Ella
Silver manacles burn into my wrists. The hot, slippery metal slides over my bones as I curl into myself, trying to shelter myself from the pain. Water drips onto my filthy hair. It’s ice cold, which is a welcome relief from the sweltering heat radiating through the room made of sweating pale stone.
There’s a single door and no windows, and I have no idea if I’m underground or high, high above in some tower. Everything from the brief moments of clarity I had after being pulled from the river to now are blurry. Flashes of being dragged by my hair through wet mud. The feeling of silver being sliced over my bruised skin. The sound of manacles being locked in place, and muffled voices lifted in snarling laughter at my expense.
I woke up some time ago thirsty and in the worst pain I think I’ve ever felt. The pain radiates from my wrists and writhes a snake through every vein, over every muscle, setting deep in my bones.
The worst of it lingers in my lower belly. A dull, cramping ache has started to spread there, and the confusion and panic when I first woke up here in this dull, brutally hot room is now replaced by fury and fear.
If Petra does anything to my baby, I will tear out her throat with my teeth. I will pull her apart inch by inch while she’s still breathing. I will use what little power I have left to bring time to a crawl just to elongate her suffering.
I will revel in every drop of blood I spill.
A sharp, slicing pain cuts through my stomach. The pain is hot enough to make me moan as I bring my knees into my chest and lay my cheek on the hot stone floor.
But the door to the room opens with an echoing creak, and light pours into the room. I close my eyes, unaccustomed to the brightness. How long have I been left like this? Hours? Days?
Goddess forbid… weeks?
I open my eyes just in time to be splashed with frigid water. I gasp as needles of ice fan out over my skin, soaking into the battered potato sack of a dress I’ve been dressed in.
“Get up, you filthy whore,” a deep, grumbling male voice booms.
I spit water, blinking rapidly to clear my vision. I don’t recognize the man and the large cream-colored wolf standing beside him. I’ll forget this man’s face, just like I’ve forgotten all the others who have come in and out of this room to taunt me. I’ve been living on spoiled meat and crumbs of bread for Goddess knows how long, but they haven’t broken me yet.
That’s what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to break me. For what reason, I have no idea, because I haven’t seen Petra since the day I was dragged in from the river.
“I’m chained to the floor, you fucking moron,” I hiss, and he slaps me so hard my vision blurs at the edges, and my teeth puncture my lower lip.
He unlocks the chains keeping me tied to the dirty floor and hauls me up right, my wrists bound by the manacles. He shoves me, telling me to start walking, but I nearly fall back to my knees as my legs wobble and tingle from lack of use.
Goddess, how long have I been here?
My leg muscles feel like jelly as I stagger forward. The wolf eyes me with a narrowed gaze as I pass. I meet his eyes, narrowing my own, then spit in his face.
His snarl tears through my ears.
“Our Queen wants her alive!” my captor shouts at the wolf, who is currently snarling in my face with his big, white teeth. “Play later.”
I tilt my head at the wolf, eyeing my own reflection in his shiny teeth, and begin to laugh. It’s a hysterical sound that bounces off every wall. My eyes are wide and bloodshot, and my dry, cracked lip is split as I look up at the man and laugh in his face, too.
“She’s gone insane,” he murmurs. “Look at this bitch, Atticus. She’s lost her fucking mind.”
At first, I think he’s talking to the wolf, but as he shoves me through the door, I find myself nearly face to face with a tall, white-haired man who could have been Petra had it not been for his shortly trimmed hair and scarred face.
He’s blind in one eye. That’s the first thing I notice. One eye is a sharp blue, while the other is a milky white with a scar running from his forehead to his cheekbone.
“She stinks,” he sneers, reaching toward me to pick up a lock of my matted hair. “Bathe her. Chop off her hair if you have to.” He begins to turn around, then slowly looks over his shoulder at the large man holding my chains and the wolf at my side. “Now that I think of it, the slave girls will bathe her. I don’t trust either of you after what happened to that mystic we brought in a few weeks ago.”
My blood runs cold. They’ve been bringing mystics here–to wherever we are? I look around, but there’s no windows, no doors open to the outside world. Water runs down the stone walls in little streams that sink back into the cracked stone floors.
It’s hot as hell, though. So, we’re somewhere warm, or this place is kept at a brutally hot temperature on purpose.
Atticus snatches my chains from my captor with a sneer cold enough to cool the air in the room by several degrees.
Without a word, he hauls me away. With each step, the manacles cut deeper into my skin, but I refuse to let the pain show.
We reach the end of a long hallway and walk down a short flight of stairs, then I’m being shoved through a door and into another hallway lit by torches that cast more heat into the snug space.
Atticus doesn’t say a word to me. A brief glance in his direction displays the disgusted look on his face as he grips my upper arm with one hand and the chains with the other.
But then he abruptly stops, his one good eye sharpening.
I resist the urge to ask what’s happening when he shakes his head and looks down at me.
“Come on,” he says, turning us back in the direction we came.
I dig in my heels, which surprises him. He turns toward me as I yank on the chains with all the strength left in my body. “Where are we going?”
“To see your queen, little witch.”
“I have no queen.”
“My sister begs to differ.”
My brows raise. So, I was right. “You’re Petra’s brother?”
“Are we that similar?” He’s terrifying to look at, but there’s something in that eye of his that Petra doesn’t have. It’s a single shred of friendliness, maybe even humanity.
He shouldn’t have let me see it.
“Is she going to kill me?”
He shrugs. “I assume so. I thought she might have wanted you… clean, at least, beforehand. But she’s demanding to see you now.” Clean. Not for her, but because I look like death walking and somewhere, deep down, he feels bad about it.
“She’s in your head, isn’t she?”
“Mind-link,” he nods, and a hint of cocky smile touches his lips.
Bullseye. This dude is as good as dead now.
“What have I done wrong?” I let a tremor run through my voice. “My mate—Oh, Goddess, where is he?”
“You were alone.”
“Is he dead?”
“No,” he says, searching my eyes. I try to look dramatically relieved and stick out my lower lip, fake tears springing to life and rolling over my lashes.
He loosens his grip on me enough that I drop my rail-thin arms and cradle the…
Oh, my Goddess.
I cradle the hard, small swell on my lower belly that hadn’t been there before. I look up at him, real panic showing behind my eyes this time. “How long have I been here?”
“Two weeks. Almost three—”
“The baby,” I whisper.
“Petra won’t let anything happen to that… child.” He grimaces, his white teeth flashing with mingled disgust and awe.
I meet his eyes. “What exactly does she want from me? Tell me now.”
He winces suddenly and grips my arm again, and then we’re moving. I imagine his bitch of a sister is screaming into his skull, and that brings me a single shred of comfort as I walk down another hallway, another ill-lit corridor, and then out into a cavernous space illuminated by multiple fires that blaze to a low hanging ceiling.
But the fires are all wrong. They glow in several different shades. Battered, chained women with tear-stained cheeks toss what looks like bones into the flames. Smoke curls along the ceiling, choking the very air from the room.
Atticus shoves me along while my stomach twists. What’s happening here?
The ceiling slowly rises the further we walk. Soon, the space opens up, and I follow the billowing smoke now twisting toward a hole in what I realize is a cave.
Eastonia and its fuckingcaves.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in.”
I lower my gaze from the hole, what could be my only means of escape, to Petra.
She taps her fingers on… no. No, anything but this.
King Kane’s iron throne with its skulls and bones is polished and gleaming like liquid metal as Petra, draped in robes of blood red, rises. Her glossy white-blonde hair is braided away from her face and woven through a crown of ivory thorns.
“Your mate has been tearing apart the Roguelands looking for you.” She grins then laughs. It’s a shrill sound that echoes through the cavernous space, bouncing off the ceiling.
I look up again and notice the carvings on the domed ceiling. It’s not a cave like I thought, but we’re definitely underground. This place… it must have been a temple of some kind, based on the gods and goddesses carved into the shadows.
“Hello?” Petra says sharply. “Did you not hear me? I just said your mate—”
“Of course he’s looking for me,” I say calmly, my voice thick with boredom. “Are you hoping he’d be here by now to see how far I’ve fallen? Were you hoping he’d find you instead, see you in all your glory, and fall madly in love?” I snort with laughter that booms over the crackling fires behind me.
“I should have killed you at the coven when I had the chance!” she screams, teeth bared.
“When? That night I mopped the crystal floors in Ravenna’s castle with your pathetic ass?”
Her mouth falls open then promptly snaps shut again, her eyes flaring with primal rage. “Get those manacles off this sniffling, filthy cunt right this instant, Atticus!”
“Petra—”
She whirls on her brother, her face twisted by a type of fury I’ve never seen before. “Right. Now.” She rolls a dainty wrist and inspects her nails. “The silver in those manacles will have caused her powers to wither to dust by now, Atticus.” She looks up at us with those pale gray eyes I would love to gouge out. “And the wolfsbane in every morsel of food and sip of water she drank.”
My mouth goes dry. Atticus reaches into his pocket and pulls out a key, making quick work of unlocking the manacles. They fall to my feet.
My wrists are practically worn to the bone. A quick glance shows me how terrible the wounds are.
Petra makes a pouty face. “You poor thing. You had such beautiful wrists and hands. I’m sure Ryatt won’t even want to look in your direction now.”
“You could peel the skin from my body and he’d still be mine, Petra.”
“I am your queen now, you insolent slut! My reign was fated!”
“By the very mystics you’ve been hunting and enslaving?” I wave a weak arm in a wide circle toward the fires burning behind me. “They never saw you on any throne.”
“It was supposed to me and Ryatt during the Rite! Not you. You had to come and ruin it all!”
“He’s mine, Petra. It doesn’t matter what you say. It doesn’t matter how badly you beat and torture me. You can kill me, and he’ll still be mine.” I take a step toward her, flexing my aching hands. “He doesn’t want you, and he never will.”
I can tell she’s seeing red. She snaps her fingers, and two women with chains trailing behind their scrawny legs come running, struggling to balance with what looks like a heavy burden carried between them.
My blood runs cold as I realize what they’re handing to Petra.
She runs a delicate, milky white finger along the edge of Ryatt’s sword. His sword of shadows.
“I want a rematch,” she grins. “But this time, little witch, you won’t have your brute strength or your powers behind you.”
Petra lunges at me with hatred in her eyes.