Chapter 19
It’d been a long time since Silver had last enjoyed the music of screams. Real screams, the kind filled with agony and torment, not the ones he pulled from Nuri when he relentlessly tortured him on his cock.
This torture was different, satisfying in its own way, but an urge he’d been able to suppress in an attempt to keep his precious secretary happy.
Only, according to Nuri, he wasn’t happy, and hadn’t been for a while. Despite all of Silver’s efforts. All of his sacrifices.
“What was the point?” he muttered to himself as he selected a new blade from the tray in front of him.
The thin dagger was sharp enough to cut when he tested the tip, a bead of crimson welling on the pad of his thumb, and he hummed in satisfaction, even as the man bound in the wooden chair a few feet away whimpered pathetically.
Silver tilted his head, fury burning brightly within him, only matched by the thrill of control. Ever since they’d been children and Brixton had stolen the jade pendant Silver’s mother had left him, breaking it shortly after, he’d longed to exact his revenge.
“Not so confident now, are we, cousin?” He smirked and twirled the hilt of the weapon, contemplating where to strike next.
Brixton was shackled to the chair in the palace dungeon, a damp and dark place made of stone.
It was the type of place meant for this sort of activity, so no one had bothered laying out plastic, and there weren’t any sort of medical supplies in sight.
He’d been brought here straight from Club Spade, with Silver arriving shortly after.
Silver had made sure Nuri was locked up safe and sound at the estate first, and had left strict instructions to the entire staff that he was to be left alone.
The sedative he’d been given should keep him out for a few hours, but in the off-chance Nuri did wake, Falc had been ordered to contact the palace immediately.
“What was that you were saying earlier?” He stepped forward and undid the shackles around Brixton’s wrists. “If I fought you fair and square, you would kill me? There you go, cousin. Want to give it a try?”
“Bastard.” Tears streamed down his face, but Brixton kept the hatred in his eyes burning brightly despite his obvious pain. “Pull these things out and let’s go.”
When he’d entered an hour ago, Silver had still been blinded by rage. His first act had been to flatten Brixton’s left hand over the chair arm and drive a knife straight through the center. He’d done the same with his right hand, effectively nailing them to the chair.
“Should have kept them to yourself,” Silver drawled. “Then maybe you’d still be able to use them.” Reaching out, he grabbed onto the protruding handle of the two inch blade and twisted, grinning when Brixton screamed again and violently shook. “Any last words before I cut out your useless tongue?”
“You can’t do this!”
“I can do anything,” he corrected. “I’m the emperor.”
Brixton sputtered, desperately latching onto anything he could think of. “Nuri will never forgive you!”
Some of the malicious glee he’d let his cousin see died. “Don’t use that filthy tongue to speak his name.”
“He’s never loved you,” sensing the crack in Silver’s armor—and wrongly assuming he could use it to his advantage—Brixton struck.
“He’s never even wanted you. It was always me.
But when Uncle Sij found out, he shipped me off planet against my will.
I never wanted to be separated from Nuri, but you Reins always think the world belongs to you. ”
Because it did?
This was Ignite, and Silver was its ruler.
And even if, by some odd chance, there was a thing on this planet that didn’t belong to him, it would not be Nuri Narek.
The thought of Brixton touching what was his…Kissing him…Fondling him…
Silver slashed the thin blade forward, cutting a line across the rise of Brixton’s right cheek, close enough to his eye to momentarily stun him.
When the emergency call from Nuri had come in, Silver had been in the middle of an important meeting with the engineers in charge of a huge project they’d been trying to get off the ground for three years.
He’d paused them in order to listen in on the live recording, annoyed at first that Nuri was with Brixton, then irritated that his cousin thought he was clever enough to get one over on him.
All of that could have been waved off. Even the shares and the real risk they brought against Silver’s position as CEO. He could have had the mess cleaned and swept under the rug. Over and forgotten in less than twenty-four hours.
But the second Brixton had admitted to laying hands on Nuri, that had changed.
Incensed didn’t even scratch the surface of what Silver had experienced in that moment. He’d ordered the Imperial Guard to follow him and had left the company without so much as a word to the employees.
“You’re a place holder,” Brixton said with renewed vigor. “He was hired to put up with you, but me? He chose me.”
“Mere delusions of a mad man.”
His Nuri, the one who mewled and writhed beneath him nightly, wouldn’t dare fall for a pathetic parasite like Romeo Brixton.
A loser with an inferiority complex the size of the sun, yet no accomplishments to his name.
Even his startup was a front. Not even a very good one either.
A single tip to the local authorities on Usurn, and his criminal dealings had been uncovered in less time than it’d taken for Silver to drop Nuri at the manor and travel to the palace.
“Oh? Then explain what he was doing there with me,” Brixton sneered. “Explain why he kept it a secret.”
“Because I hate your guts and he didn’t want to upset me.”
“And you call me delusional?” He leaned forward in the chair, his stabbed hands preventing him from going very far. “We went there to make up for lost time. To finally embrace one another the way we’ve wanted to since your father tore us apart. He loves me.”
“Lies.” Silver didn’t buy it for a second.
But that didn’t make hearing it any less distressing.
Even if it was a barbed fabrication, meant to poke the chaos within him, Silver couldn’t resist falling into the trap.
“He called me the moment you—”
“It was clearly an accident,” Brixton interrupted. “Didn’t you see him panic when he realized?”
Silver had arrived just in time to see Nuri scramble to remove the N.I.M. and order it to cut contact. But that didn’t mean anything. The way the device worked, he would have had to give it very specific commands in order for it to dial the emergency line and record.
It should have brought some relief, that obviously Brixton didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, and the implication that Nuri had discreetly recorded them, but it didn’t. The fact that his cousin thought he understood Nuri was still enough to make Silver want to gouge his eyes out.
Maybe he would.
He’d take his tongue for daring to speak his name.
His eyes for being impudent enough to set his sights on Silver’s man.
His hands for touching him.
His lips for that stolen kiss.
His feet for treading the same ground—Ah. To that effect, should he also carve out his lungs for breathing the same air?
“He didn’t want to tip you off,” Silver surmised. “Don’t mistake him being nice to you to mean anything more than it does. Narek is nice to everyone.”
“Not to you,” Brixon disagreed. “It’s all surface level.
You’re the idiot so desperate for companionship that you fell for it.
What do you think we’ve been working toward all this time?
Why he stayed on as your secretary even after Uncle Sij passed?
We were going to put you in your place. Take Rein Inc.
from you, the same way you’ve stolen from us over the years. ”
“Only one of us here is a thief.” He couldn’t steal what was already his. “You aren’t as clever as you think, cousin. If the two of you really plotted all of this, you wouldn’t be telling me now.”
“You’ve caught me,” he argued. “I know the plan has failed.”
“That may be,” Silver nodded. “You could be divulging all of this as a last-ditch attempt to hurt me before your inevitable end. However.” He drove the thin blade through the bullet hole on his right shoulder.
It’d been patched purely to prevent Brixton from bleeding out, but the bandage gave easily, and blood spurted, warm droplets splattering across Silver’s face as he leaned in and growled.
“If you really loved him, you would never drag Nuri deeper into your schemes. You’d want to keep him as far away as possible. Would want to protect him.”
Everyone knew of Silver’s temper, even if he’d kept it mostly under wraps and behind closed doors since his high school days. Brixton would know, would be very aware that he was going to suffer in this room for as long as Silver deemed fit.
“What do you know of love?” Brixton asked once he’d finished cursing, but he noticeably faltered, realizing his mistake.
“I’ve spent a decade observing how Nuri treats his siblings,” Silver reminded. “He’d rather walk through fire than see them so much as singe a hair. If you mattered to him, even a little, he never would have called me. If he mattered to you, you wouldn’t try to soothe your ego at his expense.”
Silver would do anything for Nuri. To have Nuri. That alone put him above his cousin and his fickle desires.
Brixton may very well wish to fuck him.
But he’d never get that chance.
He hadn’t in the past, and he sure as shit wouldn’t in the future.
“Since that useless appendage between your legs likes to point in the direction of other people’s belongings, perhaps I’ll spare the galaxy some trouble and have it removed.”
Brixton froze, true fear blowing his pupils wide. “Wh-what?”
Silver straightened. “I said I’m going to cut your dick off.” He contemplated. “I could send it to your mother. This is partly her fault for raising a moron.”
Maybe if she’d properly reprimanded her son when he’d stolen that jade, instead of making excuses for him, things would have turned out differently.
Oh well.
Guess they would never know.
Brixton was shaking now, and within a moment, the pungent smell of urine filled the air.
With a scowl, Silver watched him piss himself, the wet stain spreading and soaking the material of his dress pants in seconds.
He realized no part of him wanted to see the other man’s small pecker, even to slice it off, and did away with that idea.
There was still Nuri to deal with. He couldn’t waste any more time here.
And his cousin, while a complete and total waste of oxygen, had inadvertently given him a gift.
A way to test Nuri and teach him a lesson all at once.
Because he did need to be taught a lesson. For daring to secretly meet with another man. For keeping secrets about having accepted Brixton’s advances, even if for only a moment in college.
For still believing, despite this past week together, that he still stood a chance at escaping his grasp, in any capacity.
“Know this,” Silver stated mercilessly. “While you’re here, sitting in your own piss, flesh rotting from untreated wounds, so cold even your bones feel frozen, I’ll be balls deep inside of my man.
He’ll be screaming my name as he receives my cock.
And you?” Silver pulled the thin blade free from his shoulder and tapped the center of his forehead with the end, slicing him in the process.
“You won’t even be a blip in his mind. He won’t think about you while he’s being fucked by me.
Won’t think to speak on your behalf, or ask me not to kill you. ”
Again.
Because Nuri had already done that once, and Silver was still pissed about it, even if he recognized his secretary had merely been looking out for him. It’d had little to nothing to do with Brixton himself.
Silver drove the dagger into Brixton’s thigh, creating a new hole a few inches above where he’d shot him earlier.
He buried it as far as he could, until he felt the other side screw into the wood of the chair.
Then, he straightened and adjusted the cuffs of his sleeves, the spade shaped cufflinks Nuri had gifted him last Yuletide, ignoring the blood staining his hands.
“I’ll let you live, for now,” he stated. “But don’t expect an invitation to our wedding. The second your grotesque visage is turned Nuri’s way again, will be the second you find your head separated from your body.”
He left his cousin in enough agony, he most likely wished he was dead already, the chaos swirling within Silver still thriving, eager to lash out and hurt.
Nuri was waiting.