by Erin Raegan
“I am pleased you could spare us a moment of your time, Mohna,” Uthyf drawled scathingly as he flicked his eyes up and down my person before dismissing me and looking back down at the table.
I stiffened. “Of course. I had some free time.”
Syn, I believed, snorted and looked at the floor. Tahk pressed his claws into his brow.
Uthyf’s jaw hardened and he fisted his hands, leaning on them. “My thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” I replied sweetly.
I could feel the tension bleeding off Uthyf, and that got my own rising. I didn’t know what it was about Uthyf and me, but from the moment I met him, we couldn’t be in the same room without trying to take a verbal bite out of each other. At first, it had amused everyone around us, but lately it felt as though they were getting more and more annoyed with our public animosity.
“You were his.” Uthyf was deathly quiet, but he may as well have shouted. The words felt like boulders as they pounded into my skin.
Vivian sucked in a breath from the back of the room, and the others visibly flinched away from me. My face got hot and my eyes itched as I glared at the back of Uthyf’s head. His ridges were long and beaded as they hung from his crown and down his back. They were a physical trait from his regal bloodline, as were the size and sharp curl of his horns. The silver and gold beads on his ridges glinted in the light from the bowls of blue fire beside his head. His wings were just as regal, hanging down from his powerful shoulder blades. The black robe he wore was threaded with blue and skirted around his wings, touching the floor at his heels. He looked every bit the alien king he was, but I would be damned before I let anyone talk to me like that.
“Fuck you,” I spat.
Peyton and Vivian sucked in another breath, and Tahk and Fihk glared at me. Most of the Dahk would have no idea what I’d said or what I meant. Human language often got mixed up in translation. But those two had spent enough time around humans to know and understand exactly how I meant it to sound.
“He is your king,” Haytu admonished gently.
“No, he’s your king.”
Tahk stepped up beside me. “You reside under his House, you are provided for by him, and your safety is upheld on his order. He. Is. Your. King.”
I flushed again and looked away. I wanted to rage at them. Deny every word. But I couldn’t, and we all knew it. If I wanted to stay here, if I wanted a life here, then I needed to accept their culture. I was in the wrong and I knew it, but I wouldn’t apologize. No way in hell would I apologize to him after what he’d said.
Tahk knew it too. After growling a curse under his breath, he backed away.
Uthyf sighed heavily and stood straight. I braced as he faced me again. He observed me for a long tense moment.
“You were his slave, his pet,” he continued, slicing me open, coldly watching as I bled all over the marble floor. “You have information we need.”
I blinked the salty water from my eyes and stiffly stared at the wall over his shoulder. “I don’t know anything.”
Uthyf scoffed. “How long were you with him?”
I ground my teeth and squeezed my fists tightly. My nails bit into my palms. “A long time.”
“You must have seen something, heard something. You can speak Juldo.”
A wave of exhaustion flowed over me like a too-hot blanket. I knew this day was coming. They had tried a few times, but I had shown up with my bitchy attitude and refused. I knew now, with so many of them in the room, silent and watching, they wouldn’t let me escape this time.
I felt betrayed. I felt as though Vivian had driven a knife through my chest by bringing me here. She had to have known what this would do to me. I knew she had her reasons and thought it was important, but she didn’t understand how much this would hurt.
I could know something. I could have heard or seen something during my captivity. I wasn’t an idiot. But it wasn’t as simple as knowing or giving them a memory to dissect. I had repressed so much of my time there. Every memory was coated in pain and shame. To analyze every overheard conversation, every look, everything I saw or heard, and come out unscathed afterward would be impossible.
“I can’t speak a lot, only a few words.” The language was too complex without a translator, and I hadn’t been given one before Vivian showed up. I’d had to learn the language through sheer desperation.
But I could understand more than I could speak, and they knew that.
Haytu sighed a sound full of disappointment. “Mohna, this is very important.”
“I know it is,” I said through my teeth. They wanted to use me to get inside the Juldo Master’s head. It was smart, but I didn’t know how to do that without losing my mind completely. I was barely hanging on most days.
“Anything could be helpful,” Fihk said gently. “Start from the beginning and we will help you sort through it.”
I shook my head. “I can’t. I can’t.”
“Do you not remember?” Haytu sounded confused.
I swallowed hard. I couldn’t lie. “I do, but I don’t.” I held my hands helplessly as several males glared at me.
Uthyf ground his fangs. “What does that mean?”
“I—” I looked around for anyone, anyone, to get me out of here. There was no one. “I don’t want to.”
Uthyf flushed with a glare.
“Remember! I don’t want to remember!” I wanted to help, but I didn’t want to relive it all.
Several of them looked away from me, and I swallowed against the shame I felt rising up from my toes. I hated them for this. I shouldn’t feel ashamed, I’d done nothing wrong. But no matter how many times I thought the words, I could never get my emotions to accept them. I was ashamed of what had happened to me, but the shame I felt for being unable to overcome it and help them was somehow far worse.
No one knew what to say to me after my outburst. I felt the discomfort in the room.
It was Vyr who came to my rescue. He growled something beneath his breath and marched over to me. His dark red hand curled around my arm, and he gently escorted me to the side of the room.
I looked at my sandals as he bent his head close to mine. “The king is insistent. He must hear it, Mona. But perhaps if so many did not look on, it might be easier?”
I blinked away hot tears. “Vyr?” I blew out a heavy breath as he waited for me to continue. “Would he have shown me anything? Would he have let me hear or see anything I shouldn’t?”
Vyr’s eyes flashed in anger. He didn’t want to tell me. But if anyone knew it would be Vyr. If he thought the master may have revealed something to me, then he probably had. I nodded and looked away.
“You were his pet,” he said gently. It didn’t feel as painful as when Uthyf said it. “You were not meant to escape.”
I nodded again and bit my cheek until blood flooded my mouth.
His hand tightened on my arm. “But you did. You survived. Now you are in a position to aid in his destruction. Use his foolishness against him.”
“I’m scared,” I confessed. I was so ashamed of my fear. I should be able to get revenge. I should be able to stand tall and tell them all the terrible things I’d experienced and not feel an ounce of shame because fuck that. But it wasn’t that easy. Reliving it all felt like inflicting a wound that would never, ever heal.
“You are full of fire. Do not let his actions control another moment of your existence.”
Words, they were just words. But that didn’t mean they were useless. “Fire, huh?”
Vyr nodded gravely. “No female who is gutless could have survived as you have. You are fire. Now burn him with it.”
I nodded again and hugged him briefly. He stiffened but didn’t push me away. Vyr and I were similar in that we were trying to hide what lurked inside us. He had his own demons to hold back, but I saw him fighting them every day. Vivian did more for him than she could ever know, but I was alone in my fight. I’d always thought I was okay with that. But as Vyr led me back to the gr
oup, I would have given anything to have someone in my corner the way she was in his.
Just this one time.
3
Mona
“You will speak now?” Wohn asked suspiciously.
Vyr looked at the ceiling with a frustrated scowl. “She will. Alone.” Tahk opened his mouth and Vyr growled a low menacing sound that lifted the hairs all over my arms. “Alone.”
Vyr’s tone brooked no argument. Tahk swallowed his frustration and looked at Uthyf. The bastard took his sweet time answering the unspoken question, his eyes searing into the side of my face. I refused to meet them.
“Very well,” Uthyf finally said.
I sighed but felt only a little relief. It would help if so many people weren’t present, but I knew Uthyf was the major player in my anxiety.
I didn’t know him well. But we clashed the few times we spoke. There was just something about him that rubbed me the wrong way.
He wouldn’t show me an ounce of compassion. He would demand more and more from me until I cracked wide open. I preferred Tahk to him, but I knew Uthyf needed to hear it and one of them was better than two, regardless of who it was.
I could tell some of them wanted to argue, but slowly the Dahk left until it was only Uthyf, Vyr, Vivian, and Tahk in the room. Tahk looked between Uthyf and me, then he eventually followed Peyton out. Vivian tried to grab my hand as she passed, but I side-stepped her. She didn’t bother to hide her wounded look, and I didn’t bother to hide how little I cared. She could have warned me. If she wouldn’t stand beside me, she could have prepared me before dragging me here.
Vyr went to leave and I made an embarrassing sound of distress in the back of my throat. He stopped and looked at me with those bottomless eyes.
I let out a shaky breath. “Please?”
He looked at Uthyf and nodded shortly, but Vyr didn’t stay close. He relaxed against the wall by the door with his arms folded and his head tipped back.
His presence was a comfort. I didn’t know how I knew, but if anyone here could understand what I’d gone through, it was him. Or Olynth. Olynth had been through something similar, only for far longer than me. But he wasn’t here, and most days he was too scary to approach. Too closed off. I could relate. Vyr though … he may not have been chained and tortured as I or the other girls had been, but he knew. He was one of them after all. A Juldo. And he had saved me. He could have grabbed Vivian and run, but he had stayed. He and the assassin—the assassin who had left me to that hell all that time ago—had brutally slaughtered all the Juldo guarding us. They both had saved us.
Borv and Jyn hadn’t wanted to at first that day. I had heard them arguing about what Uthyf would have wanted as I huddled like a frightened cat locked in a cage. Vyr had intervened and forced their hand. As had Vivian. But she wasn’t standing beside me as I’d thought she would. Vyr was, and for now, that had to be enough.
Uthyf nodded impatiently toward a chair at the table, and I walked to it slowly. So very slowly. Every second felt like my last breath.
Uthyf leaned against the table while I sat, towering over me. It was an interrogation tactic, and I loathed him for it. Did he really think I deserved to be treated like the Dahk he locked away in the bowels of the castle? Did he really think of me as a criminal? It hurt more than I would ever admit.
“W-where do I start?”
Uthyf pondered my question. The silence made me sweat. “Start with the Shadow Born. You spoke of him to Veeveen.”
I bit my cheek. I couldn’t believe all this time she had been telling them the few things I’d said to her while locked in that cage. Not without asking me first. I would have agreed, anything to avoid me having to speak the words, but it would have been nice to know I was being dissected like a sideshow.
“What about him?” I didn’t want to talk about this. It felt like peeling away layers of my skin with a razor.
Uthyf glowered at me, making me feel two feet tall. “What experiments was the master practicing?”
I choked on the horror of images those words brought forth. “Bad things.”
“Mohna, I will not tolerate your evasion much longer,” Uthyf growled and leaned down close to me, his silver eyes searing me, his fangs bared in fury.
“I-I never saw. Not all of it. Didn’t you ask them?” Why was I the only one under interrogation? There were twenty of us who could have told them, two of them still in the castle.
“Yes. Their minds were too fractured to make sense of it.”
I laughed a sad, disbelieving sound. “Fractured? You have no idea.” I shook my head in erratic spurts. “You have no idea what these questions do to a person who experienced what we have.”
“No, human, what they do to you. The others did not refuse to answer.”
I didn’t believe that. Not once did Katrina tell me they were interrogating her. She would have told me. “It’s not like that. I’m not refusing.”
“What is this then? Why do you make it so difficult? The others did not spend so much time on Juldoris. They did not see and hear what you have.”
“I—” I hated that he was right. Most of them hadn’t left that macabre throne room. Most of them had barely spent a few weeks there. Unlike me. But there were a few of them, a few that had experienced the master’s horrific experiments. “I didn’t see as much of the lab room like they did. H-he didn’t do all those things to me.”
“What things? The others were drugged. They did not see what was done to them. They only remember the pain after waking confined once more.”
“Can’t Gryo tell you? He was our healer after Tahk brought us here. What did he tell you was done to them?” Gryo would have known, would have seen the damage. I couldn’t stand to draw up the memories. The things they had done to the others, to Roxanne … it was too much to look back on.
Uthyf crouched at my side and gripped the table and side of my chair. The marble creaked under his grip. “He told us of the incisions. He told us what was done to their wombs.”
I blinked back heavy tears. Oh god, I couldn’t talk about this. “I don’t know exactly what he did. I just s-saw the room once and the b-blood.” Lie. I saw Roxanne. I saw her once.
“You know why,” he whispered, deathly quiet. “Why did he dissect their wombs?”
My stomach cramped tight. “The assassin, he … he can create a Shadow Born. The master, he thought it had something to do with our compatibility with so many different species. He thought we were the key to creating more like the assassin.”
It was why he raped me. He tried to impregnate me. The joke was on him though. My father had taken away that ability after a particularly bad beating years ago.
Uthyf stood and looked at Vyr. “It is as we thought.”
“It cannot be done,” Vyr replied blandly, still looking at the large room’s domed ceiling.
“Maybe so, but if he is attempting it, that is enough cause for concern.”
Vyr shook his head. “He cannot.”
“How can you be sure?” Uthyf insisted.
Vyr didn’t answer.
Uthyf glared at him but Vyr didn’t react. He acted like Uthyf hadn’t said a word.
“I need to know everything,” Uthyf growled at me. “Every word he said to you. Leave out nothing.”
I stared at him, unseeing. No way could I tell him everything. It couldn’t possibly be relevant, not all of it.
Vyr was suddenly next to me. “Start from the beginning, Mona.”
I swallowed the sickly taste in my mouth. “Everything?”
Vyr crouched. “We cannot know if it is relevant unless you share it with us.”
I didn’t know why Vyr was suddenly so invested in dissecting the master’s plans. Uthyf had been trying to get Vyr to aid them for weeks. He hadn’t budged. Why now?
I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes tightly. If I was going to do this, I couldn’t look at either of them. The problem was, the images behind my closed eyes were damaging. I didn’t know what was w
orse: remembering everything or seeing their reactions as I shared it all.
“I was asleep,” I whispered, my lips numb and my chest tight. “Something shocked me. It hurt a lot. It woke me up, but I was in too much pain to stop them. Then I fell asleep again. When I woke up again, I was on a ship. It was bad there.”
“Did you see the master on the ship?”
“No, not until Juldoris.”
“Did you remain there throughout your captivity?” Uthyf asked in that detached voice I loathed so much.
“No, I traveled with him.” I couldn’t feel my fingers. I couldn’t feel anything.
“Where?”
“To the slave camps. The gaming grounds.”
“Where else?” Uthyf asked again.
I crossed my arms tightly. “Other planets. To Hugund.”
“He took you to the Council’s outpost?” Uthyf asked, shocked.
I nodded quickly. I knew why it was so shocking. How had the Council not known? How had they not intervened? I was a human. Supposedly, off limits. The Galactic Council should have at the very least reprimanded him after they saw me chained beside him like an animal. But they hadn’t. The one member I had met had not been impressed with me or the master’s fascination with me. He hadn’t cared after the master threw me at him. I blocked out the memory. I wouldn’t be sharing it with them unless they asked. I would not relive that hell unless absolutely necessary.
“Did you remain caged?” Vyr asked gently.
I shook my head. “No, I was in his room or by his side most of the time.”
“You slept in his chamber?” Uthyf didn’t bother to hide his disgust.
“I wasn’t exactly given a choice,” I spat, glaring at him.
He ignored my ire. “Did you try to escape?”
I felt weighed down, unable to hold my shoulders back. “Yes,” I said so quietly I barely heard myself. “At first.” I’d learned quickly how stupid that was. My back bore the scars to remind me.
“Tell him, Mona.” Vyr was farther away again. Distancing himself from the horror of his own kind.
