Chapter 42
FORTY-TWO
ARYELLA
If I never make it back to you, know it was all worth it just to see you smile again.
—FROM THE BUTCHER OF NYRIDA’S LAST KNOWN LETTERS TO QUEEN ARYELLA I
I repeated his words in my head. Had I heard him correctly?
“That seems unlikely.” I grasped the arm stretched across my bare breasts to try to hide my trembling. They laughed and prowled closer. I hated myself for choosing the widest shower stall. Had it been smaller, they wouldn’t all fit.
“Unlikely,” Alec said, “but true. After our little gathering, the commander sent the four of us to investigate a sighting of a man that fit his description. We found him, and we killed him on sight.”
“I doubt that,” I croaked.
Alec tilted his head, a predator surveying its prey. “You don’t want this to be true? An allegiance to the Butcher would be quite the betrayal to our commander, wouldn’t it?”
“He’s a savage!” My voice cracked unconvincingly on the last word. It was true, and it wasn’t . “I just don’t believe you’re capable of killing him.”
Four against one? For anyone else, the odds weren’t good, but he wasn’t anyone else. The real question was: them against him ? I’d watched him slaughter an entire band of Insidions in seconds. Eli taught his fighters well, but they had nothing on Gavin Smyth.
“You better believe it, because he’s dead.”
My eyes, nose, and throat burned with the urge to scream, but I lowered my voice to hide its shaking. “How would you know it was him?”
“We were given multiple markers to identify him,” Alec answered. “Scars. One on the left side of his face, among other places. He was quite the nasty-looking fucker.”
I shook my head and retreated until my back hit the wall. My foot slipped on the wet stone. I barely caught myself. “Lots of men have scars.”
“He had tattoos all over his body, too.” Alec closed in on me. “All over his arms, back, and chest. Tally marks.”
No.
I stopped seeing and breathing. For a few terrible moments, until my body sucked in only enough air to survive.
Maybe I was lucky this was how they’d found me.
Naked, so they were too distracted by my body to notice life leave my eyes.
I felt the resilience, warmth, love he’d cultivated in me flicker, sputter, and die out like a flame deprived suddenly of air, and I knew if they were to see it go, they would wonder why .
But then Gerard uttered, “Does that mean anything to you, Your Highness?”
My knees buckled. My ears rang.
“What?” I breathed. This was all a nightmare. It had to be a nightmare. “What did you say?”
“Molochai was right.” Gerard eyed my wet, naked body like a feast. “Our queen is quite difficult to resist.”
They knew .
“It’s not true,” I whispered, air passing so thinly through my lips that I could hardly hear my own voice. “He can’t be gone.”
“He was ice-cold to the touch,” said Micah Sharpe. “His eyes were open and lifeless.”
Stop talking. Stop talking, stop talking, stop ? —
“A demon who brought nothing but misery,” added another one. My eyes were too blurred with water and tears to see who. “Finally reduced to nothing.”
“Stop talking,” I croaked out loud. “Please?—”
“We buried him.” Alec stopped an arm’s length away from me, not bothering to turn off the water.
It simply couldn’t be. He was the danger, never in danger. He was the most solid, immovable force in my world. The rock that shattered my glass cage, the fire that incinerated the walls of my prison. Away from me now, but never truly gone. They couldn’t take him down.
“We dug nearly ten feet deep.”
No, no, no. Not him. Never him.
I reached for my power a third time, and it was still gone.
“Why are you doing this?” I whispered brokenly, squeezing my fists to test my strength. My fingers slipped against each other, barely able to grip themselves.
Gerard’s dark laughter rumbled in his chest. “We’ve been corresponding with Molochai for months.
Once we heard our queen died, we knew our side had already lost, so we switched.
When he revealed you were still alive, we’d already realized the many benefits of aiding the enemy.
” His fingers curved around the swell of my bare ass, threatening to invade me.
He trailed his slimy tongue up the shell of my ear before dragging me, heels scraping the floor, directly under the heavy shower stream.
I was weak again.
“I’ll scream. I’ll tell the commander,” I spat through streams of water.
“We’ll be gone before you can. We need to relay the details of this get-together back to Molochai, so we don’t plan on staying,” Gerard answered.
“Besides, everyone is much too busy celebrating right now to listen for your screams. As you can imagine, your betrothed was overjoyed to hear of the Butcher’s demise.
He may have been doubting us these past few weeks—rightfully so, he’ll soon learn—but hearing we killed the Butcher was enough for him to let us right back into his little fortress. ”
Gerard tossed my naked body down with a wet, brutal smack on stone. I tried to stand but I felt like I was stuck in a nightmare. Everything was… heavy .
A kick in my ribs left me gasping for breath. Then another. They drove their boots and fists into my naked body from all sides. Bile rose up my throat and tears flooded my eyes.
“Please,” I wheezed, hating myself for begging them. Another attempt to stand was met with a boot on my back, pinning me back to the floor. Like trying to escape from beneath a boulder. I couldn’t see whose hands were whose, but one hand clamped each of my wrists and ankles. They were everywhere .
Breathe , I told myself, then let out a tired, broken cry. Because this time, it was my own voice I heard, not his.
One of them gripped the back of my knees, spun me to my back, and forced my legs apart. The skin of my back, thighs, arms, scraped against the stone floor, the most delicate parts of me now completely exposed.
“Please,” I begged, fighting to close my legs. “Please, you don’t have to do this.”
I heard the soft hiss of a blade unsheathing, then felt a hand on each of my knees, forcing them open.
Something sharp on the inside of my thigh, then Alec informed me, “Our orders from Molochai were to break you, not kill you.” He chuckled darkly.
“I think it’s time to get creative. We never planned on tolerating some back-talking whore in the first place.
” Alec violently gripped my hair, sending sharp pain radiating through my scalp.
I tried to block him with my arms but wasn’t quick enough in my weakened state.
“Sucking Winterton’s cock might earn you special privileges with him, but not with us. ”
“Fuck you!” I spat. If I denied it, they wouldn’t believe me anyway.
“Is that an offer?” chuckled Otis Stoll as the blade broke skin.
“No!” I thrashed, breaking into a gasping chain of sobs. Thrashing only deepened the cut. “No, please, stop!” The tip of the blade dragged up my thigh, nearing my center. They opened my legs wider. They were going to… He wasn’t… No, he wasn’t…
“GAVIN!” I screamed, begging him to hear me. He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t gone . “ Gods, please! ” I sent down any and every mental pathway I could find. “ Please, please, please ? — ”
Another boot to the ribs.
“Your Highness,” Alec chuckled from between my legs, where he could see all of me.
The cutting continued. What was he carving into my skin?
My vision spun, the agonizing sting was blinding.
and I didn’t want to be conscious anymore.
“I’m not sure who Gavin is, but I don’t think he’s coming to save you. ”
My body quaked with violent sobs. The knife carved through another cut like crossing a T, and my bloodcurdling scream echoed through the shower hall.
“P-p-p-please stop!”
They didn’t stop. They twisted my arms, pulling at the skin with their greedy fingers while the knife dragged through the skin of my thighs.
Months ago, I had been cut wide open before by Molochai’s blade.
At a certain point, the pain had been so blinding that my body had shut down in response to shock. This was slower. Deliberate .
I felt every single cut of this blade.
He wouldn’t stop.
Alec was right. Gavin wasn’t coming to save me this time. And for some gods-forsaken reason, I was unable to save myself.
“I’m sorry,” I wept, dizzy and delirious from the pain. “I’m sorry I told you to go.”
Alec said something, but I didn’t hear him. My pulse slowed. My body felt feeble, resigned to enduring this. Maybe, I tried to convince myself, it would hurt a little less if I let the fight leave me. Maybe it would end soon.
It didn’t.
I clenched my teeth through the tears and watched the water hitting the stone floor.
The splashing drops sparkled in the moonlight that was streaming in from the hall’s upper windows.
It smelled so fresh, so willing to wash away all the dirt and dust. I had a feeling I’d always loved the way the water felt on my skin.
It touched something deep, deeper than my lost memories.
I didn’t love it anymore.
Another blow to my cheek, and I tasted blood from the inside of my mouth. I didn’t remember lifting my head, but the back of my head was slammed into stone, the impact blurring the sparkle of water in my vision into something dull. Clouded. Empty.
It was too much. The aches, the water, the sound of their laughter, melded together so thoroughly that I could no longer tell what was causing the pain.
“Please,” I whispered. “Please, please?—”
My muscles deflated in delirious relief when Gerard’s blade left my skin.
“There,” he sighed, pushing my legs open again to admire their handiwork.
I mustered just enough strength to sit up and see for myself what they carved.
One inner thigh, jagged and bloody, read slut while the other read whore .
My body shuddered out an endless trail of broken sobs.
Snot, drool, and blood streamed down my face and chin.
Gerard grinned evilly, then flipped me onto my stomach.
“Now you’ll never forget what you are to us. ”
Words were gone from me. I felt lost again.
“If it’s any consolation, Your Highness…” Alec gripped my hair with enough force to make my scalp bleed. He shoved my cheek into the cold, wet stone, slapped my bare, stinging backside, and whispered into my ear, “You have the prettiest little cunt I’ve ever seen.”
I waited for them to spread me open and take their fill. Relief washed over me when they didn’t. When mercifully, their steps faded away. I curled into a shaking ball on the cold tile floor, too weak and horrified to rise.
“It’s over,” I breathed. But everything hurt, and it didn’t feel over. Not at all.
I crawled so my torso and thighs were fully beneath the shower stream. “Wash away,” I cried weakly, watching the red run… and run… and run down the drain. The blood served as a reminder of how else they could have made me bleed . “Wash away, wash away, wash away.”
But the blood kept coming, as did a stomach-souring, confusing and humiliating sense of…
gratitude. They had sliced me up and seen me exposed, left me bleeding on the shower floor, but they still hadn’t done the worst. From the moment they approached me, naked, weak, and vulnerable, I had expected them to.
I had been beaten to a pulp and carved open while naked and vulnerable, but that was all.
That was all.