“What are you doing?” I ask, as he squats in front of me and loosens the zipper on my trousers.
He doesn’t look up or answer until he’s also cut my trousers off, leaving me stretched in front of him in my underwear.
He straightens and moves in closer to me, running the tip of his knife up my stomach between my breasts until it rests pointing just under my chin.
“Did you know, Scarlet, I’m not completely immune to this unfinished mating bond you have. It makes things a lot harder for me than they should be. If I could, I would force you to mate with me, completely ruining your life forever by tying you to me. You’re lucky that decision isn’t mine to make.” He draws each word out, practically purring them at me.
“And just who is this mysterious person that’s pulling your strings? You don’t seem like the kind of person to do someone else’s dirty work.”
“You’re right, I’m no one’s puppet. Let’s just say there is someone else interested in you. Right now, I’m the only one standing in their way. You want me here as long as you can, because this person makes me look like a fluffy bunny.”
He moves his knife back down to my bra when it clinks slightly against the stone nestled there. His eyes fly up to meet mine.
Shit!
“You’ve been keeping things from me haven’t you, Scarlet,” he says rather gently as he reaches into my bra and extracts the stone.
“If you hadn’t dragged me straight down here for your little torture session you’d already have the stone, and your answers,” I say, spitting the words at him vehemently.
“Don’t backchat me right now, it won’t go well for you. I suggest you start telling me what you’ve been up to the last two days.” He pockets the stone and moves over to a sink.
As he pulls a bucket into the sink and starts to fill it with water, I begin to tell him the story that may possibly lead to my end.
“Firstly, I found the stone you’ve had me hunting. Lykos had it and handed it over—”
“Just like that?” He eyes me from the sink.
“Yes, just like that. You going to keep interrupting me?”
“By all means, do carry on,” he says as he walks back over, placing the bucket of water near my feet.
“The power of the stone has already been used to create the Lycans, it has a spark left in it of some kind, so you might be able to use that,” I say, hopefully.
“I think we need to start this from the beginning, I get a feeling you’ve been keeping things from me. Your answers and reports are far too short. I’ve given you leeway in hopes you’ll bring me what I want and, instead, you bring me a worthless opal.”
I don’t reply, I know he’s got me. The minute he asks me to, I know I’ll have to tell him everything, which means if Bastian and Aylesbury aren’t ready with their plan, I could be putting them in danger.
He bends down and picks up the bucket, before I even register what he’s doing I’m covered from head to foot in freezing cold water.
“What was that for?” I say as I shake.
“You need to know this, Scarlet. I only answer your questions because I like you and can use you. The only reason I’m answering you right now is because knowing what I’m about to do will heighten your fear and make you more compliant.
“I need your skin bare and wet, because when I whip it with a cane, the pain will be a lot worse. Now, if I don’t like any of your answers you won’t like what happens to you next. It will be a hell of a lot worse.”
Oh hell.
He moves over to the same rack he plucked the knife from earlier and pulls out a length of wood about an inch thick, its edges are perfectly square. I eye them, knowing just how painful this is going to be.
He brings the wood up and smashes it against my side. I try to flinch away but can’t due to the chains. My skin instantly sears with pain, a pain more acute than the one the oath causes.
“Well, that is interesting,” he says, moving over to inspect where he hit me.
“What is?” I ask, through gritted teeth, as I suck in air to even out the pain.
“It looks like you’re no longer healing as quickly as you were,” he says, a smile playing on his lips.
Well, hell. That is the last thing I need, I rather liked this instant healing I’d contracted from Bastian.
He whips me a few more times, then says, “I want a complete report of your time, not every second, but know that if you disobey me, I’ll leave you writhing in pain until you’re on the brink of death. Then, I’ll make you do it all again.”
I tell him how I managed to secure the scrolls from the archives, I even tell him what the queen said, including the things I never told Bastian. My mouth moves on autopilot like I have no choice but to answer, even knowing that when he knows everything I might no longer be useful.
I start to tell him about the ball but get sidetracked. “If you’re so annoyed that I’ve taken your precious Bryn out of the picture, then why didn’t he know I was working for you?”
He doesn’t reply, instead, he fills the bucket up and throws the water over me, starting his little session over again until he says, “Carry on.”
It takes me quite a few minutes to gather my thoughts back together after feeling the last smack of the wood blistering and splitting open my skin. I want to refuse to tell him, but the words begin pouring out of me like some sort of verbal sickness. I explain how I found Aylesbury and the others when he cuts me off.
“How is he alive, no living being could have survived those wounds. Tell me how he survived?”
“He’s special.”
“Stop evading and tell me!” he says, moving closer to me, his hand grabbing my jaw and holding it in a tight grip.
“He’s an Omega,” I tell him, mentally berating myself for giving up my brother so easily.
“I have no idea what that is,” he says, pulling away.
“Neither do I,” I say, surprised at the words, but essentially, I suppose that is the truth.
He lets me continue, and while he doesn’t interrupt again, the violence on his face speaks volumes when I mention Bastian and tell him about the stone.
He pulls the stone out of his pocket and inspects it. I watch as the insufficient basement lights hit the milky surface and make the colors hidden away inside flash intensely. He turns the stone over in his hand then pins me with narrowed eyes.
“You swore to do everything I asked, so I ask you now to confirm you are telling the truth?”
“I have told you the truth,” I tell him, my gaze locking onto his.
He looks at the stone once more and throws it across the room with enough force that it bounces off the wall and makes its way to the middle of the room before its stops moving. He stalks back over to me and grabs my chin in a punishing grip.
“You may have told me the truth and completed your task, but I’m nowhere near finished with you. While I leave you here bloodied from your punishment, I want you to think about how long it’s going to take before the blood you’ve drank wears off. Once it does, think about how much pain you’ll be in for breaking my oath.
“I’m going to leave you like that, writhing in pain for days, and at the very last minute, I’ll make the pain stop, and we can start this whole process all over again.” The threat in his words is as real as the pain from his tight grip on my jaw.
He pulls his hand away and slaps me, my vision swims again, but I still hear his parting words as he moves up the creaking stairs.
“Your friends won’t get to you, I’m well aware they plan to kill me to get you back. They won’t succeed, they’ll be taken out before your punishment renews.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
I hang from the chains for a while, trying my hardest to pull against the metal in hopes of loosening a link in the chain, or pulling the mount out of the ceiling, none of that works. I start to wish I had superhuman strength again.
The wounds from the wood he used to whip me aren’t closing at all,
I’m clearly back to my normal healing pattern of a few days. I can’t help wondering why I’d suddenly lose that ability. Rozen had only mentioned my mating bond a short while ago, so it is clearly still there. I’m pretty sure Miranda had told me the bond would only get stronger, not disappear.
After a few hours of straining against the metal cuffs, my wrists begin to sting and drip blood. I give up and just let myself hang there. As my sliced wrists take the brunt of my weight, I begin to drift in and out of consciousness. In my more lucid moments, I’m no longer sure how long I’ve been here.
I wake when my stomach starts turning itself in knots from hunger, which means I’ve probably been down here around eight hours or so. With nothing else to do with my time I inspect the basement again, hoping to find a miracle way out.
The light from the small Fae lantern embedded in the ceiling shows me most of what is kept down here, which is not much. There is a large sink against one wall to my left, the tap hasn’t quite been shut off properly, so it drips continuously. The bucket he used to saturate me is abandoned on its side a few feet from me. To my back I know there is nothing but bare wall, I noticed that detail as he clamped me in the chains.
To my right are the rickety old wooden stairs, and in front of me is the rack that holds various implements: a sickle, lengths of wood and chain, various knives, and a leather satchel. The rack is shoved up far against the wall, it’s not like I can reach anything in the place with both my hands and feet chained to the floor though.
I huff out a sigh until I feel the building of a different type of pain in my temple, a familiar ache that usually means I am breaking the oath. I must have been out longer than I thought. The last lot of blood worked for nearly two days.
The pain builds slowly until I can no longer feel the burning in my wrists or the trickle of blood down my arms. It soon outshines the sting in my skin where it was split apart when whipped.
“Rozen!” I shout, knowing the more pain I feel, the less coherent I’ll be.
“Rozen!”
I know he won’t be far, he’ll have been waiting for this moment, the exact point where the pain breaks me.
I thrash against my bonds, probably causing more damage.
I don’t care.
The pain no longer comes in waves, it courses through my entire body inside and out, it’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before. This is the pain of a broken oath, a pain that is actually killing me.
“Rozen! Please!” I scream over and over.
His name becomes my lifeline until it’s my only thought.
Rozen.
I try to say it one last time, but I don’t hear my voice. Instead the pain consumes me, and I succumb to it, letting the darkness claim me one final time.
I find myself floating on a sea of lava, my body burning from the outside in. I know I’m not dead yet, but I think I’ve gone mindless from the agony. There is no basement anymore, no Rozen to help me, just the searing agony and visions of things that make no sense.
I drift in and out of consciousness. When I’m out, I’m in strange places being tortured, and when I’m awake the torment continues.
I chant his name over and over, he’s my lifeline, without him, I die.
Rozen, Rozen, Rozen.
He becomes my entire world.
Rozen!
Until I succumb to the madness again.
I think I’m awake again because the pain is somehow worse, hands are grabbing me, but they don’t soothe the suffering. Where skin touches skin my body bleeds pain. I want the hands to stop, to move away. I have no voice.
Rozen.
They mumble words and make sounds I can’t understand.
The movements shatter the pain and make it bloom in different places.
“Pass her to—”
“—can’t—”
“—don’t and she will die”
The skin that renders my flesh is gone and replaced with a sensation I can feel beyond the pain.
The searing torture eases at the touch of warm hands but it does not recede.
“Try and take her from me one more time, Lycan, and she dies,” a voice threatens near my ear.
“Just kill him. She’ll be fine then; the oath will be broken,” a familiar tone breaks through the madness.
“You can’t, the damage has already been done, if you’d have let me get to her sooner this wouldn’t have happened.”
The hands lessen the pain, but not by much, they glide along my exposed skin and pull me tighter to their owner.
“You will break the oath now or you die either way,” another voice roars.
I want to slam hands over my ears, but I can’t move. Someone is holding me. This must be him, Rozen. My world, my life.
“Rozen,” I whisper.
Another deafening sound pierces my ears, the sound like the howl of a beast going mad with rage.
“I can’t do it until she’s back, if I do it now she’ll be like this forever.”
The skin soothes the daggers that slice my skin and I sink into their embrace. I ignore the insignificant sounds of the others and drift into oblivion as the contact soothes me.
“Red, I really need you to wake up now,” Aylesbury’s voice rouses me from the comfort of sleep.
I stretch my body and wince at how sore I am. I open my eyes and the light streaming in the window nearly blinds me.
“Take it easy, wench, you’ve been out for a long time,” Bastian tells me, as I shut my eyes against the blinding light and grab my aching head.
Hell! How much did I have to drink last night? No, that’s wrong, I wasn’t drinking. I was being tortured in the basement. I sit up and start to scramble to the edge of the bed in blind panic when a set of arms come around me and pull me back to their chest.
“I don’t think so, darlin’, you’re not fully healed yet,” Rozen whispers in my ear.
Eyes wide now, I see I’m in a bed with Rozen, he is holding me close to his naked chest, and I’m really hoping he is wearing clothes under the covers. Aylesbury is sat on the edge of the bed looking rather concerned. I try to pull away from Rozen when I see Bastian pacing furiously at the end of the bed. There is also another man and woman in the room, the woman is at the door, the man at the window, I don’t recognize either of them.
He stops his pacing to say, “Not just yet, Scarlet. As much as it pains me to say this, you need him right now.”
I swing my gaze back to Rozen and narrow my eyes.
“Who wants to explain to me why I’m in my underwear in a bed with Rozen,” I say, trying for menacing, instead it comes out croaky and pathetic.
“Be careful, precious, you’re still under oath,” Rozen tells me before clamping a chained arm around my torso to hold me securely to him.
I sigh. “What went wrong with your plan,” I ask Bastian, the headache begins to double, and the onset of a now familiar pain begins to start.
“You need to break the oath, now,” Aylesbury says as I clutch my skull again.
Bastian grabs a sword and points it at Rozen, he doesn’t move or release his grip on me so I can move away.
“Don’t kill him, I need him,” I grit out through the building pain.
“Let me try to break the oath again,” Rozen asks.
“Fine,” Bastian growls. “If it doesn’t work this time, you die, no second chances.”
Aylesbury passes Rozen a very small knife. I just hope the chains they have around Rozen are good because he can still easily kill me, even with that tiny knife. Bastian passes him chalky liquid and he dips the knife in. Rozen cuts his palm then cuts my own, quickly grasping them both together as soon as the blood starts to flow.
“I rescind the blood oath I previously swore,” he tells me.
How are they getting him to willingly agree to this?
“You need to repeat the words, Scarlet,” Rozen says as I sit there looking dumbfounded at our clasped hands.
“I rescind the blood oath I previously swore
,” I repeat back to them.
Rozen lets go of my hand as Bastian drags me away from him to the edge of the bed.
“Do you feel any different?” Bastian asks as he makes sure I’m capable of sitting on my own.
My head still throbs, although not as bad. But other than that, I feel no different to what I did a few minutes ago.
“No,” I reply, looking at Rozen. I can now see his arms are chained to the wall and, while he can move them so far, he won’t be able to move from the bed at all.
“How do we tell if it’s worked?” Aylesbury actually asks Rozen. What the Hell?
“Scarlet, do you want to kill me?” Rozen asks the simple question.
“Yes,” I answer honestly, I still fear the pain and what refusing his questions would do to me.
All three of them watch me, their silence unnerving.
“Any pain?” Aylesbury asks.
“No more or less than I was in a few seconds ago.” Has this actually worked?
“Rozen, command her to do something? Scarlet, I want you to refuse,” Bastian orders, using his ‘I’m the dominant one’ voice.
“Take your underwear off, Scarlet,” Rozen asks with a smirk.
Bastian growls as I reply. “I am not stripping out of the only coverage I’m wearing right now thank you very much.”
We all wait again, and nothing else happens. I sigh with relief. I’m free.
Bastian lunges for Rozen, wrapping his hands around his throat.
“Bastian, stop, I need him,” I tell him as I grab his arm and start pulling him away.
He doesn’t move his hands, but he does turn to face me, his dark blue eyes flashing with wrath.
“You don’t need him anymore, so he dies,” he growls at me.
“I need answers. If you kill him, it could put me in even more danger,” I beg him.
He narrows his eyes then releases him. He jumps off the bed and stalks to the door.
Sacrifice Page 14