by Liz Meldon
When they finally had everything unbolted, Severus nudged Alaric out of the way and yanked the lead door open. The moment he stepped inside, the assault on his senses was instantaneous—and strong.
There was a palpable temperature difference between the outside hall and the interior of the room. While it took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the ceiling’s pod lights, far brighter than the torches illuminating the corridor, when Severus could see, he wished he couldn’t. His breath rapidly fogged in front of him, and he came to an abrupt halt, feeling like his legs just couldn’t move anymore. Shock. It was utter shock at the sight before him.
For there was Moira, strung up, crucified on an invisible cross, her arms stretched wide by chains embedded in the walls. His inner demon fell silent as he drank her in, starting at the layers upon layers of pearl strands wrapped around her ankles, tight enough to keep her bound. Old blood smeared across her legs, having dried as it streaked down from a wound he couldn’t yet see. Her nudity had his hands in tight fists, her ethereal skin aglow in the frigid underground cage.
Up, up, up his gaze traveled—stopping at her breasts. Someone had pierced them, with two sizeable gold rods plunged through her nipples, a delicate strand of braided gold hanging between them, connecting them. Time seemed to stop the longer he studied her.
Demons were accustomed to horror—but that didn’t mean they felt nothing when it was those they cherished most at the end of the torturer’s rod. Severus wanted to turn and run, to look away, blink hard, try the door again as if that might change things. But he couldn’t. He had to see it all. He needed the image of her burned into the forefront of his mind—to fuel his rage, to power his vengeance.
Like Diriel’s, her neck dripped with dozens of silver and gold necklaces, pearl accents throughout, crosses at the ends of some. Her head hung low—until Severus’s gaze swept across the thick braided crown of hair around it. Slowly, Moira looked up, with noticeable difficulty, her lips blue, her eyelashes frozen.
Tears sliced through the frostbite on her cheeks the moment their eyes met.
A weeping angel—she’d turned her cage cold.
The sound of crashing behind forced him into action. Severus glanced back briefly to find Alaric smashing a mounted camera against the wall. Cordelia remained in the doorway, breath fogging in front of her in slow, even clouds.
His feet—feet he no longer felt—carried him to Moira, and he cupped her face with both hands. All he wanted to do was touch her, hold her, shield her from all the evils of his world, but he knew better than that. She winced at the feel of his hands on her icy cheeks—she wouldn’t be able to handle the beast inside, what it yearned to do to her now that he had found her.
“Are you all right?” he whispered, then grimaced. What a stupid fucking question. “I’m so sorry, Moira. I—”
“’S my fault,” she murmured, her voice hoarse—Diriel would have made her scream. It shouldn’t surprise him, but Severus had to fight his natural response, his fingertips threatening to dig into her skin. Moira blinked up at him, then swallowed noticeably. “I… It’s my f-fault.”
He stiffened, then grasped her chin tight to get her attention, forcing their eyes to meet. “You listen to me. None of this is your fault, do you understand? None of it. You did nothing to deserve this.”
“I left,” she said, her words like a sigh, her eyelids heavy. “I—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Severus growled, resisting the urge to shake her, if only to make her understand. “Diriel did this, not you. This is not punishment for leaving the house. This is unwarranted savagery. You are blameless, and that’s the end of it, do you understand?” He wiped the falling tears away, his gaze dropping to her blue, trembling lips, wishing he could kiss them back to life. “I’ll kill him. I’ll fucking kill him.”
A slight rustling along the chain connected to Moira’s wrist startled him out of his rage, and he realized he was just standing there, holding her face and glaring at her lips. Fucking useless. Alaric, meanwhile, was trying to wrench the chain out of the wall—trying and failing.
“Move, move aside,” Severus ordered, wrapping both hands around the chain and pulling with all his might. It didn’t pop out of place as easily as he would have liked, his entire body working and working and working to get enough weight behind him, but eventually it snapped. With one side free, Severus ran to the other, applying the same nearly unyielding pressure until it too broke free. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Moira go down. Thankfully Alaric was there to catch her, with Severus at her side seconds later, gently lowering her abused body to the ground.
“Here we are,” he murmured, scanning her for any signs of fresh injury—and fuming at what he found. Two thick, still-healing lines sliced across her shoulder blades, and, even in his current state, straddling the line between crushing Moira against him and storming back to town to rip Diriel’s spine out, he knew precisely why her demon captor had searched there of all places.
He’d wanted to find her wings.
The thought had crossed Severus’s mind too after he’d put all the pieces together and realized that Moira was an angel-human hybrid. Angels’ wings were the pinnacle of magic—the best of the best, and they didn’t lose their power when you plucked them off the source either. He hadn’t been sure if a hybrid would possess such a powerful attribute—and he hadn’t cared. Moira mattered to Severus. Just her. Not her abilities, and certainly not what he could do with them.
It had always been her, just as she was.
Shaking his head, he brought his attention back to where it belonged.
“Someone get these cuffs off,” he snarled, spying Moira’s arms limp at her sides as though unable to lift them. “Cordelia.”
“Take them out,” Moira whispered roughly.
“I know, darling, I know, we’re working on it—”
“No.” Her watery eyes darted to his. “The piercings. Take them out. Please.”
Something glittery caught his eye, and as he brushed back a few loose wisps of her hair, Severus finally noticed all the new piercings along her ears, too. At least ten on the right side, all along the shell of her ear. Diamonds. Rings, studs—the works. He knew, however, that Moira wasn’t referring to those piercings, not from the way her voice broke.
So, as Cordelia crouched on her left side and grabbed her cuffed hand, and Alaric used the knife hidden in his boot to tear through the strands of pearls around her feet, Severus saw to the nipple piercings. Solid gold. Delicate. They would be rather attractive on her—if she had actually wanted them. The expression on her face, the distress in her eyes, the fucking temperature of this room, literally frozen with angelic sorrow, all screamed otherwise.
Teeth gritted, Severus unscrewed the round end of one of the gold bars, working as gently as he could. He could feel her watching, the weight of her stare making him clumsier than he should have been, tugging the nipple more than he wanted. Moira exhaled sharply when he got the first bar out, the sound followed by one of her heavy cuffs falling to the ground. Without a word, the trio rotated around her, Alaric darting out of the way with the strings of pearls removed from her ankles, and Severus climbing over her to see to the left breast as Cordelia moved on to the right shackle.
And Moira sat in the middle of it all, shaking and crying in the most awful silence Severus had ever experienced. The sound of her next gasp wasn’t much better, but at least he had two of her new piercings out, the ones that seemed to bother her the most. With her unshackled, it was time to get the fuck out of here.
“Cordelia, are we still clear? Any of his thugs back?” Severus asked as he shrugged off his knee-length black trench. He’d chosen one with a thick, wintry material earlier, totally out of season, because he had sensed he might need to wrap it around Moira later.
“I can cast another banishing spell before we go up,” his cousin remarked, her teasing edge gone completely.
“Alaric, watch her back.”
&nb
sp; “Yup, on it,” the hybrid said, shooting to his feet and hurrying after Cordelia. As their footfalls faded, Severus placed his thick coat around Moira’s shoulders, and shifted about so he could hoist her up as he stood.
“Wait,” she whispered, rooting through the polaroid pictures scattered around her. He frowned, only noticing them now. Most were facedown, but the few he could see told him he wouldn’t want to see the rest—Moira, in various states of torture. Diriel’s fucking face in a few.
Why would she want to keep any of these?
“Moira—”
“Okay,” she muttered, snatching one polaroid and folding it in half before tucking both arms inside his coat, which practically drowned her it had so much excess fabric. “Please get me out of here.”
She needn’t ask twice. Severus stood and lifted her up in one fluid motion, with an arm under her knees and the other supporting her back. He gave her dungeon a final disgusted sweep—then stormed out.
And neither he nor Moira once looked back.
When Moira realized she had been standing under the steady spray of Severus’s shower for the better part of an hour—just standing there, arms at her side, staring straight ahead at the expensive tile—she finally shut it off and stepped out. By then, most of the blood had been washed away, swirling down the drain. She hadn’t done much by way of scrubbing, but the scalding-hot water had done the trick.
Once again, Moira found herself just standing there, staring ahead—at nothing, at everything. Slowly, she tilted her head down to study her body. A faint pink stained her legs where the blood had been left to sit and crust for the last three days. The cuff marks around her wrists remained a bright red, tinged with bruising. Her nipples, which had been in agony ever since Diriel stuck the first piercing through, no longer burned. Removing the gold bars had brought instant relief, and as she lifted a heavy hand to examine them in the steam-filled bathroom, she found that the holes were already starting to close over—barely. She checked her ears next, but all the holes on both remained, the skin swollen and painful. And why shouldn’t they still be there? Severus had only just taken the diamonds out before she got in the shower.
Still dripping wet, she marched over to the counter, taking quick, short strides, but when her hips nudged against the marble, she stopped, frowning. How did she get here? A glance over her shoulder. She had just been there. With a deep breath, she closed her eyes.
She’d expected her head to swirl with thoughts—thoughts of anger, revenge, sorrow. But it was blank. Empty. Perhaps just exhausted. She swiped her hand over the mirror, clearing the condensation away, and then turned around to examine the marks on her back. They hurt the most, those long slashes over her shoulder blades. Pink and raw, they had only stopped ripping back open whenever she adjusted her position yesterday. Moira still felt it, the throb of pain, with every move she made. Diriel had wanted her wings. She swallowed hard and reached back, only just able to reach the start of each incision.
Moira still couldn’t process that she would have wings.
Her gaze snagged on something glittery on the counter—all the diamond and gold studs, hoops, and bars that had been viciously poked through her ears. Diriel had wanted to make her beautiful—that had been his reason for all the piercings. Make her beautiful, make her a piece of art. If she’d just said yes, she wouldn’t need to be beautiful. She would be his partner. An equal in this cruel game of black-market angel feathers that he would pluck from her, one by one, until she had reached the end of her usefulness.
Her jaw clenched. Her eyes narrowed. Fuck him.
And fuck the angel who’d handed her to him.
Leaving her shoulder wounds alone for now, she swiped all the diamonds and gold off the counter into one hand, then threw them in the toilet. She flushed three times to make sure they were all gone, gripping the fluffy towel Severus had left for her to her chest.
“Fuck you,” she whispered as she watched the water spiral. “Fuck both of you.”
When nothing glinted up at her, she finally started to dry her skin, taking extra care with her breasts, her back, and the area around her ears.
She was grateful Severus and the others had been able to get her out without her having to see her captor’s face again. Moira wasn’t sure how she would have responded—emotionally, sure, and probably with a lot of screaming. When Severus had all but kicked down the door, it had taken everything she had not to dissolve into a mess of heaving sobs and tears. She had done her best to fight it, to appear strong when her entire being yearned to break, to splinter into a thousand pieces so she could just stop feeling.
As she toweled down her hair, she thought back to that moment when Severus had first appeared, to the crippling sense of relief that had flooded through her. She had always known he would come for her, but it had been hard to keep the faith as the hours dragged on—harder still with every piercing Diriel added to her body.
But he had come for her. The black-eyed hero, there to save the idiot heroine who should have just listened to him in the first place. By his side, trusty Alaric, his face covered in blood and his nose noticeably broken. Hovering by the door, a woman straight out of a Victorian period drama, encompassing all the gothic architecture of Farrow’s Hollow in her outfit and in her eyes. The woman had broken the shackles. The woman had banished the demons who had surged from the shadows of the woods as they raced back to the car.
Cordelia. Severus’s cousin. As Moira wrapped the towel around her, she knew she owed this stranger her life, this magic-wielding demon who’d had no reason to help her beyond her ties to Severus.
She ought to despise them—all of them. Demons. Cruel, twisted, horrible creatures like the one who had tortured her for three days straight. She ought to loathe them.
But she couldn’t.
Because Cordelia had fought for her.
Because, in Moira’s moment of weakness, her body crumpling, Alaric had caught her.
And because Severus had come for her, freed her, held her the whole way home—just like she’d known he would.
Moira could never hate them. But she could hate Diriel. She could hate the demon who’d handled the camera, the ones who had come to watch, seated on the sidelines like Diriel’s torment of her was world-class theatre. And she would—until she drew her very last breath.
Or, preferably, until Diriel drew his.
She would hate him more—her father, the angel who wanted her dead. She would despise him, but she would hunt him. Confront him. Out him and his sins.
Because. Fuck. Him.
With that in mind, she tiptoed across the slick bathroom floor and opened the door. Two shadowy figures stood in the doorway on the other side of Severus’s dimly lit room, murmuring in hushed voices. Severus glanced back, revealing his cousin behind him, and as Moira stepped out, he said something else under his breath before the witch disappeared. Not literally. Or maybe she did—could witches do that? Dematerialize?
“She brewed you a sleeping draught,” Severus told Moira as he shut the door softly. “It’ll give you a dreamless sleep.”
“That was thoughtful of her.” Moira looked around the room, and when she didn’t see her duffel bag, she grabbed a T-shirt hanging over the edge of Severus’s laundry hamper and pulled it on. The cool material clung to her still-damp figure, and it smelled distinctly like him—not just cologne, but him.
“How are you feeling?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted before tossing the towel over the bathroom door, adjusting it so it hung straight. She felt—a lot. “I just… I don’t know.”
“Right. Come on then, into bed.”
He hadn’t once asked her for details. Not on the drive back to his place, not when he carried her upstairs and set her on the bathroom counter, not while he removed all her new earrings, and not after he got the shower water to the right temperature—scorching. He hadn’t asked, and Moira hadn’t wanted to tell, and they appeared to be leaving it at that for the time being
.
As she crossed the room and climbed under the covers that he pulled back, she knew she should have been exhausted. Drained. Broken. But watching Severus place a cup of steaming green liquid on the bedside table, Moira couldn’t decide where she fit on the spectrum. Was there even a normal response to what she had been through?
“Moira, why would you want to keep this?” Severus asked, his tone gentle as he lifted the polaroid she’d snatched before he whisked her out of that hellhole. He held it out, but kept the image facing him; Moira didn’t need to see it to know what was on there. The final product. Diriel’s crowning glory—her, bedazzled and bejeweled and bloody.
It was a rational question, but as she reached out toward Severus, Moira didn’t feel all that rational. Because instead of grabbing the polaroid, she grabbed him, her hand fisting around the thin fabric of his button-down. She gripped it hard, twisting it, until finally she yanked him into bed beside her. Her lower lip quivered as he fell into place, seated next to her. Her throat burned and her eyes prickled as she climbed on top of him.
And as she wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face against him, Moira sobbed. She stopped holding it in, stopped plugging the leaks. The floodgates opened, and the air around them cooled. Straddling him, Moira felt her tears streak down her face and onto his skin, just as the spring rain had fallen in streams down the window of the SUV on the drive back. Just as the thunder cracked above them now, lightning splitting the darkness, she wept and wept, unleashing the storm within on the only person she dared.
He weathered the storm in its entirety. Severus clasped the back of her head, his faced turned inward so she could feel his soft, even exhales against her skin. He let her shudder against him, all the while cautious in the way he touched her, his hands avoiding her back altogether. He said nothing when her nails sank into him, to the tortured rasp of each ragged breath.
While she had been strung up and exposed, pierced and mocked, Moira had thought she would never want to be touched again. Not by anyone. Ever. But from the moment Severus cupped her face, wretched guilt painted across his features, she knew she couldn’t go on like that. She needed to be touched. She wanted to be held—and he was the one to do it. Diriel’s touch sickened her, but Severus’s saved her. Time and time again, in dire circumstances or not, Severus’s caress breathed life back into her when Moira thought it was all over. The brush of his hands down her sides, the gentle whisper of his flesh over hers—it was her salvation.