Bonus Chapter #3
Vade cracked a fist against Ivan’s jaw.
Teeth clattered across the floor like die on a card table. His eyes rolled, head bobbing. Vade gripped Ivan’s face with one hand and demanded he look at him.
Blood painted Ivan’s lips and what was left of his teeth red. He blinked, coming back to himself with a pained croak.
“I want you to look at me,” Vade snarled, impatiently waiting for obeisance.
The pathetic human began shaking. “Please, I can give—”
“Look at me!” Vade searched Ivan’s fear-stricken eyes. “My face will be the last one you see, so take a good look at it. Study it. Learn it. Burn it into your memory.”
“Please . . .” Ivan garbled through a mouthful of blood.
Vade roughly released him and stepped back, raking a hand through his hair, trying to calm down. Patience, he said to himself.
He didn’t like to play with his food. He preferred a quick kill then on to the next. But with marks to spare until Orelia awoke, he needed to make sure he took his time so Ivan could feel every moment of pain, minute by minute.
More shaky pleas came but Vade ignored each one. He pulled out the last three seidr sana vials he had and set them on the ledge next to the weapon wall.
“If you let me go I can make you a very rich man. My father has deep pockets. Whatever you want, I can get it for you.”
“I’m already rich,” Vade said plainly as he took stock of the weapons.
He picked up one that hadn’t been there the last time he’d used the room.
He hadn’t toyed with the man then like he was now; he just needed a discreet place to get rid of the slaver.
It had been quick. Two cuts from his beloved seidr dagger he’d gifted Orelia across the stiv’s neck.
He’d let him bleed out, then left him there for Blu.
He never knew how, or where, Blu disposed of the bodies, but it was better to leave that curiosity unanswered.
Vade examined the weighty weapon that looked like an oversized wrench with a knob on one side. He twisted the knob, and the two sides moved closer together. A clamp, of some kind. “Interesting.”
Ivan began calling for help. The veins in his neck bulged as he looked all around the room, presumably for another way out, screaming as loud as he could.
Vade only smiled at the futility of his efforts. “Scream all you want. No one can hear you down here.”
Ivan thrashed against his bindings, hair flopping madly. “Let me go, you sick bastard!”
Vade threw the wrench on the ground. That word, that one single word bastard immediately sent him back to being a boy in the Points, his father screaming in his face at how useless he was.
At how pathetic his son was for not being able to fly.
How he was disgracing the entire Sharpe tribe for being weak.
“I wish you were a bastard so I could disown you.” He’d heard the phrase many times in his short seven years in the Points, both from his prick of a father and from his bitch mother. It was enough to send him into a white-hot rage in seconds.
Vade pummeled Ivan over and over, grunting with each smack of his fist against his face.
He didn’t care about the cowardice of hitting someone who couldn’t defend themselves.
He didn’t care that he had almost a hundred pounds on the scrawny human.
Vade wailed on him, feeling bone crack under his knuckles, only stopping when he needed to catch his breath.
Ivan slumped, groaning as blood dripped down his chin and soaked the front of his tunic.
Vade flipped his hair out of his face and paced around the room. He looked at the ceiling and took two deep breaths in and out. After tying his hair in his typical knot, he adjusted the sleeves of his leathers and pressed his shoulders back, steadying himself.
“Are you aware of what I am?” he asked Ivan, who was barely conscious.
“Gods-dammit . . .” Vade muttered. He snatched a vial of seidr sana off the ledge and grabbed Ivan’s face, ignoring the agonized sounds.
His left eye was swollen shut, lip split, and his left cheek was sunken where the bone had caved in.
“I want you to see every bit of this.” Vade bit the cork, pulled it free, and poured the sana into Ivan’s mouth.
Ivan choked, spitting up some of the liquid. Vade covered his mouth with his hand, forcing him to swallow the rest of it.
Within a minute, the elixir had taken effect, and the swelling on Ivan’s face receded. When his eye had returned to its normal state and his breathing came easier, Vade took a few steps back.
“Why?” Ivan asked after he’d spit blood onto the floor. “Why bother healing me if you’re just going to kill me?” His teeth had regrown but remained coated in blood, the metallic scent hanging in the air.
“Because you don’t deserve a quick death. Because you deserve to suffer, just as you made her suffer.”
A little light went out of the human’s eyes. “Is she your wife?”
Vade cocked his head. “Would it matter if she was? Would you treat any woman that way regardless if she was with someone or not?”
“No . . .” he said, defeated. “I suppose it wouldn’t matter.”
The flippant response would have sent Vade reeling when he first became the executioner, but he had learned to control his responses, knowing the wait would be worth it.
Ivan sat back, gaze landing on the weapon wall. “So, which of those will you use? All of them?”
“Are you aware of what I am?” Vade repeated more firmly.
Ivan looked him up and down. “A sorcerer, I presume. Someone who brings a person to a torture chamber and chains them up could only be as sick as one, you dark magic fuck.”
Vade smirked. He reached into himself, deep in his chest where his power came from and called on the Omnimagia. The darkness within rose and coiled like snakes in a barrel begging to be let out.
There was an evil in him he knew wasn’t from his father. It was inherent. A wolf incessantly chewing on the bars of its cage. He didn’t know how to tame it; he only knew the beast went quiet when Orelia was around.
Vade let his shadows slither out of each finger and slowly make their way across the room.
Ivan let out a high-pitched scream.
“I told you, it’s useless to do that,” Vade said with a smile in his voice.
The shadows slithered through the air and wrapped around Ivan’s face. With a quick jerk of the fae’s hands, they tightened around his neck. Not tight enough to make it impossible for the human to breathe but tight enough to keep his attention.
“You’re a Myrker Fae,” Ivan squeaked out.
Vade took a step forward. “And do you know what they call me?”
Ivan swallowed, and the movement looked painful.
Good.
“No,” Ivan said, clinging to the arms of the chair with a white-knuckled grip.
“They call me Death’s Shadow. I deliver death as my job. I kill those that need killing. And one day, when I was mutilating a group of Freebeasts in the woods not far from here, one of them said something I’ll never forget.”
Ivan’s petrified eyes were solely focused on the killer stalking toward him.
Vade gripped both arms of the chair, leaned over the man, and lowered his voice when he spoke.
“The Freebeast saw what I had done to his friends.
To his family. He saw how I ripped their limbs from their bodies with my bare hands.
He saw how I choked them to death with my darkness and how I carved up the others with my axe until they were just pieces of discarded flesh. "
Ivan’s bottom lip trembled and the tears started to come.
Vade deepened his voice. “When I was about to kill him, he said, ‘I never knew something as dark as death could still cast a shadow.’ And that’s when I knew what I was. When I fully accepted what I was meant to do. I was meant to maim. To hurt. To kill. To embrace the darkness I was born with.”
Ivan squeezed his eyes shut and began crying. His whole body shook, doing nothing to pull sympathy from the one staring him down.
“Or so, I thought that’s who I was meant to be. Until she came into my life and showed me something other than cruelty.”
Vade’s outrage boiled, and an even greater hurt started knowing he could have prevented the attack if he’d just been brave enough to tell Orelia how he felt. In the safety of the room beneath the ground, he let it all out.
“I had no one! No one in my life to protect me! The people who were supposed to look out for me, who were supposed to love me, didn’t. My father kicked me off a fucking mountain for the gods’ sake!”
He didn’t care that he was admitting his past. Ivan wouldn’t live to tell anyone about it anyway. The human cowered like the weakling he was, whimpering through his tears.
“But she cares for me. My rotted soul has the affections of a woman I don’t deserve, so I will spend every second enjoying what the fuck I’m about to do to you because of what you did to her.
You drugged her. You beat her. You made her bleed, and hurt, and cry.
Made her afraid. And there isn’t a god in this entire fucking universe that will save you from the wrath I’m about to unleash you disgusting, despicable, piece of shit excuse for a human being. ”
Vade grabbed Ivan’s tunic and tore it to ribbons. He didn’t want anything getting in the way of the canvas he was about to paint.
Leaving Ivan to his tears, Vade walked to the weapon wall and surveyed all the possibilities, eventually landing on an unassuming, if not a bit crude weapon at the end.
The instruments of punishment were all steel or iron made, except for a wooden paddle.
The flat end was filled with pins a tailor would use when taking measurements.
His lips quirked. “Blu, you twisted devil . . .” The other weapons were obvious but this one was personal. He gripped the handle tight and stalked back toward Ivan.
“I’m going to try this one out first,” Vade said, smacking the wide end on his palm with a resounding thwack. He stopped when he was standing at Ivan’s side, an arm’s length away, and with a wide stance for balance.