Vail knew of his nickname, of the things whispered about him in all the realms, the horror stories people told of him and the threats they used on their offspring. Go to bed or the mad elf prince will come for you. He knew of what they called him and he despised them all for it.
If he were mad, it was not by choice, and it was not something he wanted. He wanted… something far beyond his reach. He wanted the impossible, and that made him weak. Vulnerable. Forgiveness would never be his, and neither would salvation, but no matter how many times he had tried to purge the tiny fragment of light that remained in his soul, the small seed of hope, it had refused to die.
“You see… I got a good look at the man who helped King Thorne kill my brother,” Bruan said over Vail’s rumbling growl. “I was fighting Prince Loren at the time the Third King took Frayne’s head… and you look too much like him to be anyone else. So your charade ends here, and I have devised a new plan. I will ransom you to your brother in exchange for the assistance of the elves in my new war.”
Vail laughed at him, wiping the smile off his ugly face and replacing it with confusion. “My brother will not pay for my return… he despises me. Did you not know that I have been at war with him since long before you were born? The prince you desire to gain assistance from would sooner see me dead than align his army with yours.”
Bruan’s expression turned flat and unreadable, his green eyes impassive and giving nothing away.
“It is not so.” The demon king bent and picked up the discarded green and black metal torc, rolling it over in his hands. “I have heard your brother is searching for you. Do you not know your brother hunts for you even now?”
“To kill me.”
Bruan laughed, the booming sound echoing around the hall. “Foolish male. If I have learned anything about the older brothers of this realm, it is that they would never kill a younger sibling, one which they would have sworn to protect from the day of their birth. If your brother hunts you, then it is for no other purpose than reuniting with you.”
Vail shook his head.
“You forget, we are not born of this realm.” He narrowed his eyes on the demon king and smiled, gathering every ounce of his anger and pain into a tempest within him, one that the demon would see in his gaze. One that would tell this fool that his plot would end in ruin.
Vail would never play the role assigned to him. His brother would never set foot in this kingdom and he would somehow make sure of it. He would keep his brother safe, even if he had to take his own life to achieve it. Loren would feel the connection between them die. He would know what had happened to him and he would not be fooled by this mad demon king.
“Loren would see me dead, and the feeling is mutual,” Vail spat at the male and snarled, flashing the tips of his fangs as his ears grew more pointed, a physical sign of the aggression surging through him, the darkness that coaxed him into goading the demon into killing him. He would ensure his brother’s safety and deliver himself into death’s embrace. “I would see my brother dead before he could raise a hand to harm me. I would act to defend myself and then what alliance would you have? If you even so much as send word to my brother of my location… if you interfere in our war… in my fight… I will kill every single warrior in this castle and then I will kill you.”
King Bruan growled at him, his powerful body rippling as his eyes blazed green fire and his enormous black dragon-like wings burst from his bare back.
“You dare to order me? You dare to threaten me?” The huge demon male grasped Vail’s collar and dragged him off his feet, leaving them dangling above the dark flagstones. He was growing, his muscles expanding as his true form emerged, turning his visage dark and demonic. “A male such as you needs to be taught humility with an iron fist. You will learn to hold your forked tongue. You will learn your place. I will have submission beaten into you and then we shall speak again.”
Darkness welled up inside Vail, thick and inky, violent like a tempest swirling through his blood and igniting his fury. He snarled at the demon king, the thought of being taken back to the torture chamber shoving him over the edge into the abyss.
The beast within him rose to the fore, baring his fangs at the male who dared to threaten him, who sought to control him just as Kordula had done—with pain and punishment, stripping him of his pride and his strength. He would not let this male do such a thing to him. He would not submit to anyone.
Never again.
Vail roared and fought to lift his arms, his broken nails becoming claws as his muscles strained against the bonds that held him. The demon king dropped him and shifted back a step, signalling to the guards at the same time. One struck him across the side of his head but it didn’t stop him. He arched backwards, using every drop of his strength on the cuffs, and unleashed a victorious snarl as the chain snapped free.
He turned hard, throwing one guard off balance, sending him toppling to the ground, and lashed out at the second one. The larger male struck him again, the blow coming faster than he could evade while the magic in his restraints dampened his powers.
Vail growled, baring his bloodied fangs, clasped his hands together and swung them up in a brutal diagonal arc. They smashed into the side of the male’s face and he staggered sideways, towards the other demon now back on his feet.
He prepared himself to attack him.
Pain splintered across his knees, the force and speed of the thick pole slamming into them shattering his kneecaps and fracturing the joints of his femurs. An inferno blazed up his bones and he cried out his agony as he dropped to his knees on the flagstones. He bent over, his face buried in his cuffed hands as he fought the pain, struggling to catch his breath as it overwhelmed him, threatening to shut his body down and send him tumbling into unconsciousness. He had to remain awake.
He had to fight.
Not only for his sake, but for his brother’s.
He needed to kill the demon king.
Vail pressed his hands into the cold stones and pushed himself up, slowly and carefully so as not to worsen the spinning in his aching mind. He had to hold it together. He would not let these wretched demons overpower him.
King Bruan loomed over him, the thick shiny silver pole hanging from his right hand and the torc still clutched in his left. Vail’s legs burned, the agony numbing them but not enough for him not to sense that they were useless. In one blow, this male had defeated him. He growled, cursing himself. Hating himself.
The male laughed. “I had thought it would be more difficult to drive you into submission. Weak male.”
Vail snarled and gritted his teeth so hard his fangs cut into his gums. He gathered his strength and pushed himself up, forcing himself onto his feet. His knees gave out again, slamming him back onto the unforgiving stone flags, sending more pain tearing through him, more fire that consumed every inch of him and stripped away more of his strength. He refused to give up, pushing back onto his feet and trying again. Failing again.
The demon king watched him the whole time, through every failure, laughing at him. Mocking him with his weakness.
After his sixth attempt to stand on his broken legs, the last of his strength left him and all he could do was kneel before the king, sweat pouring off him and his heart labouring. Little Wild Rose would feel it. She would know his pain, and she would know his weakness.
King Bruan hefted the silver bar in his right hand. The two demon males grabbed Vail’s shoulders and he tried to fight them, wrestled with the last drops of his strength, but it was futile. His throat closed and weight pressed down on his chest, squeezing his heart and lungs. He was weak. Vulnerable. With one blow, this demon king had stripped him of his strength and his pride.
He had humiliated him.
Bruan cracked the bar across the side of Vail’s head, the blow connecting hard and sending him lurching to his right. His vision swam and the sound of their laughter distorted in his ears. He growled and struggled to sit up again, but made no progress.
All he
could do was bite out words in the elf tongue. “If I had my armour… if I were not enslaved… I swear by the gods I would kill you all. I would butcher you all!”
The demon guards released him and the king struck his head again, the blow splintering bone and sending him crashing to the floor. He coughed up blood and fought to remain conscious, battling the agony searing every break in his bones like lightning.
A voice within whispered to let go and allow the darkness to take him. He longed for oblivion to claim him, to steal away the pain and the world. The humiliation. He wanted to escape it.
He wanted to forget it all.
Kordula danced through his buzzing skull. She loomed over him, her crimson lips moving but her words too quiet to hear above the ringing in his ears. Her icy blue eyes slowly bled into crimson that matched the colour of her hair. She touched his face, black fingernails pressing deep into his flesh, drawing blood. Her countenance darkened, her power flowing through him and seizing control of his body, stripping away his strength. He fought her but he wasn’t strong enough to stop her, and the end result was always the same.
Whether he did as she asked, destroying lives and spilling blood, or denied her. It always ended in punishment.
She dropped her hand to his chest and his armour peeled away, leaving him exposed. He tried to fight her hold on him, mentally begged her to stop and leave him be. He had done what she had asked. He had slaughtered an entire village. Not only the males. He had brutally killed the women and their offspring too. He had bathed his claws in blood for her. Was that not enough?
Her nails raked down his chest and he shuddered, not because she had hurt him but because of the softness of her caress. He could take her punishing him, torturing him, but he couldn’t take this. He tried to raise his hands, bared his fangs at the thought of wrapping them around her throat and squeezing the life out of her. She clucked her tongue and pressed her palms against his chest, and gave him the worst form of punishment.
She kissed him.
And all he could do was let his consciousness slip away and bury himself deep, detaching himself from the situation and what was to come, and to pretend it wasn’t happening again.
He wasn’t strong enough to fight her.
The demon king was right.
He was weak.
He hadn’t been strong in a long time. He wasn’t sure he knew how to be strong anymore.
“Take him to the rack and continue our lesson in humility.” Those words shattered the hold the pain and the memories had on him, dragging him back to the cold hopelessness of reality.
He wrestled with the last of his strength, desperate and crazed, driven wild by one thought as the demon guards hauled him away from the king, taking him to the torture chamber. It wasn’t the knowledge of what awaited him in that room that sent him out of his mind, maddening him. They could do no worse to him than the one who had come before them.
No, it was another more disturbing and distressing thought that had him fighting even as his strength failed him, and filled him with a need to not give up and surrender to them.
They would drag him back to his cell, beaten into submission and no doubt unconscious.
He would pass the cells and Little Wild Rose would see him for what he really was.
A broken, weak and vulnerable male.
CHAPTER 6
Rosalind sat by the bars of her cell, gripping them tightly, her eyes closed and jaw clenched. The crack of the whip echoed down the corridor again, turning her stomach, and the guard dealing the blows that wetly cleaved flesh grunted with frustration once more. The elf made no sound, though she could feel his pain flow through the dungeon, held back and endured in silence.
Why?
Tears burned her eyes. There was no shame in crying out. During her captivity, she had heard the strongest of men break under the torture and the steel whips, lashed by barbs and bled until they passed out.
Her heart pounded and the whip struck again. She swore she felt each strike, each lash of the whip on her body. Pain ran through her, quiet but there, buzzing down her back and over her thighs.
The whip cracked again. She heard flesh give but no cry, no other sign that it had struck its target and rent another gash in the elf’s body.
Rosalind tightened her grip on the thick steel bars, clinging to them so fiercely that her knuckles blazed white and her bones ached. Anger boiled within her, a seething need to do something even when she was powerless to act on her rage. Her magic was bound. The only thing she could do was endure, just as he did, and hope.
Hope that they would bring her to heal him.
She had cursed him, hated him with a force that had shocked her, when he had called her by another’s name, but when they had led him past her, she had known only pity for him.
He had walked with his head bent, his eyes cast downwards, and she had seen his shame in them. They had stripped him of his pride.
Silence finally fell, the strange sensation of pain in her fading as her heart settled at last. Had they stopped?
She craned her neck, needing to see along the corridor to her right, but couldn’t find an angle that would permit her to see all the way to the end of it.
What seemed like hours later, the same two guards who had marched him from his cell appeared again, not holding the elf by his arms but dragging him by his ankles. They had stripped him bare, leaving not a stitch on him and no shred of dignity, and they had done it on purpose. They meant to degrade him completely.
The tears stinging her eyes wobbled on her lashes, hot and fierce, as they dragged him past her. His arms stretched out above his head, the manacles holding his wrists clanking on the flagstones and his head jogging around as it hit the gaps between each stone. A river of blood, red and stark, followed in his wake.
Her gaze widened and she covered her mouth, stifling a wave of sickness when she saw the deep lacerations criss-crossing his bare chest and arms, and cutting deep grooves in his thighs. His head bounced off another gap and lolled towards her, his firm bloodied lips parting. She stared at his mouth in horror.
His fangs.
Mother earth.
They had ripped out his fangs.
Rosalind reacted on instinct, stretching her arms between the bars towards him, her fingers barely brushing his before he slipped beyond her reach.
She sagged against the steel bars, her right temple pressing into them and her arms laying on the floor of the corridor, one in a smear of his blood that also coated the chain between her cuffs. She would make the demons pay for their cruelty. He had done nothing to deserve such punishment. Mother earth, she would make them pay.
One day.
But for now, all she could do was sit and wait, and plot.
She shuffled back into the corner, as far from the bars of her cell as she could get, and huddled into it. She smoothed her tattered black dress over her knees, hugged them to her chest with the chain between her cuffs dangling across them, and rested her chin on them. The guards would come for her. They would bring her to heal him. Until then, she would wait in silence, saving her energy, the strength he had given her with his gift of blood.
She would bestow that same gift upon him.
She wasn’t strong enough to fight these demons without her magic, but he was strong enough to fight them without his psychic powers. She would make him strong.
Her eyes slipped shut and she forced them open again, unwilling to succumb to the lure of sleep. Sleep didn’t bring her the rest she needed. It only brought her pain, a horrific replay of the war and a parade of the souls she had destroyed in that single dark night.
Rosalind held her knees tighter and rocked, trying to focus on other things. Her garden would be overgrown by now. She would have her work cut out for her when she returned to her cottage. Many of her clients would be angry with her too. They were waiting for the potions they had ordered. She would have to apologise to them all.
Perhaps the demon king Thorne had been kind
enough to somehow tell them what had happened to her, if he didn’t think her dead that was. So many had died in the war. So many lives snuffed out. Rivers of blood had run across the black ground.
Her eyes slipped shut again and the nightmare swallowed her, devoured her with sharp teeth that tore at her flesh and crunched her bones. Broken hands grasped her, missing flesh in places, and she fought them as they pulled at her clothes, tearing them from her body and leaving her exposed. They clawed at her, lacerating her flesh, leaving long red marks criss-crossing her body.
They grabbed her wrists and pulled her down into the endless darkness, into a vivid replay of the battle that had left a terrible scar on her soul. She saw herself killing, saw the faces of her victims this time, witnessed how her magic tore them to pieces and shattered their bodies, killing them in the most painful ways imaginable. She clawed at her hair and screamed for it to stop, but no sound passed her lips. With every death she dealt, her heart grew blacker, the darkness in it spreading.
Until she called on all that death and darkness, reaching beyond the grave to the other side.
Rosalind shot awake, her heart racing and breath sawing from her lungs. She ran trembling hands over her matted blonde hair, pulling it back from her face, and forced herself to take in her surroundings. Tears blurred her vision and she blinked them away. She was in her cell. It shouldn’t have been a comfort to her, but it had become one. She was in her cell and her power was locked inside her, beyond her reach.
She couldn’t kill anyone without it.
She couldn’t destroy another life.
She couldn’t take another step closer to the darkness.
She rocked back and forth, slowly purging the effects of the nightmare. How long had she been unconscious, trapped inside a twisted replay of her past?
There were five clay bowls outside her cell. Five feedings of disgusting and questionable slop meant two and a half days.
It had been two and a half days and the demons hadn’t come for her. Because she had threatened that the elf could heal himself next time?
Tempted by a Rogue Prince Page 6