Chapter 67
SIXTY-SEVEN
CADEN
I woke up to my worst nightmare.
It wasn’t the chains, cold and biting against my wrists, holding me like a caged animal in some rust-stained corner of hell.
It wasn’t the burning ache in my side, where a blade had sunk deep and left me bleeding slow. Not too slow to kill, and fast enough to remind me I was dying by inches.
It wasn’t even the suffocating stench of blood and unwashed bodies, or the three Chiefs standing across the room, watching me like they were bored of the game already.
No.
It was her.
Emma.
Held upright by two of them—no, propped, like her body had already given up and the only thing keeping her from collapsing was the strength of the monsters who broke her.
Her head lolled slightly to the side, chin streaked in blood, her skin paper-pale beneath all the bruises.
Her nose was shattered. Blood leaked from both nostrils, from her ears, trailing down the side of her neck.
One of her eyes was swollen shut, skin around it already black, so dark it barely looked human.
Both her legs were bent wrong.
And her right arm hung uselessly, twisted at the elbow, bone pushing against the skin like it was trying to escape.
I looked once.
Just once.
And everything inside me snapped.
A sound tore out of my throat, low, ragged, animalistic. Not a scream. Not a word. But a broken roar that scraped my lungs raw on the way out.
The kind of sound that made the Chiefs pause.
The kind of sound that promised none of them were leaving this room alive.
“Look who’s up,” one of the Chiefs sneered, stepping forward. He sounded too casual, too light, like this was a joke only he found funny. “Right in time for the second show. Too bad he missed our first round of punishment, but let’s make up for it.”
His boots squelched through dried blood as he walked, stopping a few feet from me, the corner of his mouth twitching upward.
“Too bad you can’t translate under a bubble to save her,” he added, head cocked. “And that knife through your ribs must really hurt to move.”
He was smiling.
I didn’t blink, too busy memorizing his face, every line of it, every scar and angle. I wasn’t going to forget it. I wanted to remember.
So when I killed him, I’d know exactly where to aim.
The pain in my side was molten now, creeping through my chest with every breath like fire made of glass. But it was distant. Manageable. Secondary.
Emma whimpered, a soft, broken sound from the corner of the room, so faint I almost missed it.
The Chief’s smile widened.
“You like the way she looks?” he murmured, tilting his head like he was admiring a painting. “We took our time.”
My wrists strained against the chains hard enough to bite into skin.
“I’m going to kill you,” I said, my voice low, icy. Not a threat but a truth, scraped from somewhere so deep inside me it barely sounded human. “And when I do, I will make sure you remember every second of what you did to her before I end you.”
He laughed.
And stepped closer.
“Yeah?” he asked. “With what, exactly? Your charming personality? Or were you hoping she’d come save you again? We hear she does that a lot.”
My haze surged under my skin, begging to be released, but I knew the second I translated, the bubble would burn me from the inside out. That was the point. That’s why they hadn’t even bothered to gag me.
They wanted me to try.
To die trying.
Another Chief chuckled from across the room. “Don’t worry. She won’t die tonight; we need her to breed the Krait. But we can still have some fun with her.”
Emma groaned, low and hoarse, as her head twitched slightly, trying to lift.
Trying to find me.
My chest cracked wide open at the sight of it.
“You will regret ever touching her,” I growled, and this time, my voice shook the chains.
The Chief nearest me crouched down, like he thought proximity made him powerful. His face hovered inches from mine, the stench of blood and rot thick on his breath, his eyes gleaming with the kind of cruelty that didn’t come from orders, but from enjoyment.
“Oh, but we’re just getting started,” he whispered, the words slick with promise.
He looked over his shoulder at Emma, slumped between two others like a broken marionette, then turned back to me with a grin that made my skin crawl.
“Maybe we should make sure she’s ready to breed…”
Everything inside me went still.
Not silent.
Deadly still.
“At least she’s of age,” one of them sneered. “How old was Rose when those horrid animals took her virginity? Seventeen?”
The name alone lit a fuse in my chest. My vision blurred with it, rage so white-hot it didn’t even burn.
The other one laughed, a hollow, soulless sound. “You know, she’s prettier up close.”
He moved toward Emma with casual confidence, then curled his fingers around the front of her shirt.
I pulled against the chains hard enough to feel my bones grind.
He didn’t care.
With a single motion, he tore the fabric open. Her shirt split beneath his hands.
Her bra was next, ripped down the center, the elastic giving with a soft, ugly stretch. Both her breasts spilled free, bare and vulnerable in the cold air.
Emma slumped forward, her body unresponsive, her head hanging. She was too far gone, too weak to lift her arms, too dazed to shield herself.
“So pretty,” he murmured, as if he were admiring something delicate. His eyes roamed across her chest with a sick hunger. “Look at these perky tits. Such perfect little nipples…”
He leaned in, his breath brushing her exposed skin. “I can see why you’d risk it all for her.”
He turned his head just enough to look at me, grinning. “Maybe if she’s not so pure anymore—if she’s been touched, ruined—you’ll stop trying so hard to take her away from Walker. Maybe you won’t want her anymore, when we’ve defiled her.”
“Worth a shot,” another muttered, hopeful. “For the sake of our survival.”
His hand moved, gliding across her stomach, creeping up her ribs, fingers brushing the curve beneath her chest.
And that was it.
That was the line.
I felt it snap, clean and violent.
My chest locked tight, brittle as glass.
Then it shattered.
The restraint I’d held onto evaporated. The rules that kept me chained, the logic that kept me contained, and the fear that made me hesitate…all of it was annihilated in a single instant.
There was only rage now. Pure, blinding, all-consuming.
There was no space, no care for consequence. I didn’t give a fuck about the bubble, or what would happen to me. I didn’t care about survival, or how it would feel to burn alive.
Because watching them touch her—watching her bleed and not being able to stop it—was already worse than death.
I reached for my haze, buried deep in the marrow of my being, and wrenched it outward.
Reality screamed as I did, and the backlash of the bubble didn’t just hit, it obliterated me from the inside out.
Ripped through me like lightning through a live wire, like my soul had been slammed into a wall at terminal velocity. My vision went white, pain flaring so violently I couldn’t even hear myself roar.
It was as if the universe rejected me, tore open my insides and tried to shove me back out.
My skin split open. My blood turned thick, boiling beneath the surface. But none of it mattered.
Because I was already moving.
The chains snapped like they’d never been strong enough to hold me in the first place. My obsidian haze tore free in violent, feral pulses, striking without mercy. One of the Chiefs turned in time to see me coming.
I ran straight through him.
My translation shredded his chest open like it was paper. He didn’t even have time to scream, just choked on his own blood and collapsed as his body disintegrated into a heap of ash and shattered armor.
The second raised his hands, trying to shield himself from me. I sent a surge of energy into his skull and watched his eyes bleed out as he hit the wall, bones crunching like dry branches. He twitched once. Then didn’t move again.
The third tried to run. Coward.
I chased him down and ripped him apart with my fucking hands. I tore into him with every ounce of power I had left, until there was nothing but gore and smoke where his body had been.
And then…my knees hit the floor.
Hard.
I tried to stay upright, but gravity was dragging me into the earth. My lungs seized. My hands shook so violently I couldn’t even hold them still enough to brace myself.
This was the end.
Fine. Fuck it.
At least I’d taken them with me.
I collapsed onto my side, as everything blurred. I couldn’t feel my legs. Couldn’t feel my heartbeat. Couldn’t feel anything except the gaping, echoing terror that Emma wasn’t going to survive this either.
The darkness had nearly swallowed me whole when I heard it.
The scrape.
The drag.
The sound of something soft, something human, crawling through blood.
My eyes flew back open.
“Emma,” I choked, the word like gravel in my throat.
She was moving.
Gods, she was moving.
Blood smeared beneath her as she was dragging herself across the floor like every inch was war, her good arm shaking under her weight, her broken body fighting to obey. Her face was slack with pain, but her eyes… Her eyes were locked on me.
Focused.
Determined.
She shouldn’t have been able to move. She shouldn’t have been awake. But she was coming to me anyway.
“Stop,” I begged, my voice nearly gone. “You’re—don’t—”
She reached me.
Her fingers touched my chest—trembling and slick with her own blood—as her golden haze flared to life.
I didn’t know how she still had any power left in her. Didn’t know how she was even conscious. But the second her magic hit me, I felt it: warm fury pouring into the parts of me that had already started to die.
It was like sunlight crashing through frostbitten skin.
And it hurt.
Fuck, it hurt. As if my body didn’t know what to do with life being forced back into it.
But it was working.
She was healing me.
And it was killing her.
Smoke curled from her arms. Her own skin blistered beneath the golden glow. Her lips split open, bleeding down her chin. She was burning from the inside out, unraveling herself cell by cell just to hold me together.
“Stop,” I croaked, barely more than a whisper. “Heal yourself.”
She didn’t answer.
Didn’t blink.
I could feel her starting to slip, her pulse faltering against my chest.
“Nightcrawler,” I said again, eyes stinging. “Please.”
And somehow—somehow—she heard me.
I don’t know what she did. I don’t know how.
But her haze shifted, turned in on itself, folding and fracturing like molten glass reshaping under invisible hands, until there were two.
It was like she’d cracked open the laws of translation and rewired them from the inside out, breaking rules that weren’t meant to bend.
Half her magic she poured into me, anchoring my soul like a tether pulled taut. The other half surged back into her.
Two halves of a single haze, circling each other like twin stars caught in the same unstoppable orbit.
And then her body stopped burning. The angry red of her skin softened. The blistering slowed, then stilled. Blood that had carved lines down her sides began to dry. Her breathing hitched, but it was no longer edged with death.
The chaos quieted. My heart steadied.
She was barely holding together, but she was alive.
I reached for her hand. She twitched her fingers. The barest movement, but it was enough.
And for the first time in hours, it felt like the world hadn’t ended.
Until Emma let out a shaky breath, and slowly, closed her eyes.