Chapter 37
Agentle breeze, reeking of death, ruffled Dominic’s hair, sending a roiling wave of nausea through him.
He breathed slowly, willing the sickness to subside, loathing how his draining magic had weakened him.
He sluggishly peeled his eyes open, squinting, expecting to be met with blinding sunlight, but then he remembered he was in the midst of the Ruins.
Hot rain pelted his face, soaking his clothes. No, that was mostly blood.
Pain lanced through his leg, eliciting a deep groan from his lips.
He glanced down, suddenly remembering the deep laceration across his thigh.
The wound had been poorly wrapped in a white bandage, already darkened with blood.
Clearly, whatever brought him here didn’t want him bleeding to death . . . yet.
With great effort, he lifted his head. Dried blood crusted on his throbbing temple and ear, itching irritably.
He moved a hand to scratch it off, only to be resisted by thick ropes abrading his skin.
Dominic slowly glanced to his left, then his right.
Ropes wound around both his wrists, stringing him up between two massive, bare trees.
His right wrist burned from the wound from that creature’s needle-like teeth.
He attempted to call on his magic—not that it had been much help lately—but something kept it suppressed beneath his skin, sputtering out before it could be of any use.
His feet lightly touched the sand, enough to allow pressure on his wounded leg, which screamed in protest as he stood on it. His shoulders ached from his arms suspended above him, holding up most of his weight. He shifted to the left, the pain shooting through his right leg easing slightly.
Those eerie, humanoid creatures stalked through the night, circling him in a wide arc.
His house was nowhere to be seen. A dark figure sauntered toward Dominic, head held high.
His black pants blended with the night. A red tunic that probably hid blood stains fit tightly to him, with sleeves that were ripped at the shoulders.
“Nice to see you again, Son,” the man greeted, his raspy voice dripping with sarcasm. Dominic’s father gave him a mocking smile, filled with crooked, yellow teeth, through his graying, unkempt beard. “Seems you haven’t aged a bit in all the years that have passed.”
Dominic lifted his head as best he could, staring straight into dark eyes. “Seems you haven’t either, considering that you’re dead,” Dominic spat in his father’s face. This isn’t real. This isn’t real. This isn’t real. The mantra repeated over and over in his head, calming his rapid pulse.
Dominic’s father snarled, wiping the saliva from his cheek. He drew a knife. “Watch your mouth, boy!” He sneered, pressing the blade against Dominic’s throat.
The King of Keys was unfazed, face remaining a mask of indifference, even as a thin line of blood trickled down his neck. “If you haven’t noticed, you’re the powerless one here. No weapons, no army . . . and no magic.”
Dominic shrugged a shoulder, regretting the motion when hurt flashed through his arm.
“Why don’t you untie me before things get a lot more messy than they need to?
” Dominic offered with false bravado. In all truth, he had no clue how he was going to get out of this.
How did you kill someone who was already dead?
His father’s hand shot out to the lesion on Dominic’s leg, digging his fingers into open flesh, twisting deeper.
Black spots danced across Dominic’s vision as pain, hot and sharp, shot through him.
He cried out sharply. Blood leaked down his pant leg.
The pain was a thousand times worse than normal without his magic healing him.
Dominic would not submit to his father, though.
He’d been through enough agony and torment before.
He could withstand some filthy ghost and his vengeful wrath.
The man stepped so close that Dominic could smell his putrid breath. “You killed your own father,” he seethed. Feral wrath flashed in his eyes.
As if he needed to remind Dominic, whose lips curled into a malicious smile at that particular reminder.
“I’m not letting my chance at revenge slip away.”
Dominic huffed a laugh. “I did you a favor. It was either a swift, merciful death at my hand or letting something worse attack at night. You never would have survived after I left.” Dominic and Saige had been the ones to labor away, earning whatever money they could and stealing when their work didn’t support them.
They’d been the ones to put food on their plates and fetch water from the wells.
Pain shot through his jaw, the impact of the hilt of his father’s weapon delivering a harsh, swift blow. Stars danced across his vision.
“I would have survived had you not been a heartless monster, poisoning your own flesh and blood,” he growled.
“Your mother would have survived too, had you not been a reckless, foolish child, venturing out to the unknown, bringing that disease back with you.” His father’s voice wavered hysterically.
The thought of his mother stung, but Dominic merely rolled his eyes. His younger self could not be blamed for his mother falling ill. He wouldn’t let his father do that to him again.
Light peeked through the drifting clouds—it hadn’t been nighttime after all, the world cast into darkness from the storm—reflected off his father’s glossy eyes, anger and sorrow fighting for dominance. “Your sister would have lived if you hadn’t let her take the blame. She was a child!”
So was I, Dominic thought, rage building to a crescendo inside of him.
“You were the one who should have died!” his father shouted, his fist flying at Dominic’s face.
The taste of copper filled Dominic’s mouth as he turned his head back to his father.
He spat blood on the man’s grimy boots. His mouth hung agape as he breathed heavily through the agony sluicing through him.
Running his tongue over his blood-stained teeth, Dominic said, “If she was just a child then why did you let her do everything for this family? That was practically begging for her death. You were the one who murdered her in cold blood.”
Nostrils flaring, his father argued, “She was more than capable of doing things on her own. She was proud to take care of us.”
“Saige wanted nothing to do with you,” Dominic cut in.
“She told me stories every night to drown out the sound of the war, to give me hope in this bleak life. She took me outside to play in the dunes so I wouldn’t see what a drunken, pathetic piece of shit our father was.
I asked her if we could run away, and she was more than happy to go.
” His voice came out in a rough pant, hardly standing the sheer pain coursing through him.
His father stepped back, taken by surprise. Then his face contorted in rage, muscles twitching in his jaw. “Lying bastard!” he shouted, fisting Dominic’s tunic in a tight grip. “That’s not true!”
Dominic stifled a wince, the man’s hold shifting him forward onto his injured leg, and chuckled darkly. “Oh, but it is.”
“You’re lying!” he yelled, spit flying from his mouth.
Dominic grimaced. His dagger shot to Dominic’s throat, blade shallowly slicing into his skin, sending a sharp sting across his neck.
The King of Keys only grinned in response.
It was so satisfying to see his father squirming at the truth.
Saige had taken the blame for Dominic, saying it was her idea to run away, and it was her demise.
He’d give anything to watch his father struggle the way they fought to survive his wrath.
“Three days, Saige told me,” Dominic said.
“She would give you three days to listen to her demands. To stop drinking and find work somewhere. When those three days came to an end and nothing changed, we would leave.” Dominic swallowed a knot of sorrow rising in his throat. “All you had to do was listen to her.”
“You brutally murdered me and left my body to be picked apart by the vile creatures of this land. I will do the same to you,” his father threatened.
Dominic barked a laugh. “Brutally murdered you? That was nothing compared to what I should have done.” Dominic, being too young and scared to do anything else, did the only thing he could think of to get away with it.
He went out into the wastelands and extracted poison from corpses, pouring small amounts into his father’s alcohol bottles until he drank himself to death.
“I poisoned your drinks,” Dominic admitted, though he felt nothing victorious within, only more despair.
“One wouldn’t have killed you, but multiple .
. . All you had to do was stop drinking. ”
“I’ll do to you what you were too much of a coward to do to me,” his father snarled.
Dominic narrowed his eyes with a valorous smirk on his face. “Do your worst.”
But all that cruel confidence faded in a flash as his father unfurled a whip in his hands and Dominic was reduced to nothing but the little boy he used to be, cowering before his father’s drunken rage.
He squeezed his eyes shut at the first crack of the whip, teeth piercing his lips.
He would not give his father the satisfaction of hearing him scream.
This isn’t real. This isn’t real. This isn’t real, Dominic tried to convince himself.
But every time he thought it, the crack of the whip followed, the sting of his skin splitting apart in its wake. Again, and again, and again.
It would be a slow, agonizing torture. Dominic pulled on the bonds holding him hostage, but they wouldn’t budge.
It only made his wrists ache more, skin red and raw from the rope.
Running wasn’t an option even if he wasn’t tied up.
Searing pain shot through his right leg.
Magic—his last resort—hummed in his veins but would not break through, the result of the Ruins stifling it.
Just like old times, he was powerless against his father, unable to fight back.
Dominic could do nothing but bite his tongue, masking his cries of pain.