Chapter 80
I wake with an icy roar coiled on the back of my tongue, wrestling it into submission as I slash my gaze around.
Take in the sturdy stone table before me—long and stretched left—heavy with a mix of rusty pitchers, ornate plates piled with food, and dozens of crooked, broken, or tarnished candelabras.
Each holds pillars of weepy wax tipped with writhing flames.
Collectively, they cast the table in a threatening orange glow, raging against the cold, oppressive dark of the feasting cavern I know too well.
Voiding my rabid fear, I work to clear the remaining fog from my brain, squinting through the forest of flames that know the taste of my skin. Home my focus on the presence I sense across the table, looking straight into volcanic eyes blazing beneath a pinched, sweat-dappled brow—
The candle before me sputters with my frosty, whimpered exhale.
Kaan.
Creators, no …
I scour the chains wrapped around his body and the dense stone chair he’s bound against. Chains thicker than his biceps—like the ones used to hold dragons down while they’re bled into the ground—etched in glowing runes that seem to flicker with every flex of his bulging muscles.
My desperate gaze stills on the puncture wounds in his arms that look like they’ve been dug through, then messily stitched up.
Whips to the deep gash in his head and the dried blood smeared down the side of his bruised and beaten face, his mouth stuffed with a gag that’s a black strike across his profile.
My gaze lifts, heart shredding into a mess of fleshy tatters at the softness in his eyes. Desperate fear directed at me.
I snarl, wrestling the shackles cinching my wrists together behind my chair’s stony backrest—the cold cuffs so tight they chafe. I try to kick my feet, but they’re equally shackled, tethered to the ground.
Fuck.
I open my mouth to tell Kaan that we’ll find a way out—that I’ve gotten free before, so it’s possible—when a chill crawls up my spine, lifting the hairs on my nape.
My very essence recoils, squirming into a tightly muscled knot. Kaan’s eyes are no longer soft and vulnerable, but lit with blistering rage, directed on the male I sense at my back.
The Scavenger King.
Conductor of my slumber-terrors.
His menacing presence heckles every nerve ending, like Clode in the gravity of a hungry flame. Too familiar with his sadistic lust for shrinking his prey.
I want to scream. Tell Kaan to present calm and composed and give him nothing to hunt. But I can’t even hook his attention, nor can I bring myself to move—so stiff in the heckling atmosphere of the male who knows every weak seam in my soul.
Who loosened the threads to make them so.
Reaching around me, Arkyn sets a tarnished plate on the table, exposing me to a view of his hand—wiry. Gnawed on.
Capable of horrific things.
My heart labors as I look at it; watch him spin the plate until it’s exactly where he intends it to be.
“Ahh, there you are.” Arkyn’s voice sizzles my nerves so much it’s an effort not to flinch, bile surging as the back of his hand strokes the line of my jaw—Kaan’s muffled sounds heaving with intensity. “How nice of you to wake for me.”
The violent thud-ump of beating wings pounds the air before a whetted shriek slices down.
I swallow, knowing she’s up there. A beast I’ve never seen but have so often felt the watchful gaze of, her possessive intrigue now scraping across my face like a claw.
“Calm, Cliár.”
Arkyn’s order blasts through the cavern as he moves into my peripheral, toward the head of the table. He turns with a dash of his tattered cloak, draping against the intricately carved seat I heard he scavenged from some poor fuck’s tomb.
“Apologies, Sire.” He flaps a hand at Kaan, then digs into his pocket, pulling out something he flicks between his fingers. A copper weald. “I’d offer you a plate of food, but you already have your mouth full.”
Kaan’s eyes widen on the instrument, all the color draining from his face before he thrashes, blasting stifled words I can’t make out. All the while, my heart drums. Like Bulder has his fists in my chest, busting them about.
Stop fighting, Kaan. Please.
That’s exactly what he wants!
“Yes, I know. I said we’d share a meal.” I can hear the smile on Arkyn’s face as he balls his hand around the weald, then sets his chin on his fist. He lifts his other like a claw, using his thumbnail to gouge the ravaged skin on his fingertips.
“But since seeing just how much you’ve grown to look like Pah, I’ve decided I’m not interested in hearing anything you have to say.
You’ll just have to sit there and listen. Think you can manage that … brother?”
My breath catches.
Kaan’s brows crush together as he searches the darkness within Arkyn’s hood, the statement appearing to have stumped him as much as it has me.
I was under the impression Kaan only has two brothers. Cadok and Tyroth.
Two brothers.
One sister.
A pah you could wipe the floor with.
My gaze cuts between the two, taking in Kaan’s confusion and Arkyn’s air of nonchalance.
Is Arkyn a half brother? If so, why is Kaan only learning about this now … chained to a chair within a cavern that knows the fried reek of torture?
I focus on Arkyn, seeking his tells, when Kaan’s earlier words come to me like an echoing premonition, filling me with a cold, sinking sensation.
Revenge is the loneliest deity of them all, Moonbeam.
Creators, is that what this is? What drives the Scavenger King? Feral lust for some manner of revenge?
“This one, however …” Arkyn’s head turns in my direction, and I meet ruddy eyes burning within the shadow of his floppy hood. “Why, I love nothing more than to hear her words. But she so rarely speaks for me. Only when she wants something. Isn’t that right, Fire Lark?”
The name mocks my flesh with the promise of pain.
From the corner of my vision, I see Kaan’s eyes bulge. See him stiffen, like the room just filled with mortar.
Arkyn clicks his tongue, then slams the copper weald on the table beside my plate. So hard and loud I flinch, repressing a shudder as he lifts his hand from the instrument—boasting it. A quiet threat glinting in the firelight.
As if I needed a reminder of exactly what he’s capable of.
He taps his finger against the weald … again … again … then snatches a serving spoon stuffed in a pile of steamed vegetables and scoops some onto my plate, loosening me from the coil of anticipation screwing into my soul.
I exhale through my nose, slowly, taking the small reprieve to scour the table. To hunt for something—anything—that can help get us free. Get Kaan free of this twisted, fucked-up situation.
My heart hitches at the sight of the pale-brown parchment lark I dug from Sereme’s desk, tucked between bent candlesticks, still bearing the fold marks from when Kaan pressed it into a square.
Arkyn must’ve scavenged it from his pocket …
“Good eyes,” he murmurs, then leans forward and plucks it off the table, revealing the uhloo I gifted Kaan coiled behind it.
Severed.
My blood becomes ice, causing my pulse to slow, then stop. Long enough that my vision blurs.
Arkyn cut it free … because he knows it’s mine. That it came from me.
And it’s quite possible he knows what it stands for.
Meaning—
I stifle a whimper as Arkyn presses the lark back into shape. It wriggles in his grip, frantically flitting about in a manner that sends a chill shooting down my spine.
He pinches the return fold and tosses it free.
The lark bounces in a tight circle, gathers its bearings, then darts straight for Arkyn, swoops into his open palm, and lands, tipping sideways.
I stare at it, confused.
That lark was to Sereme, from the Elding.
My gaze cuts to Arkyn, his smile gleaming at me from within the darkness of his hood. Like a taunt.
A poignant
stabbing
taunt.
My heart slams into something solid.
Arkyn’s the Elding.
I choke on the poisonous theory as jagged pieces begin piercing into place, too fast for me to inspect properly:
The blood bind.
Sereme’s love for the Elding, and her equal hate for me.
The special treatment I never asked for.
Understanding stabs deep, purging the blood from my face until I’m so lightheaded the room’s wobbling, threatening to topple my chair onto the ash-dusted ground.
If Arkyn’s the Elding, that means—
This is The Flourish.
This is where I’ve been funneling folk with the promise of a better life away from corruption and heartache. The same place that’s snapped me across its knee like a stick more times than I can count.
This.
Fucking.
Place.
My breaths come hard and fast, slitting through flared nostrils as Arkyn pockets the lark, then pinches the uhloo, lifting the braid like a dead serpent. “You really thought you could flutter away from me?” he asks, voice mocking, serving to make me feel even more stupid, na?ve, and—
So, so blind.
“You should’ve known better, Fire Lark. Truly.” A smirk is thick in his voice as he dangles the uhloo over a lit candle, lowering it.
The tapered tip of my braid kisses the small flame—
The fire gobbles, surging in strength and size while it purges twirls of smoke. While my throat grows so tight it feels like his hand is around my neck, squeezing the life from me.
Arkyn flicks the still-flaming braid, and it arcs through the air, disintegrating as it falls back to the table. “I’ll never let you go.” He snatches my fork and, in one swift motion, plunges it into a pile of bloody meat on the table before Kaan.
I flinch, picturing that same fork stabbing into his chest.
“You’re MINE,” Arkyn belts out, the words boring through the cavernous space, bouncing off the walls. Tearing into me like a mob of flesh-hungry beasts.
I’m statue still, not daring to move. To blink or even breathe. Only once Arkyn turns his attention to the fork, raises the slab of meat, and slaps it on my plate, do I allow my lungs to fill—almost choking on the smell of my fried hair.