CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
VESPER
Vesper spat blood. Each time after the beast’s fist connected with his face, he counted his teeth with his tongue. By some miracle none had fallen out, though blood leaked from his crooked nose.
“Can you swing the other way?” he asked, the words hoarse and pushed between swollen lips.
Thick, metallic saliva pooled in his mouth.
“If you’re going to break my nose again, save me the trouble of straightening it later.
Otherwise my face just won’t look right.
” He leaned to the side and spat again, but only red, stringy drool dripped from his mouth.
The creature stared at him, or at least he thought it did since vines consumed the entirety of its eye sockets. Its growl rumbled in the chamber before it shrieked like some feral rodent.
He winced as the high pitch stabbed his ears. “I’ll take that as a soft no.”
The creature struck him again and knocked his head to the side.
Blood sprayed the nearby brick wall. Acute pain tunneled his vision, and his consciousness wavered, but he summoned all his strength not to let the creature see what being locked in that fucking dungeon with no food or water or, well, anything had reduced him to.
He hadn’t seen Kyrith or his friends since he’d woken up, and he didn't have a clue where he was. Sharp pain lanced through Vesper’s scalp as the creature dragged him by his hair and the chair he was tied to screeched across the floor, reverberating through his bones.
It cinched the chains tighter before it tossed him back into that fucking cell that had been his home for the last … week? Honestly, he’d lost track.
He tried to move his arm. Couldn’t. His dislocated shoulder was numb aside from the usual tingling. His nerves screamed in protest at the beyond swollen joint. It wouldn’t pop back in, and, really, if it did reset they would just rip it back out.
“Same time tomorrow?” he called out to the creature as it skulked from the room on tangled limbs. It didn’t turn back. How bloody insulting.
They wanted information. And it was information he would rather tear off his arm altogether than give to them.
But not the one Kyrith had painted. That was the only thing that held him together some nights.
He would trace the design with his eyes in the low lamplight to try to sink back into that moment. To be anywhere else.
Especially because every time he closed his eyes, he saw Nef’s bloody, mangled face, and it made him want to die too. And he couldn’t let himself go there. Not now. Not here.
He had taken so many smacks to the head that he wasn’t sure of much but he was sure of one thing: they wanted Emmery.
Vesper blinked his blurry eye. Even if the other one wasn’t swollen shut, he couldn’t make out much in the dark. He pressed his nose into his good shoulder to staunch the bloodflow and hissed as pain sang through his face. Definitely broken.
He slipped into unconsciousness and let the darkness blanket him in a brief moment of peace where the pain left him.
But after what felt like seconds, a sickening, high-pitched scream wrenched his eyes open. His ears strained as another blood curdling scream reached into his chest, seized his heart, and squeezed.
Because he knew that voice. But it was impossible. She was in Ellynne.
“Briar?” he hollered into the shadows. His heart pounded in his ears as an achingly long silence fell. A broken sob followed. “Briar! Fuck, no Briar!”
He flung himself at the bars and thrashed until his raw wrists reopened from the ropes.
Those fucking bindings on his hands rendered him useless.
If he could summon Kaida, he could get out of here, but she lay within him, sedated by these marks.
And they’d taken his knife and stashed it gods only knew where.
Footsteps echoed down the hallway, growing closer. Vesper’s vision swayed. A shadow of a man entered the room.
“Vesper Merikh,” the man said, deep and booming. “It has been some time.” He couldn’t place the familiar voice.
Vesper narrowed his good eye at the man’s brown hair threaded with grey, illuminated only by the shred of moonlight. “Am I supposed to know you?”
The man chuckled darkly as he pulled a key from his pocket, shoved it into the cell door Vesper leaned on, and caused him to topple to the floor.
With great effort, he scrambled to his knees, wincing as his shoulder pulled.
But his stomach sank, and he blinked hard not wanting to believe who stood before him.
He only managed to say one intelligible word, “Fuck.”
Destonne’s father, Thellonius, wore a crown atop his head. A false king if he ever saw one. What a fucking joke.
“You—no, you can’t be. You’re dead.” Thellonius’s enormous stature reduced him to an ant beneath his shit kicking boots.
“Evidently not,” he purred. “Now, come along. Don’t make me drag you.”
Vesper sat back on his heels in a refusal to go anywhere with this bloody psychopath, but Thellonius wasted no time.
He seized Vesper by his dislocated arm and hauled him across the floor.
The bricks scraped his exposed flesh, his tunic and trousers long ripped by those beasts.
Blood warmed the new wounds. Vesper clenched his teeth so hard he was shocked his jaw didn’t splinter.
He refused to scream. Refused to give him anything.
Light ravaged Vesper’s eyes, after the long sentence of darkness, as they entered a new room, one he hadn’t had the snot beaten out of him in yet.
“We’re not playing anymore,” the False King snarled.
He tossed Vesper aside, then strolled to the corner and retrieved a small female by the shirt. When he pulled her into the light, Vesper’s stomach bottomed out.
Briar’s wild, tear-soaked eyes locked with his in a wordless exchange. And gods, her flesh was bubbled and red and so fucking … burned.
Someone had burned her.
A slow inferno of rage built in his chest and crept up his spine until he was sure he would explode. He opened his mouth to hurl some obscenity at Thellonius, but then his eyes flitted to the far corner of the room, tucked away in the shadows.
A scream crawled up his throat but died.
Spreadeagle like the victims in Rensburrow, wooden stakes pinned Cal’s arms and legs to the wall. On the peeling burnt skin of his chest, the word UNTRUE had been carved, no doubt by Thellonius’s own flames and hand. Cal’s chin rested on his chest, blood pooled at his feet, streaming from—
He couldn’t tell. There was too much. Too fucking much.
Vesper choked on bile, unwilling to let the false King see he was falling apart, though raw icy fissures spread through his chest.
A disappointed cluck rolled off Thellonius’s tongue as he shook his head. “Such blasphemy. Such acts against the gods. They deserve far worse than the kindness I’ve shown them.” He fisted Briar’s hair and hauled her up to dangle her like a rag doll. Her feet kicked helplessly.
A furious scream wrenched from her as she thrashed for freedom, not for herself Vesper realized, but to get to Cal.
Unperturbed, Thellonius held her. “We caught these two in bed. How repulsive.”
“No,” Vesper wheezed, his lungs like a collapsed balloon with a savage leak. His vision swam as his pulse pounded, a knock, knock, knock to his head. “Put her down! Put her down, now!”
Thellonius pulled a blade from somewhere as his vision faded in and out, but when it nicked her neck and blood welled from the wound, Vesper saw red. He didn’t recognize his voice as he roared and snarled like a wild animal.
“Now, one of you is going to tell me where the little harlot is,” Thellonius taunted. He sank the blade deeper into Briar’s flesh. “Or I’ll slit her throat.”
Briar’s eyes slid to Vesper and caught his wide gaze. Unfettered determination lay in her stare, her message clear. Keep quiet. Keep Emmery safe. Protect her at all costs. Because they owed this to her.
“Bri—” Vesper sobbed, not willing to accept this. Not willing to watch one of his oldest friends face this fate. To let this be the way she went from this world. She deserved infinitely better from this life and had only received pain.
Then she shook her head, a miniscule movement, but firm. Unyielding. And they both remained steel vaults through Thellonius’s bellows, taunts, and his vomitous promises, though Vesper’s heart wrestled and stretched for Briar.
He wanted to scream.
Wanted to save her. Help her.
Anything. Anything. Anything but this.
He mouthed that he was sorry. She mouthed back she was too.
“Fine,” Thellonius sneered. “Have it your way.”
Vesper’s bottom lip quivered as he watched the blade press into Briar’s throat. “Don’t hurt her! Don’t—don’t, don’t, don't!" And he roared until he thought his vocal cords would shred to bits.
Blood spilled from the wound, like sinking an axe into a paint can. He broke, slowly—pieces snapped off one by one.
She choked, sputtered, and her scarlet eyes matched the red soaking her, saturating her navy hair.
Vesper yelled or screamed, or at least he thought he did, but it was as if he watched from across the room, out of his body, out of his fucking mind.
Thellonius tossed Briar against the wall, and her limp body collided with the brick beside Callias with a sickening crunch. Vesper strained his eyes in the dark for anything: a rise in her chest, a twitch of her finger, but the thick pool of blood beneath her only grew by the second.
His Little Shadow lay there. A deep, inconsolable sob shook his core, his foundation, and his chin fell to his chest as he shattered. His world swam, and he couldn’t decipher reality from the faded blur.
Thellonius tilted his head at Vesper and studied him as if he were the freakshow. “You really care for that abomination, don’t you?” His black eyes matched Destonne’s, how evil seeped from their depths. “You think you won’t crack, but I may know your weakness.”
Vesper grasped at reality as the world spun. What did he mean by weakness?