The soldier threw him, and he landed on his side, his hip striking painfully against the floor of the cart.īefore he could regain his footing, they slammed and barred a wooden door, locking him away in the darkness. They watched from their doorways and windows as he was shoved into the back of a wooden wagon. The other women he had grown up around watched warily, but did not speak a word on his behalf, not even the kind ones who had offered him refuge in their rooms while his mother worked. He was hauled down the stairs and marched outside the ramshackle building. Once his fingers were wrenched from their last hold on the doorway to the room he and his mother shared, there was no stopping the men who carried him. She never looked back at him, no matter how he screamed, not even so he could memorize her face one last time. Until the king’s soldiers peeled his scrawny arms away from her knees and dragged him away. There was no large, happy family waiting at home for him. Cruze had known he was not like other boys. He ignored the sting, and clutched at his mother’s legs, burying his face in the fabric of her skirt so he did not have to see the way she still kept her gaze from him. When he managed to break away, he ran and slid the last distance on his knees, his threadbare clothes doing little to keep his skin from scraping against the stone. She only watched with tired eyes and turned away as he kicked and screamed and bit at the soldiers’ wrists to tear himself free. He did not understand why the soldiers behaved so cruelly, or why his mother did not object. He did not understand the day they took him from his mother.

Rage by cora carmack