78. Chapter Seventy-Eight
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Beau Drewitt
A Day Later
“Rise and shine, shit bag. It’s time to meet your Headmaster.
” The guard’s voice from yesterday sounds outside my cell.
I get to my feet so he can’t man-handle me again.
He has the upper hand with my hands being bound behind me.
I worked all night trying to free myself from these cuffs and couldn’t get them to budge.
He slides the dark bag over my head again and I can feel him guide me out of the cell.
When we stop, he hits me with something elongated at the back of my knees and I hit the ground beneath me.
A perfect replay of yesterday. He doesn’t remove the bag from my head and slaps the same stick to my back, shooting the same searing pain back to my shoulder blades.
I wail in pain causing my world to tilt.
My head has been bowed. Not in submission, but because the weight of the moment has folded me inward.
The stone beneath my palms feels cold and absolute.
Before I can lift my face, the room moves with sudden, brutal force.
The bag is removed from my head and I feel hands seize my shoulders to shove me forward.
The fall rattles through my bones. Pain flares across my chest on impact, and then a dozen eyes press down on me like judgment.
My eyes adjust to make out their shapes.
I roll onto my side and try to gather my body upwards.
The sickening smell of rot and decay isn’t as putrid out here.
The seemingly amphitheater location rises around us, carved stone tiers swallowing the room.
Torches gutter in their sconces, throwing the chamber into ragged light.
They haven’t given me the luxury of standing.
They want to make a spectacle of me. They want shame before any words can be chosen.
Submission is the only goal here, that’s evident.
What crime did I commit to ensure such punishment? To be nabbed out of Elowen’s home? “Why am I here, Headmaster?” I bark out.
“Silence,” a large and looming voice orders.
His voice drops into the room like a boulder, crushing the murmurs into a hard, dense quiet.
I can’t rise. My knees still burn from the skid.
My wrists tremble beneath me. I keep my chest low.
The voice speaks again, his robe moving in the torchlight.
“Don’t allow my title to sound so small in your mouth.
Beau Drewitt, we find you guilty of disobeying the Council.
You shall answer for your actions by—” His voice blurs as my thoughts surge louder.
The Council? I don’t owe them a fucking thing. This council means nothing to me.
The sentence lands heavy and final and I rack my brain for any idea of what crime I’ve committed. My name was stripped of grace as it passed their lips. I cut the Headmaster off, “What crime did I commit?” He stops speaking.
“You refused a claim. Our law states that if chosen, you do not have a choice but to submit to their choice. You have been chosen, yet you deny the claim.” The headmaster announces.
“How,” I rasp, my throat raw. “I don’t give a fuck what you want or what’s expected of me.
I don’t want Kalevala. I have already chosen another.
Kalevala never made her claim evident until after I had already made my choice.
Your rule is obsolete. She struck too late.
She’s just too fucking stupid to take no for an answer.
” My voice scrapes across the stone surrounding us.
A hand slams against the rail above me in warning.
The sound booms and sends a shiver through my spine. Ominous fucker.
“You already have a mate,” one of them intones from the dark, like scripture being recited. A gesture follows, pointing toward Kalevala.
“You better not touch, Elowen. And that’s not my mate. I have a sino that I told you I chose before I ever met that conniving bitch.” I spit.
“We don’t care that you turned the mortal. She is safe. You are not guilty in that regard.” Another council member chimes. I force myself to lift my head.
“I have a true sino,” I say. The words come tight, defiant. “I can prove it.”
The Headmaster’s eyes carve into me as he leans forward.
His voice is slow and measured, each word a mark of approval sealing my verdict.
“You bonded with a worthless mortal while knowing Kalevala had already chosen you. Submit to her immediately and with haste. You will mentor under me to become the next headmaster and then be found redeemable for your actions. You’ll come to find very quickly that Kalevala is the best choice to help you lead.
” Mentor. He wants me to lead the council with Kalevala.
The word is law wrapped in contempt. There is no space to plead, no opening for nuance.
My palms press harder onto the cool floor that lies beneath us.
Anger sparks hot and runs viciously through my coursing veins.
How can they reduce her to a rule in their ledger?
How can they not see what she means to me?
There has to be some unwritten law, some fracture in their order that will still allow me to be with her.
How could a planet bind us out of pure spite and expect us not to be drawn to one another?
Sino is written over and over throughout the text.
I know. I’ve studied it endlessly throughout the last few months.
“Don’t you dare call her worthless,” I spit.
“She is everything to me. Everything I’d give my life for.
She knows more about me than any of you fucks ever could.
” The ferocity in my voice tastes old and familiar, and I cling to it.
Silk brushes my skin as Kalevala approaches.
Her presence is cold, heavily perfumed, and predatory.
She moves like a shadow that knows its edges. Something about her is far worse now.
Her fingers trace my shoulder in a possessive glide that scrape against my will. “I own you, doll face,” she murmurs, soft enough for only me and heavy enough to lock my jaw.
I turn my head toward her, my voice raw and shaking.
“I’d rather kill myself than be tied to you and them for all eternity.
” I spit at her feet and twist away. The chamber inhales as one, waiting for the punishment to fall.
Kalevala laughs, small and hollow.Her expression then shifts into something fractured.
Venom laced with sorrow. And something else that seems lodged deep inside her.
I push myself higher and ask the only thing that still matters.
“Do you just want to punish me to get your sick fix, you sadistic freak? If I let you punish me, will you leave Elowen alone?” For the briefest blink, Kalevala falters.
Confusion flickers across her face. Almost disbelief.
Then, her hand fists in my hair and yanks my face close until our breaths tangle.
Tears cling to her lashes, as if this moment is costing her more than she’d planned.
“You want to be with that whore that badly,” she hisses, and her voice shreds.
“You’d throw away what’s owed to me. My seat on the council.
You and that whore—” Her pupils shift, and for a heartbeat I see inside her mind.
A girl thrashes there, trapped and screaming, clawing at invisible walls.
The insult cuts through her mind and slices the girl free. What a visual.
“She is not a whore,” I roar. “She is my wife. My mate. My sino. Something you could only ever desperately wish to be, you useless bitch. You have to make people like you, unlike Elowen. Loving her comes easy to everyone. It must fucking suck being so pathetic that you have to make people submit and serve you to earn their loyalty. You’re.
Pathetic.” The words strike something deeper than her flesh.
The chamber erupts. Outrage surges, voices tangle into ritual condemnation.
Someone moves to silence me. The headmaster draws a breath to rebuke my statements and calm the chambers back down.
Kalevala’s face breaks. For a second she looks smaller and exposed.
Then something inside her snaps and she moves.
I hunker down to protect my chest. I feel her move around me, not with calculation or restraint, but utter violence.
She isn’t attacking me. Her speed is a storm.
I slowly lean back up to see her hands blurring.
Stakes flash into existence as if dragged from the shadows.
Blood splatters the walls and cement floor beneath us.
She drives into them with brutal precision, straight through their chests, through the heart of every council member sitting before us.
Bodies fold like puppets with their strings cut.
Some necks are snapped, but with stakes protruding from their chest. Councilors fall.
The priest below them collapses on the ground as Kalevala sinks her teeth into his neck.
I can hear the vacuum sound that her mouth makes as she suctions to his carotid artery.
One after another, the room fills with the soft, final sounds of death.
For such a massacre, the room was nearly silent.
The only evidence is the carcasses left behind in her wake as she stormed through the line of chairs before us.
The headmaster never screams. He simply falls.
Her arms are coated with blood and a small line of it made its way across her cheek.
Kalevala stops in the center of the floor in front of me.
As she stands among the ruin, chest heaving, hands slick with blood, she looks behind her.
She looks to the stakes jutting from lifeless bodies, pinning the council to the stone they’d ruled from.
Her eyes glitter with something feral. Triumph tangles with grief until they are indistinguishable between one another.
She turns toward me, and the look on her face tilts the world again.
Confusion and satisfaction coats her face, almost like relief.
Kalevala is borderline unrecognizable. She carries a light in her eyes that I’ve never seen before.
Her once slitted pupils are now small circles.
“I need you to start running, Beau. Get far from here. As fast you can.” She mutters under ragged, dragged out breaths.
I don’t hesitate. I move on instinct, on centuries of survival.
Elowen fills my mind until there’s nothing else.
I don’t know what changed while I insulted her, but after my insult, Kalevala had shattered into something unrecognizable.
The corridors swallow me. Stone twists and narrows, conspiring to slow my escape.
I run until my feet scream for mercy. Behind me, metal shrieks and a voice rises, distant and feral. It sounds like Kalevala screaming.
I won't stop. Stopping means surrender now.
I run until the city thins and the open sky breaks through the stone.
I climb up a ladder at the end of the corridor.
At the top, familiar streets flash past. The nasty aftertaste of that chamber clings to my mouth like a curse.
I slow beneath an eave and drag in air. My knees shake trying to find where I am. The night cuts cold against my skin.
Freedom doesn’t erase what Kalevala has done. It only delays the reckoning. Elowen floods my thoughts again. Running brings me clarity and I know what to do next. I’ll run long enough until I finally have Elowen in my arms again.
The dark welcomes me as I cut through it with purpose.