by Anne Malcom
His eyes bored into mine. “One will ensure we have heirs on our new throne,” he said as the hand not holding the knife cupped between my legs. My skin crawled and I held back a retch at his probing touch. He grinned as if he sensed my reaction, then resumed the carving of my flesh. “The other is the Awakening of your true nature, of your true destiny. In the darkness. With me.”
“I’ll go nowhere with you,” I hissed. “Only Hell, if only to make sure I get a handwritten thank-you note from Hades.” I glared at him. “My true nature is awake and pretty certain on the notion that you repulse me and I’m going to kill you.”
The knife tore into my stomach, slicing an opening wide enough for Jonathan to place his hand inside my belly and rip at my organs.
Black spots danced in my vision as the pain threatened to blind me. Still, I gritted my teeth against any kind of screams of pain. I wasn’t lame enough to cry just because my previously dead husband was ripping apart my body and yanking my organs out of their rightful places.
Something, maybe my liver, hit the floor with a wet splat.
I never lowered my gaze. “You’re going to have to do better than that. You call that torture? It’s worse than a teenage virgin’s attempt at foreplay.”
He smiled, stepping forward with a wet crunch as his boot crushed my liver. “I will do much better than that, mon ange,” he promised, laying his lips over top of mine.
He had obviously expected me to be groggy with pain, the reason he lingered in front of me for so long. I utilized it by sinking my fangs into his cheek and ripping.
I reveled in the cold blood that spilled into my mouth along with chunks of his flesh. I spat it at him as he reared back in fury, hand going to the wound.
His eyes turned cold and evil, but then he smiled. “Ah, I am so looking forward to getting to know the vampire you’ve turned into.” He leaned forward. “And to turning you into something your true nature demands of you. I’ll take my time, of course. We have centuries to catch up on, after all.” He eyed me. “And then once we catch up, I’ll bring you back to that beautiful creature you were after you thought I’d perished.”
I scowled at him as blood poured from my stomach. “I wasn’t beautiful. I didn’t even spend decent time on my hair because I was too busy killing things. So I won’t be going back to that any time soon. You’ll just have to kill me.”
“You were dead before. Truly dead on the inside, and it was a beautiful thing,” he said. “I gladly take the credit, the responsibility for that. Because it was beautiful. It was us who did that. Our love. It made you hard.” His cheek had healed, and his hand moved from his face to button his suit jacket. “Death made you dead,” he continued. “But life has made you soft. What you’ve made with him, with the humans you hang around with, that’s turned you ugly. So I’ll take it upon myself to call back death.”
I rolled my eyes. “Did anyone ever tell you that you talk too much? Because even Shakespeare would think such a monologue is excessive. Not to mention narcissistic. And that’s saying a lot, you know, coming from me.” I glanced down. “And I’m glad you think I’m ugly now, because judging by your shoes, you wouldn’t know beauty if it strolled up and ripped your fangs out.” I glared at him. “Which is what this beauty is going to be doing in the very near future.”
He stepped forward. “Such pretty threats, but it’s you who’s chained to a wall.”
“There’s only so long chains can hold,” I said. “They won’t hold forever. So I’ll outlast them. Rip them from the walls. And then I’ll kill you.”
He tilted his head. “So no promises that your slayer will come save you? Avenge your honor?”
I scoffed. “He’s about three centuries too late for the whole honor thing. And as for the saving portion? I don’t need saving. Because this isn’t that kind of story. There’s no victim here. Just another villain.”
He smiled, showing fang. “I sure hope so, mon ange.” And then he turned on his heel, leaving me once more.
“Look, I’m getting super bored of this,” I said when Jonathan appeared at the door of my unlocked cage. It was taunting me more and more as I grew weaker without Thorne’s blood, as my skin became drier, more wrinkled, as my wounds failed to regenerate. Jonathan had left me for days after he’d cut my liver out.
It was not fun regrowing that, or watching it rot on the floor in front of me.
“You need to get the picture. I’ve moved the fuck on,” I hissed at him, though he didn’t fully enter. “You’re going to have to either kill me or unlock me and try to fight me like the man you pretended to be, or at the very least the vampire you’ve convinced yourself that you are.”
He smiled, a sickening and gruesome sight that filled me with utter and carnal dread. Because that was not just his usual joy at entering my cell and seeing me naked and suffering.
No, it told me that he had something, that he’d taken something else from me. Was about to cut something from me that was a lot more precious than my liver. And something that wouldn’t grow back.
My premonition served correct as he yanked a small form in front of him.
A small form wearing a Metallica tee as a dress and thigh-high boots.
Sophie.
He yanked at her hair, lifting her up so her neck was exposed and I could see her face. It was drawn, pale, that same grayish twinge of before but a lot more pronounced. Her cheekbones protruded a lot more than they should have, telling me the witches had her on a detox that she didn’t fucking need.
Black kohl was smudged on her eyes, not artfully as before, and they were—unexpectedly—open.
He had dragged her near-limp body upward, and because there was no fight in the motion, I assumed Sophie was unconscious. Sophie would have to be unconscious not to fight.
Or so I’d thought.
Her stare widened a fraction when she laid eyes on me, some glint showing in the eyes as dull and gray as her skin. There was something very pivotal missing from them.
Something very Sophie-like.
“Just can’t keep your clothes on, can you, whore?” she croaked, telling me not all of Sophie was gone.
I forced myself to grin. “I’m not the one who’s let my curves go to shit just because of a pesky little kidnapping and imprisonment.”
She limply lifted her arm, as if it weighed a ton, and flipped me the bird.
“Okay, I’m gonna say that this is the point where you blow Jonathan to low Hell. And I don’t even care if you have to take me with him. It’ll be worth it to get rid of him. He’s so annoying.” I tried to keep my voice casual, light, like it was any other situation that Sophie and I had to kill our way out of. Like I didn’t see the knife in Jonathan’s hands, see his intention just as clearly. Like I didn’t see the resigned, almost expectant look on Sophie’s face.
I couldn’t see that.
Because I couldn’t handle that.
Jonathan cutting out my liver again? Fine.
Him touching me in the places that were only designed for Thorne? Hated it, but could handle it.
Staying chained there, slowly decomposing from thirst with only my demons for company? It would grind my soul down to the very nub, but I would be able to handle it.
Watching my best friend die in front of me without being able to do anything at all? No. Not fucking happening.
She smiled sadly at me, full of more resignation. “As much as I would really love to, vamp, they’ve bound my powers. I’m just a pretty face and a hot body now.” She paused as Jonathan yanked at her hair harder, lifting the knife to her neck. “I suspect I’ll make an even hotter corpse.” Her eyes glistened with something more than tears. Regret, maybe. Something foreign I hadn’t seen on Sophie’s face, ever.
My stomach was acid.
“Tell the wolf…” The corner of her mouth quirked up as if she remembered something. “Tell him I don’t hate him.”
The words, her expression, the whole fucking situation was a knife to my heart at th
e memory of the time she told me to give the wolf her words of love in case she died.
I struggled against my chains with a renewed vigor, a renewed desperation. I didn’t even feel it as they ripped into my skin.
Jonathan smiled at me, the knife hovering in his hands. “I told you I would take everything from you, mon ange, until you have nothing left but death.”
My heart beat in my throat until it became a roar in my ears, fear stifling all thought, all cohesive brain function. I was waiting for that moment, right before the sick, terrible, and unthinkable thing happens, when someone breaks it and yanks that sick and terrible thing away? So you’re left with the rancid taste of the memory, but that’s all it is in the end, a memory.
But that kind of thing wasn’t reality. Sick and terrible things happened all the time. Every second. This was just another.
But it couldn’t.
“I will kill you for this.” I wrenched the words out of my throat with such force that they shook with the rage and anger behind them. I struggled once more against the manacles. Did I imagine that bit of give? My skin was ground down so only the exposed bone remained. I had gotten that far before, many times, but maybe there was magic in my rage, something beyond physics or anything that could be explained. Maybe I was willing to sand my bones to dust for my best friend.
No, there was no maybe about that. I was completely willing to do that.
But there wasn’t enough time. Jonathan’s knife started to press against Sophie’s skin as he watched me writhe and struggle with a grin.
“No, mon ange, you will not,” he said.
And then he cut Sophie’s throat.
Blood poured from the jagged and gruesome wound, and he dropped her unceremoniously to the floor. She landed with a thud that I imagined because someone was screaming.
Not someone—me. I was screaming.
I hadn’t screamed throughout two weeks of torture. This was something I’d scream over for years, for the rest of my life. It wouldn’t always be audible, but the vision of Sophie’s body twitching in the last throes of death and then suddenly stilling as her warm blood reached my toes was something that was burned into my body.
It must’ve been a while before I stopped thrashing, since my hands were screaming at me almost as loud as my heartbreak. I couldn’t take my eyes from Sophie’s body. I expected her to jerk up and yell, ‘Psych!’ or for the air to shimmer with that magic of hers that was so darn powerful and fucking resurrect her.
None of that happened.
She just stayed there.
Still.
Dead.
I had never thought someone so full of life could ever die. But there the bitch was, proving me wrong.
My vision was tinted crimson, not from all the fucking blood pouring out from Sophie but from the crimson tears streaming from my eyes, blurring everything but not blurring it enough, not taking it away, the image in front of me.
But something did take them away. A roar so loud, so full of visceral pain that it hurt to hear. It rattled my very bones.
And my vision cleared enough to see Jonathan thrown against the wall of my cell—I didn’t even find any satisfaction from it, my mind still fractured from Sophie’s death, from that growl—and watch a half man, half wolf, full of violence and utter danger, pick Sophie up with the upmost gentleness that I couldn’t imagine a nurse holding a baby much softer.
“No, no, no, my warrior.”
He gathered the corpse of my best friend in his clawed hands, his entire body shaking, face painted in such a distorted grimace of bone-deep, soul-deep agony that I had to look away.
And my gaze found the pile of crumbling rock that Jonathan was wrenching himself out of, fangs at the ready, more death in his eyes.
I didn’t know whether it was that—the prospect of more death, witnessed from a place of total helplessness—or the fact that I’d nearly ripped my wrists from my arms with my struggles, but I found myself freed.
My limbs screamed at me as sheer force of will—of ultimate grief—stopped me from collapsing in a heap on the floor as I would have in any other situation.
As I would have in any other situation that didn’t include my best friend dead at my feet. But this was the situation, and the vampire responsible for it, who had fucking smiled at me while he did so, was about to spring and attack the werewolf rocking her lifeless body in his arms.
Not what I had expected him to do. With the power of rage inside that roar at seeing Sophie’s body, I would’ve expected both the alpha male inside him and the beast rippling around him to go for Jonathan and tear him the fuck apart.
But there was none of that. There was only sorrow so deep it seemed to drain the very oxygen from the air.
But I wasn’t complaining, because that meant I got to make impact with Jonathan.
It was luck more than strength that made him crumple back to the pile of stones that had rained down when the wolf threw him into the wall. He had his attention on Conall, on killing yet another immortal in my circle that he hadn’t factored in regarding what my grief would do to me.
I had always thought anger was the main thing that drove me to kill. It drove anyone past their limit of strength, made even mortals master immortal acts if the anger was deep and hot enough.
But no, it wasn’t anger that somehow had me managing to hold myself atop of Jonathan’s weakened body, no matter the fact that I was naked, blood-deprived and weakened from my pounding heart. It was the gut-wrenching, life-ruining grief that had me doing that, even as he struggled against me, and rightly should’ve been able to throw me off him with little to no effort.
But he didn’t, and I bent down, fangs extended, and ripped the side of his throat out, tearing through the flesh like butter. And then I kept going, kept tearing at his neck, crunching through the bone, the gristle, the flesh until he stopped struggling.
My mangled and near-useless fist somehow found purchase on the cool and gritty stone around us. It wasn’t a question, or even a fully formed thought about what I was going to do with it. I was plowing it into Jonathan’s face again and again, bone crunching underneath my blows, blood splaying upward—but not enough blood. There wasn’t enough. I had it all over me, streaming from my mouth, but it wasn’t enough to match what he’d taken from Sophie.
All her blood.
All her life.
So I kept going long after his face caved in. Long after his features became nothing more than a mess of flesh and bone.
His head was only attached to his body by his spine, something I hadn’t been able to tear my fangs into. So with my stone, I turned my attention to that. But even with the power of grief in my veins, it wasn’t enough to replace the blood that was little more than dust at that point. I’d used the last of my strength, and then some, to get myself to that point, to get Jonathan’s blood on my hands, on my body.
But it was still not enough.
So I pushed. I pushed my mangled hands not to let go of the brick, my mind not to succumb to the darkness, my body not to collapse from the assault it had been subjected to. And I kept going.
I didn’t know for how long. There was still thudding of flesh against that stone, still crunching of bone, so I hadn’t ground him away, pushed him from existence, so it wasn’t enough.
But I wasn’t on top of him anymore.
No, I was in someone’s arms. Warm arms. Familiar. The blood, it was most familiar of all. Singing to me. Calling to me. My throat burned, charred, and blistered at the scent of it.
“Holy fucking Jesus,” Thorne choked out as his features came into view.
I imagined his face might be painted in that same horror that saturated his voice, that ripped at the cords so familiar yet so foreign. But I didn’t look to his face. My eyes were focused on his neck, on the movement of it. The small pulsing of his veins, the glorious blood underneath it.
My body shook from need.
But I didn’t move.
Maybe I couldn�
��t.
I might’ve been scared. Fucking terrified that this wasn’t real. Was some hallucination that I’d spiraled into after watching Sophie die and I was still chained to the wall, her blood soaking my feet.
So even though I was decaying underneath Thorne’s strong and warm grip, even as my throat burned with thirst unlike anything I had ever experienced, I didn’t move. I just sat there, still, watching the movement of that pulse.
“Oh fuck,” a foreign—or was it familiar?—voice cried. “No, Sophie. She’s not dead. No, no, no,” the same voice chanted, petering out until only sobs remained.
“Isla,” Thorne demanded again, his voice raw, stripped to the nerve. My eyes stayed glued to his throat, though something inside me was punched, speared, stabbed with the utter defeat, pain in his voice.
Hands framed my face, jerking my neck upward.
I met gray eyes, swimming with unshed tears, with unhinged rage, with naked worry. “Isla, baby…” His eyes searched my naked skin. “Fuck, baby, fuck! Silver, get me your shirt, now,” he demanded, his voice a guttural growl.
“She doesn’t need her modesty covered, she needs blood, Thorne,” a sharp voice ordered, one that was usually even, measured, emotionless but was now slightly frantic. “She’s in danger of not being able to regenerate,” Rick continued, leaning down and scoring at the skin I’d been fastened on until those gray eyes pulled me with more force than even blood.
But then, when it was exposed to the air, exposed to me, I wasn’t able to get lost in Thorne’s eyes, in him.
No, I got lost in the blood.
But I didn’t lean forward, didn’t sink my fangs into the skin, though it was utter agony not to.
Thorne shook me. “Drink, Isla!” he roared.
I blinked, more crimson trailing down my cheek. “It’s a trick, isn’t it? It’s all a trick,” I chanted to myself, but not to Thorne, or Rick, or Silver, who was shrugging a button-down over my shoulders. The fabric scratched against my skin.
