Chapter 21 #4
The effect on Aamon is instant and terrible.
He makes a sound I have never heard him make—low, torn, involuntary—and folds, one knee hitting the floor and then the other, both hands going to his own skull like something inside it is being pried apart.
The disc is keyed to his bloodline, and it has him.
All that centuries-old composure, gone in a heartbeat, and he's shaking, his head bowed, unable to do anything but endure what looks like horrendous pain.
"Aamon—" I lunge against the bindings, and the chain snaps taut, but I don't care, I'm pulling anyway, the metal tearing at my wrists.
"It won't kill him." Leopold rises from the chair, unhurried, crossing to where Aamon kneels.
"It simply makes him very, very compliant.
In too much pain to fight back. Enough to hold him still for the part that matters.
" He crouches, almost companionable, and slides his hand into the inside pocket of Aamon's jacket—and comes out with a thin black remote, pen-sized, one recessed button, a biometric strip down the side.
He holds it up to the grey light and laughs, soft and delighted.
"You have no idea how simple you made this.
Carrying it everywhere you go. Close and ready, like a good dog with its leash in its mouth. I didn't even have to hunt for it."
The remote. The one Aamon has kept in his pocket since the day I arrived, the thumb-press that can rip my magic out of my body in half a second. The thing I have feared in the abstract for months, in the wrong hands now.
"Now." Leopold presses his own thumb to the biometric strip. "A moment. It has to learn a new master."
The device chimes—that soft chime I feel more than hear, the fail-safe in my neck buzzing softly—and I understand what he's doing, and panic goes through me white and total.
"Don't—Leopold, don't—" I claw for my magic, down past the drug fog, groping for the spark Kage found in me, because if I can just get one thread of it up I can break out of these binds, I can—
No. I can’t.
Because Aamon is on his knees three feet from Leopold, and Kage is chained to the wall, and if I reach for the fire in the state I'm in—drugged, shaking, no control, nothing but raw destructive force—I won't be able to aim my power.
I'll take out the whole room. I'll kill them both.
The two people I have left, unmade by my own hands, exactly like everyone in this building twelve years ago.
I let the spark go. I have to let it go. It's the cruelest thing he's made me do yet and he doesn't even know he's done it.
Across the room Kage has understood what the chime means, and he loses it—throws himself against the silver, full force, no care for what it costs him, the metal shearing into him and the blood sheeting down his arms. "Leopold—don't you touch that button—Hex, no—I'll kill you, I will end you—"
The device chimes a second time. A different note. Settled. Done.
"There," Leopold breathes, straightening, and there's wonder in it, and peace. He looks at the remote in his hand and a satisfied smile takes over his sinisterly handsome face.
Then he looks right at me.
And everything slows. The room goes quiet and far away, the way it does right before disaster. Leopold looks at me with those warm brown eyes gone gentle, almost kind, almost sorry, and he says:
"You left my sister to die alone here. I’ll stay to the last breath. Consider it a courtesy she was never shown."
"NO—" Kage's voice tears out of him raw.
Leopold presses the button.
The fail-safe lights up at the base of my skull and the world becomes pain. Not the clean flare of my magic—the opposite, the inversion, a cold electric fist closing around the thing behind my sternum and crushing, white and total, driving down my spine and out through every nerve I own.
My back arches. My teeth lock. Somewhere very far away someone is screaming and it might be Kage and it might be me. The room strobes. The grey light through the low wide window smears sideways.
I've felt this three times before. Never longer than a second—a second is all it takes to drop me like a slaughtered thing. A second, and then Aamon always lifted his thumb.
Leopold isn't going to.
The pain whites out into nothing.
And on the far edge of that nothing, the last thing I have before I go isn't fear, and it isn't even despair.
It's the two of them.
Kage. Aamon.
Two men came for me tonight. One lied his way into my head and made me feel found. One tore himself open on silver just to reach me and couldn't.
I loved them both—I know that now, at the worst possible time to know anything—and I'm going to lose them in the room where I already lost everyone once.
There is not one single thing I can do about it.
The grey light smears. The screaming goes far away.
And then there’s nothing.
To be continued...