Chapter 45 – AZAREL
AZAREL
My head pounds with the rhythm of my pulse, each throb sending fresh waves of nausea through my gut. The sedative clings to my consciousness like tar, dragging me down even as I claw my way toward awareness.
I force my eyes open.
Stone walls. Torchlight flickering across damp rock. The stench of piss and old blood.
A dungeon.
My brother threw me in a fucking dungeon. The most dilapidated part, from the looks of it.
The chains around my wrists bite into flesh, cold iron anchored to the wall behind me. I test them instinctively, knowing before I pull that they won't give. Plague wouldn't use anything less than reinforced steel on someone he considers a threat.
Smart bastard.
My vision swims, doubles, then slowly resolves. The cell is small, maybe twelve feet across. Bare stone floor slick with moisture. A drain in the center that probably sees more use than I want to think about.
And across from me—
Knight.
The massive alpha hangs limp in his own chains, arms spread wide and shackled to the opposite wall. His bone-white hair falls forward like a curtain, hiding his face. Blood drips from beneath the curtain of hair, drops that plink steadily against the stone.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Each marks a second we don't have. A second Cosima doesn't have.
My chest tightens.
I can still feel her through the incomplete bond we share. It's faint, barely there, like trying to catch smoke with my bare hands. But it exists. A thin thread connecting my soul to hers across whatever distance separates us.
And that thread is fraying.
"Knight." My voice comes out rough, scraped raw from roaring. "Knight, wake up."
No response. Just the steady drip of blood and the rasp of labored breathing that tells me he's alive but not much more than that.
I try again, louder. "I know you can hear me. We need to move. Now."
Still nothing.
The sedative they gave him must have been strong enough to drop an elephant. Combined with whatever psychological break he had in that medical wing, watching Cosima on that table...
Fuck.
She's still alive. I can feel it. That thread between us may be gossamer thin, but it hasn't broken yet, even though the alphas—her alphas, I remind myself with a twinge of pain—apparently told her what was happening before the doctors started fucking around with her head.
How much did they tell her?
Enough to potentially trigger the kill switch?
I refuse to even consider any reality where that’s the last time I will ever see her alive.
Gripping the bones of the cilice until they dig into the broken flesh of my palm provides clarity. I see a flicker of white in the corner, just behind Knight. Hear the rustle of feathered wings. The vision is gone when I look up, but the shackled giant is still there.
Her guidance is clear.
"Knight,” I grit out through the haze of my own sedation, fighting to keep my eyes open and on the alpha who almost scooped out my brains with the curved metal claws on that iron gauntlet.
And Cosima’s only chance at survival. If we can somehow stop the exam—
His massive frame shudders.
For a moment I think he's still unconscious, that the movement was just an involuntary spasm. But then I hear it.
A sound so broken it takes me several heartbeats to identify it.
Sobbing.
Knight is sobbing.
Not the violent, uncontrolled sounds of typical grief.
These are the muffled, hitching chokes of someone who's forgotten how to cry properly.
Someone who can't shed tears but whose body still remembers the motions.
He's fighting it—I can see the way his shoulders lock up between each broken sound, the way his breathing stutters.
The sound makes my stomach turn.
I've witnessed torture. Inflicted it when necessary, though the necessity always left a bitter taste. I've seen strong men reduced to begging, seen warriors break under pressure that would crush steel.
This is worse.
Those men broke under external force. Knight is breaking from the inside. From damage so deep and so old that even his body has forgotten how to express grief.
Knight isn't breaking.
He was born broken.
"Hey." I soften my voice, stripping away the command. Just speaking to him like I would any soldier under my charge who's hit their breaking point. "I need you to look at me. Can you do that?"
His shoulders shake harder. More blood drips from beneath that curtain of white hair.
I can see now that some of it is fresh, bright red against the darker stains.
He's still bleeding from whatever wounds he inflicted on his own face with the curved metal claws of the gauntlet replacing his right hand.
"Listen to me," I say, keeping my tone steady even though everything in me wants to rage at the chains, at my brother, at this entire fucked situation. "I know you're hurting. I know you're terrified. But Cosima is still alive. She needs us."
At the sound of her name, his head moves. Just slightly, but it's something. His breathing hitches.
"But she won't be for long if we don't get out of here." I pause, letting that sink in as much as speaking the words out loud feels like a betrayal. Goddess knows I’ve betrayed her enough. "I need your help. Can you help?"
Slowly—so fucking slowly I want to scream to hurry—his head lifts.
I knew his face was ruined. Saw glimpses of it during the chaos in the medical wing. But seeing it now, without the mask, without the blood-haze of combat obscuring the details...
His lips are gone. Not damaged, not scarred—gone. Ripped away or cut away, leaving his sharp teeth exposed in the same nightmarish rictus grin I saw on Wraith when his scarf fluttered loose.
But that isn't all. One side of his aquiline nose is torn down to the bone.
Blue eyes, eyes filled with a level of pure anguish I've never seen in my fucking life, stare at me from a face that looks more corpse than living flesh.
Even with blood trickling into his eyes, he isn't blinking, and his eyelids are so scarred and torn, I doubt he can fully blink at all.
The gashes his claws scored diagonally across his face aren't the first. There are older scars from the same damn thing clearly happening multiple times over the course of his painful life. Scars from his own metal claws from times he tried to hide his face with a gauntlet instead of a hand.
Knight looks at me with those torn eyes, and I see nothing. No recognition, no understanding. Just empty blue depths that reflect torchlight like glass.
Somehow, his face is as impassive as the silver mask he wore. Even more, maybe, because of the level of scarring. At least the mask had serenity carved into it.
"Knight?" I try again. "Are you with me?"
No response. He stares right through me like I'm not even here.
The sedative, the trauma, the psychological break—it's all compounded into something that's left him a shell. And I don't know how to reach whatever's left of the man inside that broken weapon.
Think, Azarel. Think, for fuck’s sake.
What would Cosima do?
She'd touch him. Speak softly. Treat him like a person instead of a monster or a weapon. That’s how she’s always been.
There was a guard at her old house who was badly disfigured from the war, and Cosima went out of her way to chat with him every day even though it took him a solid minute to get out a single word.
But I can't reach him from here. The chains keep us separated, anchored to opposite walls with just enough slack that we could stand if we tried but not enough to close the distance between us.
Unless...
I look at his metal arm, at those curved claws that sliced through machines like they were made of paper. His clawed hand is maybe three feet from my own left shackle. Close enough that if he extended his arm...
"Knight." I shift, turning my wrist so the shackle is more visible. "I need you to look at this chain. Can you see it?"
His unblinking eyes don't move.
"The chain holding my left wrist." I keep my voice calm, almost conversational. Like we're discussing the weather instead of planning an escape. "Your claw could fit in the lock mechanism. If you could just—"
He blinks. Not completely—his eyelids are indeed too scarred to fully close—but it’s blinking for him.
It's such a small thing. Such a basic response. But it tells me he's still in there somewhere, buried under layers of trauma and sedation.
"That's it." I lean toward him as far as the chains allow. "I know it's hard. I know you're struggling right now. But Cosima needs us, and we can't help her from in here."
At her name again, something shifts in his expression. Not much. Just a tightening around those ruined eyes, a fractional change in the set of the exposed jaw muscles framing his sharp teeth.
But it's there.
"Cosima is dying," I say bluntly, the words coming out strangled, but sugar-coating it won't help. "Right now, while we're chained up in this fucking shithole, Cosima is dying. If we stay here, Cosima will die."
A sound escapes him. Not quite a growl, not quite a moan. Something caught between the two that speaks of agony that has nothing to do with physical pain.
"I can feel her slipping away." The words scrape against my throat like glass.
"Every second we waste is a second closer to losing her forever.
So I need you to focus. I need you to help us get out of these chains so we can reach her.
You love her. She loves you. You're her mate. Can you do that for her?”
His eyes finally—finally—focus on me.
There's still nothing in them. No spark of intelligence, no sign of the alpha who fought so fiercely to protect her. But they're focused on my face instead of staring through me, and that's progress.
"The lock on my left shackle." I turn my wrist again, making the iron rattle. "Your claw. Can you reach it?"
He doesn't move.