Eleven
Eduardo looks too fucking happy to be alone with me.
The binds on my wrists and ankles seem to grow tighter as he advances with a scalpel in his hand, but I keep my chin up, my fear down. “I’m going to take your ear next,”
I say with a lick of my lips.
“The only thing you’re going to take from me,”
he sneers, “is my cock.”
I jerk against my cuffs, unable to help myself. I’d rather he cut into me a thousand times with that scalpel than know what his cock feels like slamming into my pussy. “If I even see it, I’m going to tear it off and then use it to fuck that new hole in your face.”
He stops, his eyes narrowing. Fury and fear clash in his gaze. He’d have to turn me over to rape me without getting his jugular ripped out, but as soon as he freed my hand, I’d find a way to kill him – scalpel to my throat or not.
Turning to the counter, he puts the blade back down, and a burst of relief hits me, followed by optimism. I controlled that. I’m not entirely helpless in here. I will survive until I escape or Varius saves me.
Eduardo grabs a hypodermic needle and a blood bag. He walks over to my feet, places the bag on the bed, then grabs my toes. He leans my foot back so the veins are clearer, then lines up the needle. “Imagine this is my cock sliding into your cunt,”
he says as he pushes it inside me.
“It’s that small, huh?”
I snort to hide the fact that inside I’m panicking. I can fight against a scalpel. I can’t fight against his words, against the memories slamming around my skull. My pussy can feel it, and I want to be sick. He looks between my naked, open legs. I want to close them, but I can’t.
Can’t move against my cuffs.
Can’t show any weakness.
“It’s so small, I could put it in your urethra,”
he says, and nausea hits me hard.
He pulls the needle out of my foot, then stabs me with it again. I grit my teeth as I try not to imagine him fucking my pee hole. The pain would be intense.
Stop.
He wiggles the needle as if he can’t find the vein, but I’m sure he’s just being a dick. “I’m not allowed to come inside you,”
he says, “so maybe I’ll just take your earlier suggestion and make my own holes.”
A cold tremor rushes through me.
“I could fuck every single one of your limbs. Your organs. Make my own bingo card.”
He jabs me with the needle, over and over again, looking for the vein. I grit my teeth as pain crawls up my leg. I keep my face flat, but I’m screaming inside my skull, yelling at myself for giving him the idea, blaming myself for being in this situation. My heartbeat runs wild at the idea of being violated by this sick freak.
“Not such a talker now, are you?”
he sneers. He stabs the needle into my vein. “The next time one of the mutts knocks you out” –he grabs the bag to connect it to the needle– “I’m going to fuck you in your left lung, close enough so I can feel your heart thudding against it. I’ll heal you so you’re awake for the whole thing.”
My throat closes as I stare at him in horror.
“Not so tough now, are you?”
Squatting down, he sucks my toes into his mouth.
I jerk my leg so hard the cuff cuts into my ankle.
His teeth scrape the skin off my toes.
The needle hits a nerve, and intense pain flares up my leg.
Grabbing my foot, Eduardo runs his tongue in between my digits. He drags his teeth across my flesh.
I fall back onto the bed with a silent scream I refuse to emit. My hands fist. I close my eyes and imagine thrashing against my binds until I can escape and beat him to death. Outside my head though, I stay locked still, not giving him any other response. No weakness.
Eduardo groans as he starts to jerk himself off. Angry tears burn my eyes. I hate how helpless I am. How pathetic. I am an assassin, the mafia queen to the Shadow Domain, wife to Varius fucking Shadow himself. I should be able to do something.
But I can’t.
And I don’t know who I hate more in this moment.
Him.
Or me.
My foot throbs as the needle’s placed back into my vein, but it’s the wet slurp of his mouth, the slide of his tongue, and the hard bites of his teeth that are making me wince. He’s leaving his mark on me. I try to comfort myself over the fact that it’s not as permanent as the mark I’ve left on him. I’m winning.
I don’t feel like a fucking winner.
He releases my toes and stands quickly. I keep my eyes on the ceiling as the hot spurt of his cum hits my foot. It seemingly burns through my skin, right through my fucking bone.
Perhaps his mark is more permanent than mine after all.
Fuck.
No.
Keep it together, Micha.
You stopped him from raping you. Focus on the win.
“Surprise, surprise,”
I say, working hard to keep my voice sounding bored. “You’re a minute man.” I lift my head to look at him. “When I fuck your face with your own dick, I’m filling it with needles first.”
He snatches the bag of blood up and quickly steps back. Once he’s a few paces away, feeling safe, he starts to gloat. “I hear you can feel when your mate dies. It’s agonizing to experience.”
He holds the bag up to his face and looks at it in awe. “It’s poetic, really, that your blood is what’s going to kill Varius. Terra will use this to create a disease that infects only him. Then we’ll release it all across St. Augustine, and if he so much as breathes in that city, it’ll kill him.”
I jerk against my binds, my heart hammering. I play it up, let my fear out so he can see it across my face. See my panic. My terror. He just gave me a name, vital information I can pass on to Varius when I get the chance, and I want him to keep talking.
His eyes light up as he looks at me, thinking he’s won, thinking he’s found a way to hurt me without getting close enough to risk his life. “You’re going to be with me when he dies so I can study the effects of the blood bond. Then I’m going to fuck your urethra as he takes his last breath, and you’re going to tell me how it feels to feel him dying.”
“You’re lying. No one is good enough to make a disease that specific, and if you spread it all over St. Augustine, you will infect enough people to call in the SCU.”
The Special Crimes Unit really doesn’t like magical pandemics. They’ll come in hard and fast after only a handful of cases. Then Antonio will be screwed. They’ve left our Families alone so far because the power vacuum that’d occur in our absence would damn well trigger World War III, but cross one of their lines, and they’re as merciless as we are.
He smirks gleefully. “Terra Harrison is that good.”
“She’s been dead for decades. Not even a necromancer could bring her back.”
“No, she never died, just nearly did, and now she’s here, working for Antonio.”
He takes a step forward, grinning like the Cheshire cat. “Who do you think broke the ward at your house and killed all of Leno’s plants?”
My blood chills. Shit. When she and Cara Jervis went to war over a hundred years ago, they almost took the entire world with them. Both disease witches, their magic went haywire, and over a third of the population died. The SCU went after them hard. Soldiers were rounded up left and right. Capos were killed on sight. Even their associates were not safe, and many of them ended up in prison off world.
The only reason Cara is still here is because she changed her face, forced her Underboss to take hers, made a disease that made them utterly convinced they were her, and then practically served them up to the SCU. Now that person is serving life in Damaculus, the worst prison on the Seven Planes – a place only reserved for the most dangerous of criminals. Varius, Antonio, Aleric – none of them would warrant a spot in there.
So if Terra really is alive…
“Your man is as good as dead. Then we’ll kill the rest of the Shadow family one by one.”
My pulse crashes against my skull, beating hard in my ears as I struggle to keep focused. Their plan is just that. A plan. It can be foiled. They don’t even know we have Cara Jervis; they think she’s in Damaculus like the rest of the populace. So focus on that and keep him talking. “Why is Antonio doing this?”
He shrugs with a demeaning scoff. “For love. He wants to bring Siome back from the Underworld.”
My mouth drops. Venturing into the realm of the gods is insane. “He’s never going to succeed.”
I try to put the pieces together, my mind racing. It doesn’t matter what I say. He’s arrogant enough to correct me if I get it wrong or gloat if I get it right. As long as I keep talking, so will he. “That’s why you’re making hybrids. You’re juicing him up to survive the Underworld. You’re a fucking idiot. That’s never going to work.”
His dark-brown eyes flash with anger. “I’m the only one smart enough to pull this off. No one thought you could turn someone into a hybrid, but I’ve done it. I just need to tweak a few things, and –”
“Tweak? The men look like twisted piles of shit.”
“Those are the failures,”
he grinds out. “What I’ve done is pure genius.”
“What’s so genius about men with deformities? I could make someone just as ugly with a hammer.”
His jaw tics. “My masterpieces are not deformities. They are faster, stronger, bigger, better in every way. Their shifted forms are a combination of other creatures –”
“So you’ve made chimeras, not hybrids.”
“They’re hybrids.”
“Uh huh. How many have you made then?”
“Fi–”
He stops, having finally caught on that I have been interrogating him. His eyes narrow. Antonio is going to be pissed he’s shared this much with me.
I grin savagely at him. I hope he fucking kills you for it.
No.
I hope Antonio just beats him senseless for it. Then I can still kill him myself.
“It doesn’t matter that you know all this,”
he says with a sniff, trying to blow it off. “You’re going to die in here.”
I don’t say anything, and he puts the needle and blood bag down on the counter. Then he rolls me out of the room, the wheels of the bed squeaking across the floor. He pulls from the footboard, still too nervous to come anywhere near my head.
I smile at that.
He takes me down a hall. We’re definitely in a school, though this part of the building has been renovated. The walls are a cool teal. The door frames are painted black, and the doors themselves are a crisp white. Bronze knockers rest on them in the shape of a howling wolf sitting on a crescent moon that’s been turned sideways. Classrooms have clearly been combined to create bigger homes, with no doors sitting across from each other.
All the old school lockers have also been removed, and now long wooden troughs full of flowers and herbs sit along the walls. Paintings of mountains and rivers dot the place. They’ve been painted in layers to give a 3D feel to the scree slopes and pebbled banks. I like the décor, but it isn’t going to stop me from burning this place down if I get the chance.
A door opens in front of us, and a little boy no older than two darts out. He’s squealing with laughter. He doesn’t have any bottoms on. A well-built man, dripping wet and without any clothes on at all, runs after him. He grabs his son in a few strides and lifts him under his arm like a football. The boy squeals and giggles. “How the funny bunny did you get out of your pen?”
he mutters as he disappears back inside. Their door is shut well before we reach them.
I swallow hard and pin my gaze to the ceiling. My empty womb sends a flare of pain all the way up to my heart. I lost my little girl, lost all those moments, and I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye.
But Varius will.
He’ll get to hold her.
Bury her.
Be the parent I’ll never get to be.
A tear streaks from the side of my eye.
As much as I love him, I can’t help but hate him for that.
You better come save me, you fucking neanderthal.
Because if I have to do it myself...
I’m never going to forgive you.