Chapter 18
The King’s words echo in my skull. A portal? My pulse skitters. I don’t know what he’s talking about. I don’t even have the chance to form the words to ask a question before his gaze flicks past me.
“Begin,” he says.
Abaddon steps forward. His presence is worse than the shackles, worse than these stone walls pressing close. His hands are now bare, and when they close around my arms, the world erupts in fire.
I scream. My skin feels like it’s peeling from my bones, though when I wrench my eyes open, there is no flame. No smoke. Just burning—endless, searing, all-consuming. And then it stops.
I collapse forward, dragging in ragged breaths, every nerve ending quivering. My body looks whole. Unmarked. But I burned. I know I did.
“Just a taste,” the King murmurs, idly brushing a speck of lint from his cuff. His voice is smooth, unaffected. “You may tell me what I want and spare yourself… or you may suffer. Where are the rest of your kin?”
I rasp out the truth. “I don’t… know. I was told the Queen was the only one left.”
Another glance at Abaddon. Another wave of agony. My vision whites out, tears streaming, my back bowing against invisible fire. The King doesn’t even watch me. He examines the stitching on his sleeve as though bored.
The questions come, each one sharper, stranger, more impossible to answer.
I know nothing of what he wants, but honesty only earns me more pain.
Over and over, Abaddon’s hands draw fire and rot into my flesh without leaving a mark.
Time ceases to mean anything. Minutes stretch into eternities, each scream scraped raw from my throat until I can’t make any sound at all.
When they finally leave me, I crumple onto the foul floor, curling around myself. My chest heaves. My face is wet. I cry because I can’t stop. After all, I am nothing but pain and confusion and fear. The chamber is silent again.
I think of the bread, the water. Of the sudden weight in my limbs after I swallowed that wasn’t just worry. That’s how they keep me bound. Nullified. If I want even the faintest chance of escape, I cannot touch their food again.
When the next tray scrapes through the slot, I crawl to it on shaking limbs.
I snatch it up quickly, hungrily, as though I can’t wait another second.
Then I hunch over, back to the door. I tip the contents through the grate in the floor, listening as the liquid drips down into the unseen dark.
Let them think I’m eating. Let them believe I’m weak.
My stomach twists and gnaws, my throat is desert-dry, but I repeat the vow in my head: I will not eat. I will not drink. I will wait until my magic returns.
Time drips as slowly as the water somewhere in the distance.
My mind wanders. Are Lowan, Zillah, and Selene home by now?
Did they reach the estate quicker without me weighing them down?
Lowan could have flown ahead—no, not with the others unaware of his secret.
Grief tears through me at the thought of him.
His face. His hands on me. His breath against my skin.
The ache of his absence hollows me out, as sharp and unrelenting as the torture itself. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.
The only thing that matters is this: I must endure. I must outlast. And when my magic rises in me again, consequences be damned—I will take the King’s power, whatever it may be, and I will destroy him with it. I will make them both pay.
The days—if days even exist here—bleed into one another. Sometimes the footsteps outside my cell bring the King with his polished menace, questions curling like smoke from his lips. Other times, it is only Abaddon, arriving not for answers but for the joy of watching me break.
He stands just inside the threshold, eyes lit with a wicked gleam, and the air itself seems to turn sharp around me. Sometimes he needs no chains at all; sometimes he strings me against the wall like a bow pulled taut, savoring each ragged breath as though my pain is his entertainment.
I stopped touching the bread and water maybe three days ago, if they truly feed me once a day. They don’t know that. Refusal has left me weaker, yes—but beneath the weakness, something else stirs. A trickle, faint as the first meltwater seeping down stone. Magic. Mine.
I cling to it. Wait. If it can return steady, if it can root deep again, I will carve my way free. But before it grows strong, he comes.
The King enters, a storm of rage unlike anything I have seen from him before. He is no longer composed, no longer a figure of cool calculation. His onyx eyes are blown wide, pupils black swallowing black, and his voice breaks against the walls like a wave.
“Tell me who sent you!” His fury sprays like venom. “Was it Nova Donovan?”
The name hits me like a stone to the chest. I don’t know it—don’t know her—but his words drip with hate.
“I have hunted that decrepit bitch for decades,” he roars, spittle sharp against my skin. “I know she lives, and still she slips through my grasp. I know she sent you to me. Tell me!”
But I can’t. Even if I want to, I have nothing to give. My throat gurgles with a sound I pray is not blood as Abaddon sends waves of pain through me.
With a slash of the King’s hand, the pain cuts off. Silence rushes in so suddenly it stings. He steps forward, closing the space between us, and tangles a fist in my hair. My scalp screams as he drags me close, and then steel flashes. The dagger cleaves through.
Locks spill around me in a heavy rain, sliding down my shoulders, scattering across the stone. I scream, twisting up, catching his wrist with both hands. My fingers dig into flesh, into the ridges of sinew.
And then I feel it. A sliver of my magic answers, surging outward, desperate to seize his power, but there is nothing to seize.
Where Lowan’s magic had been alive—sun-bright, pulsing—I find only absence. A void. A blackness so pure it claws at me, pulling at the edges of my soul. For an instant, visions tear through my mind—shattered glimpses of horrors I cannot name. They flash too fast to grasp.
I look down and see darkness coursing through the veins beneath my own hands where they grip him—black streaks, spidering outward. I tear my hands away in horror. And he smiles.
The blackness retreats beneath his skin as if it had never been. But his smile—his smile is vicious, hungry. “Well,” he murmurs, voice low with delight, “things just got a lot more interesting.”
Before I can move, his hands clamp onto my shoulders. His grip is merciless, crushing bone and muscle until fire lances through me. I cry out, but he only tightens, forcing me to hold his gaze.
“See,” he whispers. “See how that vision will never come to pass.”
Agony floods my veins. Images—his images—explode across my vision: shadows thick with teeth, twisted faces screaming, ravens tearing carrion from bone. I choke, trying to wrench free, but he drags me deeper, drowning me in his horrors.
When he finally shoves me back, I stumble and collapse to my knees, my skin still burning where his fingers branded me.
He turns to Abaddon, now hovering at the edge of the cell, panting like a wolf denied its kill. “Change of plans. We can have our fun with her. But keep her alive. She has just become useful to me.”
Then, to me, with a look that feels like chains tightening around my very soul: “Get the shackles.”
His command has barely left his mouth when the King’s hand cracks across my face.
The blow sends me reeling, pain bursting hot across my lip—a taste of blood pools on my tongue.
I stumble, fall to my knees, palms against the cold stone.
My eyes blur, but I see it—the thin red trail, drops spattering the floor.
Something about it strikes me with terrible familiarity.
A vision I had once seen, a flash I had thought meaningless. My blood, on stone.
Before I can make sense of it, Abaddon’s iron grip wrenches me upright. Chains clatter down from the ceiling. They drag my arms above me, the weight of the shackles pulling until my shoulders scream, until I have to fight to draw breath.
The King circles, slow, deliberate. His eyes rove over me with that vile gleam, the hunger of someone who delights in what he can ruin. He unsheathes a dagger. The tip presses against my chest, cold through the torn fabric. Then he drags it downward in a single slicing motion.
The sound of tearing cloth echoes through the chamber. My dress falls in tatters. I am left hanging, exposed, blood trickling from my mouth, my hair hacked unevenly around my face.
The King tilts his head, considering me. For a moment, I think—no, I know—where this is about to go. My stomach twists.
He smirks, glancing at Abaddon. “Would you prefer to stay and watch? Or is forced pleasure not your forte?”
Abaddon’s laugh is low and cruel, a grunt of amusement that makes my skin crawl. The King’s smile curdles. He leans in close, his breath brushing my cheek. “On second thought,” he whispers, voice cutting sharper than any blade, “you’re not even fuckable. You are filth.”
He straightens, dismissive now, as if he settled my degradation with those words. “Let her hang here for a while. She’ll be more useful when she’s broken.”
They leave me.
I don’t know how long I dangle here. Minutes, hours—it all blurs. My arms burn until they go numb, then not even numb, only absent. Cold seeps through my bones, through my skin. My body is failing. My will is fraying.
And the worst of it is not the pain. It is the memory of what I had touched in him—the visions that had clawed through my mind when I reached for his power. Darkness deeper than death. Horrors without shape. I could not name them. Could not understand them. Only feel the echo of them tearing at me.
I won’t survive this, I think. Not long enough to learn what they mean. Not long enough to know who Nova Donovan is. So, I close my eyes. And in the dark, I search for the people I love.