A Hatred Most Pure novel · Chapter 5 of 24
Chapter 5: The Kitchen
By morning the bed was empty and my left hand worked again.
Bram knocked on the door with a tray and a folded black dress.
"The Alpha says a captive who eats gets work," he said. "I'd take the work. It's the warm room."
"Where is he?"
"Out on the wall. He's been out there since before light." Bram looked at my shirt, torn open and held shut with one hand, and his face went carefully blank. "Wear the dress."
The kitchen of Dunmarrow was a stone cave with six ovens and thirty women.
The cook was a broad woman with flour to her elbows.
She looked me over once and pushed a barrel of turnips across the floor with her foot.
"Peel them," she said. "All of them. And don't talk to my girls."
I sat down on an upturned bucket and started peeling.
Nobody spoke to me, and nobody looked at me.
The women moved around my bucket without a glance, and when I reached for a salt crock the woman beside it took it away.
I peeled for three hours.
Around noon a small boy crept across the floor, no more than five, with a smear of soot on his nose.
He stopped an arm's length from my bucket and stared at my face.
"Are you from the sea?" he whispered.
"I was born next to it."
"Is it real? Mama says it's a lake with no edge."
"It's real." I held up a turnip. "It's bigger than all of this. It's gray in the morning and green at noon, and it smells of salt and rotten fish."
"Rotten fish," he said, delighted.
A woman snatched him by the collar and hauled him off.
It was the thin young woman from the hall, with the baby on her hip.
She looked at me with her whole face twisted.
Keep reading free with an account. Start A Hatred Most Pure from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.
← Chapter 4 · All chapters · Chapter 6 →
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend