Chapter 23 Of Blood & Defiance #3
Something flickered in his eyes—a moment of genuine curiosity perhaps, quickly masked. “Yet another cruelty to lay at your father’s feet,” he murmured. “Though it served to make you strong, I’ll grant you that.”
“Your approval means less than nothing.”
His laugh was soft and cold. “It’s not approval, princess.
Merely observation.” I felt his gaze touching my skin, cataloging every scar, every vulnerability.
“You’ve been beaten before,” he noted, pausing behind me where I knew the old scars from Ira’s whip criss-crossed my back. “Your father allowed this?”
“My father did not care to know,” I said flatly. “Another fact that should make you question the effectiveness of your revenge. You’re torturing someone he already tortured.”
“Ah, but there’s a crucial difference.” His voice came from directly behind me now, close to my ear. “I don’t torture to punish you.”
With that declaration, his power lashed out again—not the shallow cuts from before, but deeper slices that opened across my skin with deliberate precision. They formed patterns now, I realized through the haze of pain—controlled lines that curved and intersected, as if he were writing in my flesh.
A cry built in my throat, but I swallowed it, biting down hard on my lower lip. The pain was different—sharper, more intense, each cut placed where it would cause maximum sensation without risking fatal blood loss, although it ran freely down my legs, pooling on the stone beneath my feet.
“You truly have such remarkable control,” Valen commented, as if discussing a particularly challenging piece of needlework.
I couldn’t respond. It took every ounce of concentration to remain silent as another wave of cuts opened across my stomach and thighs. My body jerked involuntarily against the chains, metal cutting into my wrists as I fought to maintain some semblance of composure.
My muscles trembled with the effort of remaining still. Cold sweat mingled with blood, making the cuts sting all the more. My vision had narrowed to a tunnel, with Valen’s face at the end of it—pale and perfect and utterly merciless.
He struck again, every cut on my body deepening simultaneously, and I could no longer keep quiet—a cry tore from my throat, high and broken and unmistakably genuine.
The moment it escaped my lips, Valen went still. His eyes fixed on mine, pupils expanding until only a thin ring of darkness remained. I saw it then, clear as day… satisfaction at breaking my silence, yes, but something else beneath it. Something hungry and hot that did not care for revenge.
He leaned closer, his breath warm against my bleeding cheek. “There it is,” he murmured, his voice transformed—lower, almost reverent. “That’s the honesty I’ve been waiting for.”
I tried to jerk away, straining my neck to keep distance between us, but the chains held me, keeping me fixed in place.
“Go to hell,” I managed, but the defiance in my voice was thin, worn through with pain and exhaustion.
His smile was slow, almost intimate. “I’ve been. It’s highly underwhelming.” His free hand rose, thumb catching the blood trailing from a cut below my eye. He studied it for a moment, then, as I watched in horrified fascination, brought it to his lips.
Something passed between us in that moment.
A current of sensation that had no place in a dungeon cell, no place between torturer and victim.
My stomach twisted with revulsion, of course, but beneath it lurked something darker, more disturbing.
A heat. A hunger. As if some part of me, some traitorous, broken part, responded to the monster before me.
The memory of our wedding night flashed through my mind. How his hands had been surprisingly gentle despite everything that had come after. The way my body had betrayed me by responding to his touch.
This was different, yet the same.
Another form of surrender I didn’t want to give but couldn’t seem to withhold entirely.
He must have seen it in my face—that moment of confused heat. His eyes darkened further as they dropped to my lips, and for a heartbeat, I thought he might kiss me. Instead, he stepped back, maintaining the careful distance he’d kept throughout, a cruel smirk spreading across his face.
“Princess, if you like the image of me tasting your blood from my thumb,” he said, his tongue flicking over his digit with maddening slowness, “just imagine how it’ll look when I’m tasting it from your pretty little cunt.”
I gasped, hoping he heard the revulsion instead of the heat that flared through every limb. “You are disgusting,” I spat, my anger returning to overtake my confusing emotions.
He laughed, his head tilting back to expose his strong, corded neck. Oh, how I wanted to rip his throat out with my teeth. “Enough for today, I think. We’ve established a baseline.”
I felt my body sag against the chains in relief, the last reserves of my strength depleting. As much as I wanted to keep up my defiance, blood loss and pain had left me light-headed, the edges of my vision growing fuzzy. I knew I wouldn’t remain conscious for long.
He raised his hand once more, and I tensed, expecting fresh pain. Instead, I felt a strange tingling sensation across my skin as the bleeding from my cuts slowed and then stopped. The wounds didn’t close entirely—they remained raw and painful—but they no longer threatened to drain me of life.
“I can’t have you dying after I had just had you healed,” Valen explained, noting my confusion. “That would be... inelegant. And we’ve only just begun.”
I wanted to respond with defiance, to tell him I would never break, but the words wouldn’t come. My body had reached its limits, and consciousness was becoming a fragile, flickering thing.
Without waiting for a response, he turned and walked toward the cell door. He paused at the threshold, looking back over his shoulder. “Until tomorrow, Princess.”
Then he was gone, his footsteps fading down the corridor, leaving me hanging in the silence, naked and trembling.
I drifted in and out of consciousness, unable to find the oblivion of true sleep in my painful position.
My shoulders burned from supporting my weight, my wrists raw where the manacles bit into them.
The cuts Valen had carved into my skin throbbed, although they no longer bled due to his last minute healing.
In one of my more lucid moments, I became aware of the presence radiating from the darkness of the adjacent cell. I couldn’t see him, my harbinger, but I felt him as surely as I’d felt Valen’s power lashing against my skin.
“This is your fault,” I muttered, my voice a rasp in the darkness. The words seemed to echo in the emptiness of my cell, bouncing off stone walls before dissolving into nothing. “You should’ve let me die.”
My fingers had succumbed to numbness hours ago. Even my shoulders had passed beyond pain into a strange, detached agony that seemed to belong to someone else’s body. I hung like a broken puppet, held up only by the chains that tethered me to the ceiling.
“He’s enjoying this,” I continued, speaking to the silent presence I couldn’t see. “He’s finding pleasure in my pain.”
I didn’t expect an answer. Yet I found myself wishing for his voice, desperate for any connection that wasn’t soaked in my own blood.
“Is this what you imagined, my harbinger?” I asked, growing louder, more desperate. “When you kept me alive?”
Only silence greeted me. No rustle of movement, no mocking response. Just the usual drip of water and scurry of rats.
“Answer me,” I demanded, but my voice broke on the words, revealing the need I’d tried to hide.
Nothing. The prisoner, my promised death, remained as silent as the grave he’d failed to deliver.
I closed my eyes, letting my head drop forward as far as my position would allow. The movement sent fresh waves of pain through my shoulders, but I hardly noticed. A single tear escaped, tracking through the dried blood on my cheek before falling to join the dark stains on the floor beneath me.
“Coward,” I whispered, though whether I meant him or myself, I couldn’t say.
Morning arrived like a thief, stealing what little comfort darkness had provided.
Pale light crept through the high, narrow grate above my cell, illuminating the dried blood that painted the stone floor beneath me in rusty patterns.
I hung in a half-conscious daze, my body having long since passed beyond pain into a numb detachment that felt dangerously close to surrender.
When I heard the sound of boots in the corridor, I couldn’t summon even a flicker of defiance.
All that mattered was the promise of release from the chains that had become my world overnight.
The cell door creaked open, allowing entry to three guards—different ones from yesterday, I thought, though their faces blurred together in my exhaustion.
They stopped short at the sight of me, and I wondered what I must look like—naked, bloodied, suspended like a broken marionette with intricate patterns carved into my flesh.
“Gods above,” one of them muttered, his voice carrying a note of something almost like sympathy. “He really worked her over.”
“Eyes on the floor,” snapped another. “Get her down. The king wants her kept alive and unharmed.”
The mention of Valen sent a tremor through me that had nothing to do with the cold or pain.
Memories of his face as I’d finally cried out, that look of hunger and satisfaction mingled together, threatened to surface.
I pushed them down, focusing instead on the immediate promise of relief from the chains.
Two guards approached, the movement around me barely registering until the first shackle opened with a metallic click. The sudden shift of weight sent pain lancing through my shoulder—a preview of what was to come.