by Queen, Nyna
The bastard just kept smiling. “That’s a pretty threat, my dear. But honestly, I don’t see that happening.” He leaned forward. “And now … enough of words. We have a hearing to attend and you, my dear, you have to die.”
He jerked his head at the torturer, a curt, sharp gesture of his chin. “Kill her, and make sure to milk her for every last drop of her venom before you dispose of the body. I will have some compensation for this. It’s the least she can do for us after causing us so much trouble.” The senator lifted a non-existent hat in a mocking salute. “Good day, Lady de Nuy.”
With that, he walked out. After one more uncertain glance at Alex, Tyler bolted after him. The heavy clang of the door closing behind them sounded awfully final in Alex’s ears. She shuddered, dripping more blood onto the plastic wrap.
Her torturer walked over to his little table with unhurried steps to select the tools for her execution. Alex was so exhausted, she could barely muster up any fear. What little strength she’d had left had been used up by keeping her shit together during her conversation with Tyler and Roukewood. Now, her body felt as if each pound of flesh had doubled on weight, dragging her mercilessly down toward the floor. She slumped in her bonds, more tired than she had ever been in her entire life. The cuffs cut into her wrists, but she was so used to the feeling by now, she barely noticed it.
It would change in a moment. During their first conversation, Heloise had been right about one thing, though what she’d said wasn’t limited to shaper kind—they were all nothing but animals below the skin, and when faced with death, primal mortal terror would be the last prevailing instinct. A gut reaction designed to mobilize last reserves to help the body survive. Not that it would do her much good in her situation.
It was over. The realization sunk in with the force of a shell being released from a bazooka. She couldn’t claw, threaten or sweet-talk her way out of this.
Every hope she’d secretly entertained that she might still be saved in a last minute rescue attempt was blasted to pieces. Nobody would come for her.
She would die here, in this dirty, cold basement. Alone. Not even knowing if Darken had made it.
Her chest tightened so much it hurt to breathe. Darken’s face swam up before her inner eye, filling her mind. If she was about to die, she wanted to spend her last minutes with him.
It was almost funny in a way. After what happened with Tristan, she had sworn herself that she would never fall for a man again, that ‘true love’ was a myth for starry-eyed teenagers and soppy romance books, a thing that simply didn’t exist in the real world. But she hand’t reckoned with Darken. He had burned his way through all her shields, melted her armor and had left his mark on her heart, irrevocably claiming it for himself. And she had eagerly handed him the match.
Well, at least she got to experience that before she died. If for nothing else, she was grateful for that.
If she could somehow reverse time and strike a bargain for her life against a future without Darken, she wouldn’t take it. Not for a second. Not even now, at Death’s door. She’d rather die here, chained to this cursed chair, than live without him.
Alex’s eyelids fluttered closed. Darken smiled at her from her memories, that lazy, arrogant come-hither smile that had made her heart rate accelerate for the first time in a stolen halfborn car on a crazy chase through the country. Darken spun her across the dance floor of the Royal Palace during a forbidden dance on the knife’s edge of unconcealed passion and secret desires. Darken’s hot fingers caressed her skin, shaper skin and human skin alike, while he told her that she was beautiful, while he told her that he loved her—
A sharp bolt of lightning seared through her entire body, pulling a hoarse scream from her throat and ripping the image apart, brutally bringing her back to the dark, cold cellar.
Her torturer was looking down at her, that same neutral expression on his rugged face that he’d worn during all the hours they had spent together in this room. In his hand, he was holding a magic taser, a thin tube of glassy-looking, silver-blue metal, slightly reminiscent of a spellgun, with two thin, exposed metal prongs at the wider end.
Alex’s stomach turned over and would have emptied itself if there had been anything in it but dread.
“I’m sorry, my dear,” he said as he frowned at the instrument and then pushed the charge button to the very top with his thumb: set to kill. “The pain will be excruciating, but in my experience it will be over rather swiftly.” Great! Now, that’s some solid comfort right there. “This method will also keep your body from cooling too quickly which will make harvesting your venom easier for me.”
Efficient to the very last. Alex clenched her teeth and balled her hands into fists, knowing there was no way to prepare for the pain to come.
Please, just let it be quick.
Magic sparked and hair-thin threads of white-blue energy ignited between the exposed metal prongs of the taser. Alex could see them with perfect, sickening clarity as he raised his arm and moved the pronged end toward her chest, a bright glow that kept her mesmerized. Her body trembled violently.
Alex squeezed her eyes shut. Her heart hammered against her ribcage. Sweet Jester, please, please, let it be over soon!
A second passed.
Another.
And another.
Taut to the breaking point and barely breathing, Alex cracked her eyes open a slit. Her torturer had frozen with the taser about a handspan from her chest, a slightly confused look on his face.
Alex watched completely baffled as a fine line of red swelled at one side of his neck and spread down across his collarbone to his other shoulder. His eyes narrowed a little, and he made a small questioning sound before his head slid to one side, neatly cleaved off from his torso, and dropped to the floor with a wet plop.
His lower half remained upright for a second longer, unwilling to accept its fate, then toppled backward to the ground, the right hand still clutching the taser. Its spark died. Blood gushed onto the plastic wrap in a dark-red fountain.
Alex stared, eyes huge. Behind the dead body stood Darken, tall, unearthly, and demon-eyed, holding a bloody sword, flanked by Maxwell and Josepha, the boy cradling a patched, old teddy bear to his chest and the girl clutching a big combat knife in her knuckle-white hands.
The picture was so surreal that for a moment, Alex wasn’t quite sure if she had already died or not.
Her eyes found Darken’s. The lethal fury in them couldn’t possibly have been conceived by her imagination.
He was here. He had come for her.
Alex managed to arch an eyebrow, even though it made her entire face hurt, and rasped in a slurred voice, “I do realize that coming five minutes earlier wouldn’t have been quite as dramatic, but I certainly would have appreciated it. I was kinda worried there for a sec…”
The fury seeped out of Darken’s eyes and was replaced by shaky relief. He bridged the distance between them and dropped to his knees beside her chair, working on the chains.
Suddenly, her arms were free. They flopped down her sides like two filled sandbags, too heavy to lift. Pain bathed her entire body, yet it was the sweet pain of being alive, and Alex embraced it.
The moment she was no longer shackled to the chair, Darken lifted her up and gathered her against his chest. His eyes were liquid gold as he carefully wrapped his coat around her, ignoring all the dirt and blood covering her body.
“I’m sorry, Alex,” he whispered over and over again as he gently held her bruised body. “Great Mother, I’m so sorry. Edalyne tried to locate me for hours, but I had company and had moved out of her range…”
Alex tilted her head up and mashed her lips against his, cutting off his words. It hurt like hell, but it didn’t matter. She was alive. He was with her. Nothing else mattered.
Darken’s arms tightened around her, then quickly released her again when she winced in pain.
Alex leaned against his strong, warm body, inhaling his rich, dark, dominant scent, hardly dar
ing to believe that it could actually be real. Sweet Jester, please, don’t let this be a dream.
She tasted tears and wasn’t sure if they were hers or Darken’s. The only thing she was sure of was that she wanted to sink into this embrace and never resurface.
Instead, after a couple of seconds, she leaned back and punched him. It wasn’t a hard punch—not that she would have had the strength for that. Still, the impact almost knocked her off her feet. Damn bloody body!
Keeping her steady with one hand, Darken rubbed his chin with the other and looked down at her, half incredulous, half amused. “What was that for?”
Alex planted her feet. “If you ever again tell me you love me and then leave without me, I swear I’ll kill you!”
A wry smile curved Darken’s lips. “Duly noted.”
“I hope so,” Alex growled.
After delivering the punch, she remembered the even more important thing she had wanted to do. She looked into his eyes, those deep, wild, demonic eyes and the untamed fire burning at their bottoms, and whispered, “I love you.”
Darken cupped her face and softly brushed his lips across hers. “I love you too, spiderling.”
Alex pressed her mouth to his, jerked back with a tiny yelp when one of her cuts opened, just to lean in quickly again. Ah, what the hell! She was alive, who cared about paltry things like blood and aches.
Someone giggled. It sounded suspiciously like a child’s giggle. It reminded Alex that her Black Knight from Hell hadn’t come alone in her vision. Since he seemed to be real, she might not have imagined the presence of Max and Josy either.
Taking a wobbly step back, Alex raised her head and opened her mouth, yet before she could utter a single word, the world started folding in on her.
Oh fuck! She might have overdone it with all the kissing.
Blackness wrapped itself around her, pulling her downward. She felt herself being lifted and propped into a chair—No, not that cursed chair again!—and flailed in blind panic. A soft hand touched her cheek and suddenly gentle warmth flooded her skin, easing the pain the way a cool river brought relief to a feverish body. The pain in her limbs dulled almost instantly. Alex gave up her fight and surrendered to the touch.
When the cell returned, someone was leaning over her. Dark hair. Big, luminescent, honey-brown eyes.
Ah, yes, Josy. Both of her.
Wait, what? Alex blinked her eyes. Josy? What on earth was Josy doing here?
She jerked backward, earning herself an annoyed, “Hey!”
The luminescent glow of healing magic vanished from Josy’s eyes, replaced by an irritated frown.
The room was still wobbling a little, but Alex could see again. She could also feel her legs again, thank the Jester.
A ring of amplifier crystals formed a circle on the ground around her chair and Josy. A few feet away, Darken was crouching beside Max, who was still hugging his favorite teddy bear, looking anxious and more than a little peaky.
So, she hadn’t dreamed it. The kids really were here. In Roukewood’s basement. In her torture cell. Where she’d nearly been fried to death a moment ago!
But she wouldn’t yell at them. Oh no. She would be calm and reasonable.
When Alex tried to rise from the chair, Josy leaped forward and relentlessly held her down. They fought a short but fierce battle, which Alex lost miserably.
Fine! She could deliver her message from here just as well.
Calm. And. Reasonable.
Calm—“What in the Jester’s fucking name are you two doing here?” She didn't yell exactly, which—admittedly—was more due to the fact that she ran out of breath two words into the tirade than for any other reason and had to force the rest of it through gritted teeth.
She glared at the kids, trying to convey her anger through her gaze at least. “Are you mad? How could you possibly do something so risky?”
That had never been the plan. First, despite all the talk about a backup plan, she had never actually intended for Max to teleport to Roukewood’s mansion—and, more importantly, had never thought Darken would allow it when it came to that—and, secondly, in no reality had Josy ever been meant to be involved in the rescue.
“We had no choice!” Max protested, immediately looking a little fiercer again.
“He’s right,” Josy quickly jumped to his aid. “When Mom finally managed to locate Uncle Darken, she was so overspent that she fainted. Grandmother is caring for her now. We told her”—Josy bit her lip, having the decency to blush—“well, we told her that the plan had always been that we would accompany Darken to Roukewood’s. And she couldn’t really say anything because she didn’t know all the details, did she? And we didn’t tell her we were actually going inside the house, so it didn’t sound like we were taking that big of a risk. And that’s when Uncle Darken appeared via the porta unicanis, and when we told him how much time had passed since you should have returned, we all agreed that he would never make it in time if he took the hover-cycle, so Maxwell had to teleport him, and we also figured that you might need a Healer, which is why I had to come along as well. And we were right, weren’t we? Darken would have been too late if we hadn’t teleported in, and you would have been dead,” she gushed. “And you do need a Healer, so you don’t really have any reason to be mad at us at all.”
Well, if she put it that way…
No. They wouldn’t get off that cheaply. Alex raised her chin. “Still. That’s no reason to justify—”
“You agreed with us on the plan,” Josy said, sounding utterly reasonably.
“Yes, I did, but—”
“And you brought Bear and stationed him in that bathroom.”
“Yeah, well, that’s true, but—”
“How could you put Bear into a girls’ bathroom?” Max interrupted in an indignant—and slightly accusing—voice. The way he said it made it clear that, in his opinion, that was the only really important issue here.
Alex blinked and shrugged, failing to see the problem. “It seemed the unlikeliest place for him to be spotted.” Women seeing a teddy bear in a bathroom would most likely go ‘awww cuuuute’ and go about their business while men might get suspicious or even throw it away.
“Still, it’s a girls’ bathroom.” Max put a big emphasis on the world ‘girls’ and shuddered exaggeratedly. “It’s for girls. I’m a boy. I can’t go into a girls’ bathroom!”
Oh, for the love of—
“Don’t worry, sugar,” Alex told him confidentially. “Your balls won’t shrivel up just because of one little transgression.”
The boy looked down his front and turned an unhealthy shade of green. Darken, who had gotten up and moved to stand protectively over Alex’s chair, suddenly also wore a slightly pained expression as though he, too, didn’t want to think too hard about shriveled assets. Men! One word about busted balls and they all got whiny as hell.
Darken cleared his throat. “Speaking of risky actions.” His fingers touched Alex’s shoulder. “From what I’ve heard so far, your entire plan was one big risk. Entrusting your life to the teleporting talent of a ten-year-old level one Teleporter, even as a backup … some people would consider that suicidal.”
Alex waved a hand with a weak smile. “Oh, I knew he could do it.”
Max beamed, sitting up a little taller.
It wasn’t entirely true, but Alex was sure the Great Mother would forgive the little white lie. Just imagining all the things that could have gone wrong…
Well, there were too many things that could still go wrong, so there was no use in getting fussy about what might have been. They had to get moving.
“We need to get out of here,” Alex rasped, trying to get the lingering hoarseness out of her throat. She needed water. And something to eat, preferably with meat in it. And a lot of other things, for which she didn’t have time now. “Max, can you teleport us back?”
Seeing his nephew’s alarmed expression, Darken gently nudged the boy’s shoulder. “You’re feeling up to it,
buddy?”
Max looked as if he’d rather lose his breakfast then do another teleportation, but he nodded bravely. “Sure.”
“Good.” Alex pushed herself out of the chair and promptly swayed precariously on her feet.
Josy rushed forward and grabbed her arm, trying to maneuver her back into it.
“No!” she said in her most frightening Healer’s tone. “You can’t be moved yet, Alex. I need to do a proper healing on you first. I only healed the most life-threatening injuries and only perfunctory. You’re not over the worst yet. One wrong movement and you might rip up something vital again. I cannot allow—”
“There’s no time for that!” Alex interrupted harshly, raising a hand to override any coming protest. “Roukewood came in here for a final round of gloating about an hour ago, mainly to tell me the big news himself. Your father is on trial. Right now.”
Josy stopped in her effort of forcing Alex back into the chair and stared at her face, seeking the confirmation that Alex wasn’t joking around. Whatever she saw there made her turn completely pale. She clasped a hand over her mouth. “Great Mother, we have to stop them.”
Seeing his sister’s distress, Max clutched Darken’s sleeve, eyes full of panic. “Will they hang Daddy?”
Shoot him, more likely, Alex thought. Hanging was long out of fashion as far as she was aware.
“Nobody’s gonna get hanged,” Darken said grimly, turning back to Alex. “You do have a plan, right?”
Alex bit her lower lip, suddenly wishing she hadn’t turned down Josy’s healing offer so out of hand. The ground was starting to roll beneath her again. She swallowed carefully. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“Your definition of ‘plan’.”
Darken’s irises flared. “Alex!”
“Oh, alright, alright, calm your tits, sugar. I’m on it.”
Okay, concentrate, Alex.
Her eyes wandered to the fire bowl in which all her possessions had been reduced to ashes many hours ago, including Rachel’s lucky knife and her other weapons. They moved on and came to rest on the combat knife dangling from Josy’s belt. Yep, that would do.