Chapter 58 Spitfire
Niklaus
The punishment, no matter how severe, is of little consequence to me.
Barging into this Black Widow room to find Sapphire strapped to this table, legs spread, and bawling hysterically?
That is the greatest punishment I could receive.
The anguish and wrath entwine together, hollowing out a space beneath my ribs where my heart use to beat normally.
I walk to the brass table like it’s a sacrificial altar. The room is quiet—with an anticipating silence that stretches, trembling like glass about to shatter.
The edge of the table grazes my fingertips.
She looks so relieved. Terrified for my fate, but still—so relieved.
A Guardian enters the room, adjusting that ridiculous headdress that he wears like a silver crown, so tall and pointed, it could be a cranial cage.
The broad man saunters over to me, observing my upper body with a strictly analytical expression.
His stillness is almost impossible to read and terribly deceptive.
“No—I’ll do it. This isn’t right…” Sapphire says with a shaky voice. “Niklaus, I don’t like this. I can take the punishment, okay?”
“I’ll be okay, Spitfire.”
The Guardian who carries out these punishments flashes a doll-like grin, then does a signal with two fingers to someone next to me.
My hands are slammed against the table.
They use metal clamps to nail down three of my left fingers, splaying them wide, and tucking away the other two.
The Guardian unsheathes a weapon.
And it doesn’t register how bad this is.
It’s doesn’t fuse into my thoughts.
My heart fumbles outward.
Three.
Two.
One.
My eyes fall to a wide slayer sword slamming down to the table and chopping off my fingers.
The rusted silver is so sharp and precise, it separates the flesh and bone in one swing.
I stare at it.
The hand. The dark pool of blood. Fingernails. Severed nerves.
I stare.
Left hand.
Crimson red puddle.
Fingers separated from hand.
A wrist.
Shackled wrist.
More blood.
Slayer sword glides away, screeching against the table.
Fingers.
They’re still lined up.
I blink a few times. Ice spreads into my eyes, down my cheeks, splintering into my throat. The world hums and booms with chaos. But all I can see are the fingers no longer attached to the hand.
I sway a centimeter from the table and pull the hand with my body, leaving a sad streak of blood in its movement.
My hand.
That is my hand.
My fingers.
They’ve taken my fingers!
My name is screamed.
Again and again. Her voice is a broken shard of glass that splits through the noise. I find that sound through the static, through the fire raining from the heavens.
Niklaus.
My hand. They took my fingers.
“Niklaus! NO!” Spitfire howls.
I look up.
I look at her.
I find Spitfire’s heterochromatic eyes.
I stare at them long enough to watch her get sucked away in a black hole of shadows and ink.
Without me.