Chapter 10 #2
Only cold. Rage. Betrayal burned in my chest like frost set on fire.
“Everyone betrays me,” he whispered. “Everyone.” His voice cracked, as thin as paper. “No one ever stays. No one ever loves me. They use me, they take from me, they leave.” He shook his head, trembling. “My father hated me. Helena lied to me.”
His voice dropped to a rasp. “I thought I could find it with her. Just once. I thought if I loved her hard enough, she’d see me.”
I stared at him—this man I once called brother. This boy, who’d once thrown himself between me and a ring of bullies, like my life mattered.
“So, you killed her?” I said, my voice thin, sharp. “Because she wounded your pride?”
He flinched, his face collapsing inward. “I didn’t mean to,” he said, voice breaking. “I didn’t plan to. I just… I wasn’t thinking. I reacted. And when I came back to myself, she was gone. And I couldn’t take it back.”
I rose to my feet. My fists clenched so tight I could feel the blood straining beneath my skin. The cell was too small for the rage that filled it.
“Do you even hear yourself?” I shouted, the words tearing through the air. “You killed her. You took her life. And for what? Because you couldn’t stand being hurt?”
Salvatore’s head hung, shoulders shaking. His voice came out broken, barely more than breath. “I just wanted someone to love me.”
The silence that followed was worse than the confession itself.
It filled the cell, thick and choking, pressing against my chest until every breath scraped my ribs raw.
I stepped closer. The chain between us slackened, dragging against my skin. My voice came low, shaking with fury that had nowhere to go.
“And you think that excuses it?” I hissed. “That makes it better? You’re not a man—you’re a monster, Salvatore. You didn’t just kill Helena. You butchered two men. And now you tell me you snapped?”
The word burned my tongue. “That it just happened?”
He flinched, shoulders curling inward, his head bowing under the heat of my words. Then, slowly, he lifted it again. The light caught his face—ashen, hollow, haunted.
“I know,” he whispered. His voice trembled, each syllable breaking apart. “I know what I’ve done. But gods help me, Lazarus—I didn’t kill my father.”
I said nothing. My heartbeat thundered through the silence like a drum calling for blood.
“I swear it,” he continued. “I don’t know who did. But it wasn’t me. I hated him. I won’t deny that. I fought him, cursed him, wished him dead more times than I can count. But when I left the estate…” His breath hitched. “He was alive.”
I stared at him until my jaw ached. The chains creaked as I clenched my fists, every muscle tight enough to split.
“Then who?” I growled. “Who would want him dead? Who would want us buried in this godforsaken place?”
Salvatore’s gaze met mine for a heartbeat before it fell. He shook his head slowly, the movement defeated.
“I don’t know…” His voice was barely there. “But someone’s behind this. Someone powerful. Someone who wants us gone.”
* * *
Every day bled into the next, a cycle of suffering without end.
The guards barked orders with the arrogance of men who feared nothing, their voices tearing through the morning haze. We were dragged from our cells before the sun broke the horizon—driven into labor that ground us down and spat us out empty.
We hauled stones heavier than our own bodies.
Scrubbed blood from the floors until our fingers split.
Dug trenches in the yard with blistered hands, the dirt grinding into every wound until flesh gave way.
And always, the brand on my shoulder pulsed with each movement—its heat flaring with every breath, every strain, every heartbeat. The wound never healed. It tore open again and again, blood seeping into sweat, into soil, into the bones of the Dreadhold itself.
We weren’t men anymore.
We were raw material—muscle, breath, obedience.
Salvatore worked beside me in silence.
And honestly… I didn’t mind.
Since his confession—since the moment he met my eyes and said I killed them—something between us had shifted. The air grew colder. The ground felt farther away. A distance opened between us that no words could bridge.
And for the first time, I welcomed it.
I needed the space.
I needed time.
He didn’t speak. Neither did I.
The silence wasn’t awkward. It was survival.
He kept his head down, shoulders taut, jaw locked tight. When he did glance at me, it was fleeting—like eye contact itself was too much to bear, like one more word between us might snap what little thread remained.
So, I let him have that silence.
Because I didn’t have the strength to carry both our grief.
I focused on surviving.
On watching.
On listening.
Even in the worst moments—when my knees sank into filth, when breath came in wheezes, when the guards screamed their orders like demons—I listened.
And lately… the whispers had started to change.
They drifted through the halls like smoke—half-spoken words, rumors carried on the breath of dying men.
The Shadow Lord Trials.
They said they were brutal. Inhuman. Designed to break men until nothing remained but the screaming.
But they also said something else.
They said if you survived them—
You could win your freedom.
And in this place, hope… even twisted, bloody, impossible hope… was a dangerous thing.
But I held onto it anyway.
Because it was all I had left.
One day, in the caves, I drew closer to a cluster of prisoners huddled near a crumbling wall.
Their faces were gaunt, their skin pulled tight over bone.
They couldn’t have been older than me—twenty, maybe twenty-five—but their hair had already gone pale, and their eyes looked like extinguished lamps.
They didn’t look alive.
They looked like the ghosts this place forgot to bury.
I lowered my voice. “What are the rumors about the Shadow Lord Trials?”
One of them turned his head slowly. His gaze was keen despite the wreckage of his features. He looked at me like I was something unfamiliar, something that hadn’t learned how to decay properly yet. “You haven’t been here long, have you?” he rasped.
“Why would you say that?”
“Because everyone knows about the Shadow Lord Trials,” he said. His lips cracked when he spoke. “They’re the only reason most of us haven’t let the stones swallow us yet.”
He leaned back against the damp wall, his bones creaking under the motion. “What’s your name, stranger?”
“Lazarus,” I whispered.
“Orin,” the first man said, pressing a thumb to his sunken chest. “And this is Rian.”
The second man gave a slight nod. His wrists were rubbed raw where the chains had eaten through his skin. His hands clutched his knees like he was holding himself together by sheer will.
“And the one pretending not to listen,” Orin added, jerking his chin toward a figure sitting just beyond them, “is Tarek.”
Tarek didn’t look over. He just grunted.
“I’m listening,” he said, his voice flat and dry. “I just don’t waste words on the new ones.”
“Why?” I asked.
He turned then, his eyes sharp but empty, the kind of gaze that had stopped seeing the difference between day and night. “Because they die quickly.”
“I’m not planning on dying,” I said.
Tarek gave a low chuckle. It wasn’t humor—it was exhaustion made sound. “No one plans to. That’s the joke of it in here.”
Rian’s eyes narrowed. “You really don’t know, do you? About the trials.”
“I’ve heard whispers,” I admitted. “Shadows that move like snakes. Wild animals. Some kind of… tests.”
Orin exhaled sharply through his nose. “Tests? That’s what they call them now?” He leaned closer, voice dropping to a rasp. “It’s not a test. It’s a siphon. The trials drain you. Break you. You go in as men and come out as husks—if you come out at all.”
I frowned. “Then who lives?”
They exchanged glances—one of those silences that carried more weight than speech.
Orin’s voice came next, low and venomous. “Severen.”
The name crawled through the air like a curse.
“He’s always listening,” Rian whispered, his eyes darting around the cave. “Even through the walls.”
Tarek nodded toward the stone. “He’s got spies everywhere. In the cracks. In the dark.”
I stiffened, the hairs on my arms rising.
And then—I saw it.
A glint in the wall.
A pair of eyes—shadowed, deep in the rock, unblinking. Watching.
“Gods help us,” I muttered. “They’re so dark they just… blend in. I never noticed them before.”
Tarek gave a slow, grim nod. “That’s the point. He doesn’t want you to know how closely he’s watching.”
Silence settled over us, as weighted as the air itself.
Then Rian spoke, his voice barely more than a breath.
“They say the trials aren’t meant to test your strength—or prove your worth. They’re meant to bleed you out. To starve you. To strip away everything you are.”
He turned toward me, and I saw the emptiness in his eyes once again.
“Then they give you a choice so twisted, so foul, you forget who you were before it.”
I pulled my arms close against my chest. “What kind of choice?”
Orin’s gaze darkened. “The kind that gives you everything you ever wanted—at the cost of who you are.”
“But no one survives to talk about it,” Rian said, his tone flat.
“No one?” I asked, my fingernails digging into my forearm.
All three of them shook their heads.
“That’s the second joke of this place,” Orin said. “The trials are a promise—a rope out of the pit. But it’s a lie. A pretty lure before the slaughter. Every man who’s taken them has died screaming.”
“They don’t walk out,” Rian added quietly. “They just stop making noise.”
Orin gave me a long, thin smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
“Welcome to the waiting room of hell, Lazarus.”
He paused—then leaned closer, his voice dropping to a rasp.
“But if you want truth, not rumor—there’s one man you should speak to.”
My pulse quickened. “What man?”
Tarek’s gaze flicked toward the far end of the cave, where the shadows seemed thicker—like they resisted the light.
“He’s been here longer than anyone,” Tarek said. “Too long.”