fists until they stopped.

They couldn't see me cry.

I had given them enough already.

My tears were mine.

My fear was mine.

And whatever was left of me after everything they had taken—

that was mine too.

My name is Adele Luketon.

At least, that was the name written on the papers that brought me here.

In Nylesk, a woman's name was supposed to mean very little.

Her obedience meant more.

Her silence meant everything.

I had broken both.

They called me a heretic.

A rebel.

A threat. Not that it hurt a bit.

A girl who had forgotten her place.

But the word they hated most was much smaller.

One word.

Three letters.

"No."

A woman could say it in her head.

She could feel it, she could say it to her fellow woman or girl child .

She could even whisper it to herself in the dark.

But she was never supposed to say it to a man or close to a man.

Never to the Council.

Never to the society that had decided what she was allowed to be before she was old enough to understand what freedom meant.

I said it anyway.

And one word was enough to change everything.

I leaned my head against the wall and closed my eyes.

For a moment, I could almost hear my mother's voice.

Little rebellion.

She used to call me that.

I used to laugh whenever she did.

But now.... I can't.

Why??

My mother is dead.

So is Mara.

The two people who knew me before the prison.

Before the accusations.

Before I learned that truth could be more dangerous than a lie.

My jaw tightened.

They wanted me to remember them as victims.

I refused.

My mother didn't die because she was weak.

Mara didn't die because she was guilty.

They died because the Council was afraid of what they knew.

And I was still alive because they had made one mistake.

They thought putting me behind walls would make me surrender.

I looked toward the locked door.

They were wrong.

I had lost almost everything.

But I had not lost the reason I was still breathing.

The Council.

I would not die here.

Not yet.

Not before I saw the people who destroyed my family answer for it.

A sound came from the corridor.

Footsteps.

I stopped breathing.

One.

Then another, it was coming close to my door.

I sat up.

The chains around my wrists gave a quiet rattle as I moved.

Who was coming?

A guard?

A councillor?

Someone who had come to finish what they started?

The footsteps stopped outside my door.

I stared at it.

Then I heard my name.

“Adele.”

I lifted my head.