Chapter Ten- The Longest Night
Iam awakened for the fourth time tonight rather abruptly by water being poured onto my face.
I gasp and thrash but I’m bound to the floor.
The soaked cloth shakes free and I inhale deeply, choking up water from my lungs.
There are shackles on my wrists like lead.
They’re spelled to suppress my magic, the familiar hum of my power now a distant echo. Well, shit.
“Did you just fucking waterboard me!?” I shout into the too-bright room.
The stone beneath me scrapes my knees and it takes me forever to blink through the blinding light in my eyes.
I don’t have time to ponder how exactly I ended up in this situation before the silver-haired prince splashes an entire bucket of water in my face.
He’s partially frozen it now, with that damned magic of his and shards of ice bite at my skin.
Thorne doesn’t use his ice magic often and this is cruel.
The truth is that Thorne should not possess ice magic.
It is a gift to the Kingdom of Frostguard from their fallen Titaness Shivara.
The truth of Thorne plagues me, a thought tapping me on the shoulder, but I turn away.
Stygian Arcanists of Netherhelm possess dark magic and often a small affinity for fire.
What he can do is unnatural, wrong. Just like my serpent magic.
We are wretched mirrors facing one another, open to each other’s storms as we exchange our darkest truths.
He snaps and whatever was shining the blinding light in my face, dims. It can’t have been a lantern. A lightning orb perhaps? They aren’t common and more of a weapon than a tool.
I growl and buck against the chains, my fangs elongated to defend myself. Thorne crouches down to meet me.
He tilts his head to take me in and suddenly he’s the one who’s serpent-like in his mannerisms. He blinks slowly, watching my fangs, my tongue, my chained body, and my bleeding knees. It’s as if he’s delighted, no, curious about me.
“Oh for fuck’s sake, Thorne. What is this?” I mumble and roll my head backward against what I realize is his bedroom wall. He waves a hand over the water on the floor and dispels it.
The Executioner Prince reels back and lands a blow to my jaw. My head cracks sideways and I spit blood onto the floor.
“Ow,” Thorne holds his own jaw. A bruise—probably matching mine—quickly blooms on his face.
“See. It fucking hurts, you masochist!” I thrash against the chains.
His need to see how deeply we now share a lifeline—and pain—is akin to fighting the drowning tide of the ocean. This is inevitable.
The torture, and Thorne’s silence continues for far too long. But I am relentless in my pursuit for answers. For what he knows.
“Can you please tell me what the Titan’s Kyanite does to you?” I beseech him for the fifth time and spit blood at him. He spits his right back at me.
“Tell me what the prophecy says!” He finally roars. I freeze because he finally spoke and then he starts to… get undressed?
Thorne kicks out of his bloody pants. He’s standing before me in a tattered tunic and under shorts.
I look away, even as part of me marvels at the fact that his bone is no longer jutting out of his thigh.
The other part wants to reach into his skin and yank it back out for the way he’s restrained me.
For three hours, my hands have been chained together above my head.
My knees are digging painfully into the floor.
My legs have lost feeling from kneeling for so long.
I’m also thoroughly confused about Thorne just having chains accessible and an anchor already screwed into the stone wall.
My mind threatens to wander to sexual places but I turn my attention back to him.
“Can’t you just accept that I’m trying to help you and I physically can’t kill you?” I reason with him. He frowns, his perfect lips pulling downward.
“No.”
He drags on a pair of cotton pants and removes his shirt. That damned chain around his throat remains.
“Thorne,” I sigh because I’m tired of this. The tips of his ears redden at his name on my lips. “Can you please tell me what I need to do for us to be able to work together?”
His biceps flex when he pulls a new shirt over his head, messing up his wavy hair, wet with blood. I eye the scar across his ribs, the smaller ones on his stomach. I watch his dark veins that now match mine as they move under his skin to the rhythm of his muscles.
“Tell me who hired you,” he answers smoothly.
“No one,” I lie.
“Fine, stay there for the night,” he turns towards the door.
“Wait!” I scream but Thorne doesn’t stop. I bang my head hard against the wall, causing him to wince and grab his own. “Stop!”
“If one more lie comes out of your mouth, Serpent, I will put you to sleep for a decade and keep you stored in the castle’s dungeon,” he bites as he stomps back to me.
The fury in his eyes leaves no room for doubt that he’ll do it.
“That won’t stop him from trying to kill you,” I lock eyes with him. He crouches down to my level.
“Who?”
“Release me.”
“Give me a name first,” Thorne tilts his head. His blue eyes pierce into me, searching.
“He threatened my family. I’ll help you kill him,” I growl and pull against the chains. Thorne tracks my muscles flexing just like I did to him. It causes heat to rush up from my chest to my face.
Thorne moves his hands up to the shackles on my wrist. “A name.”
He’s so close that I can smell the death and blood lingering on him, and I shudder.
The urge to lean my head forward into his chest and inhale deeply is interrupted only by the view I have of his lower abdomen.
His arms, raised to release me, have pulled his shirt up and I ignore the mouth-watering effect it has on me.
His pale skin shows the muscles trailing down into his pants, the veins below his skin visible this close up.
Fuck.
His breath fans across my face as he turns a key. My right arm drops like a lead weight to the ground.
“Ow!” We both say.
There is humor beneath Thorne’s ironclad facade at the situation we’re in, but he buries it.
“Once you know, you’ll have to act. Nothing will be the same moving forward,” I warn him.
He puts his face in mine, inches apart.
“Stop stalling,” he warns. My shoulder is threatening to dislocate from the one remaining arm still chained above me.
I still can’t feel my legs or my right arm, I can’t fight him off.
I don’t even know what good that would do me.
I truly have no choice but to work with him now.
To try and trust him when everything in me is warring between the need to fuck him and kill him.
The need to kill him is less a need than a carefully crafted lie I keep telling myself, however.
If I lose the rage I feel for him, I’m not sure I know how to look at him.
Then his dead body beneath me flashes into my mind, his cold skin soaking up my tears. The sensation of my throat closing up drives me to admit the horrible truth:
“Your brother.” It comes out as a whisper.
Thorne’s face scrunches in frustration.
“Aleksander?” He asks and finally releases my other shackle.
I shake my head no.
“Not a brother you know.”
His eyes widen and he sits back on his heels.
When Caelthar Cryovale, Prince of Frostguard came to me, I was thoroughly confused. See, he was much younger than I, perhaps sixteen at the time.
When I was summoned to the Truce Temple in the Hifrost Mountains where Netherhelm borders Frostguard, I half expected an attempt on my life. I certainly didn’t think, as I stood in the biting cold, that Caelthar himself would trudge up that hill.
His silver hair ran in waves down his back, framing his face.
A face that he fought to sharpen despite his boyish features.
The wind caught his hair, causing it to flow delicately, beautifully.
His white tunic and fur coat showed his status, just as the ivory crown which sat upon his head.
Clearly a more everyday crown, not one for formal events. Still, I found it annoying.
“What is this?” I asked him.
“I’m told your hobbies include killing high-status nobles in Netherhelm,” he said. He spoke so smoothly, not nervous at all.
“If you say so,” I crossed my arms.
“I know so, Harrow Darkbloom. I have learned that King Zephyr is the true father of Thorne Shadowfall,” the boy told me.
“And that’s my problem because…” I answered.
“He’s my older brother. Making him the rightful heir to the throne of Frostguard if he finds out,” Caelthar reasoned. “I am offering an overly generous amount for you to do what it is you’re already so skilled at.”
“Double the reward,” I demanded of him.
So he did.
“Caelthar Cryovale.” Thorne stares into nothingness as he processes what I’m telling him. “So that makes young Ariya Cryovale my sister?”
“She doesn’t seem to be interested in killing you” I offer.
“She’s six,” he frowns.
I muse, briefly as I have before, on the incredible rarity that is his existence.
It’s nearly impossible for children to be born from two Titans’ magical lines.
It’s been tried for centuries; the offspring usually die before they are born or very soon after.
The two types of magic war within the small being, making its tiny vessel inadequate.
Thorne turns his head slowly towards me, finally giving me a glimpse of his wounded soul. We’re sitting on the floor in front of each other, allowing the shock of Thorne’s heritage to wash over him.
“I tho… I thought she slept with someone common…” he refers to his mother. He then looks down at his hands. “My affinity for ice magic instead of fire always led me to believe that maybe my mother had ice Arcanists in her bloodline… However unlikely. B-but King Zephyr?”
I stop breathing when he looks at me, his eyes glossy with unshed tears. I try to imagine what the weight of this realization must feel like.