Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Knox
Her bloodstained fingers stretched toward me before pausing in the air. They hovered between us, not bridging the gap, and I made no move to take them. Her arm fell limply back to her side as confusion marred her features.
“Seth?”
When I didn’t respond to the question in her voice, her gaze traveled from me to Devnair, and then to the caster stuck to my claws. Finally, she looked at Devnair again.
“I can’t get him free,” she said.
“No, you can’t,” I told her.
“We can’t… we can’t leave him here.”
“Why not? Are you that eager to fuck him?”
She recoiled again, but fire was replacing the shock in her eyes as color flooded her face once more. “How do I get the vines undone?” she demanded.
“You leave the room,” I told her.
“And then you can free him?”
“No. Only the casters can open the doors from the inside, so I’m not stepping inside that room without you in it.”
She bit her bottom lip as she studied the room and tapped her foot. When her gaze settled on one of the open doorways within the room, she gawked at the whips, chains, ball gags, swing, and assorted other sex toys lining the shelves within.
I didn’t have to see into the room to know that’s exactly what she was seeing.
My prison was nearly identical to this one, except my comforter was green.
I’d never been inside any of the other rooms either and would never step into them, but I’d seen through the doors’ windows on the occasions we were taken out and paraded around, and I’d noted they only varied by color.
“Then how… how do we get him free?” she asked.
My teeth ground together as I glowered at her. It irritated me that she was so concerned with freeing the elf, and it pissed me off more that it bothered me.
“We don’t,” I told her. “It’s time to go… now.”
The last word came out in a low growl that drained the color from her face again. Briar had never been one for conflict; she avoided it when she could and had often kept me from the main ballroom in No Man’s Land, though we’d both enjoyed the thrill of sneaking in there.
She didn’t move. “I’m not leaving him.”
A sneer curved my lip. I wasn’t used to being disobeyed, and I wasn’t about to be defied by this bitch. “You’ll go where I say you go.”
She looked as if I’d asked her to fly out of here. “We can’t leave him. It’s… it’s cruel.”
“Your kind is cruelty incarnate.”
“That doesn’t mean I am!” she snapped.
I released another harsh, bitter laugh. “You’re the worst of them all.”
“No,” she breathed. “I’m not. I’m not. I don’t know what they did to you in here…. I mean… I… I do know, but I’m not leaving him.”
Ten years had forged a spine where there wasn’t much of one before, but I suspected that most of what I remembered of her was lies. She’d forged the persona she wanted me to see and believe back then.
I glanced at Devnair, who remained held above the bed by the thorns digging into his wrists; I easily recalled the bite of those vicious barbs. The blood dripping onto the bed below him soaked the comforter. Many casters reveled in that blood.
I didn’t know the elf well; I’d shared some experiences with him, as they didn’t always keep us in these rooms and the vines did as the casters commanded.
The vines came from the walls and moved through them as they followed us from one room to another.
There were times when it was all of us and one, or many casters, in the large sitting room with all its pillows.
I’d probably only ever seen the elf once, or maybe twice, in my male form. When I was with the casters, I only saw him as the beast… or at least part of the beast.
“The vines are impenetrable, or at least they were supposed to be,” Devnair said with a pointed look at me.
The corner of my mouth twitched toward a smile. “They are supposed to be.”
“But you can break them,” Briar stated. “Which means you can free him.”
The elf looked at her like she’d sprouted ten heads that bobbed and weaved around her like the snakes around the gorgons.
“Who the fuck is this girl, Knox?” Devnair asked.
“I have no idea,” I answered honestly.
I couldn’t figure out who this woman was in place of the girl who betrayed me. I could still hear her screams and recall her final kiss goodbye.
Then, her mother’s whispered words screamed through my mind once more. Those words ran on repeat through my mind for years. In the beginning, I refused to believe that bitch. My Briar, mea eveto, would never betray me.
But I’d been so wrong, and it wasn’t just the queen who whispered those words to me; other casters did too.
Not all the casters taunted me with their truths, but enough of them did for doubts to start.
And it wasn’t just the words they whispered that gradually changed my mind; it was the other things they knew too.
They knew our supplies and what she’d brought to the tunnel on which day.
That was when my doubts about her first surfaced.
However, I convinced myself that someone could have been watching her without her knowing.
We were always so careful, and she’d managed to sneak into No Man’s Land for years, but we’d always known there was a chance one of us could get caught.
I clung to that hope as the days passed and the torment continued, but the final nail in the coffin of my belief in Briar was when her mother whispered about our plan to live on the ocean. No one could have known about that unless Briar told them.
That dream of sailing away was ours and ours alone; I never would have trusted anyone else with it. Until then, I’d cleaved to the hope Briar hadn’t betrayed me. After that, I couldn’t deny it anymore.
Recalling the depth of her betrayal sparked a fresh surge of loathing for the casters, especially this woman. I had no idea what game she played here, but it was time to go.
“We’re leaving,” I stated.
“Wait!” Devnair cried.
Briar spun back to the vines. “I’m not leaving him here to die!”
“What does he matter to you?” I snarled.
“Nothing, but I told him I’d free him, and I can’t walk away from that. I won’t let him die.”
“But you could put me here to rot.”
She shot a look over her shoulder. “I did no such thing.”
Her scowl deepened as she grasped the vines. The wrinkling of her nose was the only indication that the vines had pierced her flesh again. The coppery scent of fresh blood filled the air.
My gaze shifted back to the elf. As much as I wanted out of this shithole, with its all-too-familiar and hated scents, memories, and horrors, I couldn’t turn my back on a man who was staring me in the eyes.
I had no problem walking out of here without any of the others, but I was too close not to free this one.
“Back up,” I commanded Briar. “Retreat to the corner of the room.”
Briar glanced nervously at the elf before backing into the corner near Devnair’s nightstand.
“If you try to cast a spell, I’ll break your hands,” I told her.
Surprise flickered over her face before she closed her eyes and nodded. I waited to make sure she’d remain where she was before entering the room.
The sorcerer’s heels dragged across the ground as I hauled him toward the bed. I tossed him on the mattress and retracted my claws. Without me penetrating his brain, he’d start healing, but not fast enough to escape.
“Don’t move from there,” I told Briar.
She clasped her hands together before nodding again. Without hesitation, I gripped the vines and ignored the sting of pain from the thorns piercing through flesh to scrape my bones. I’d experienced their bite countless times before and was used to it.
My blood fell to mingle with the elf’s and Briar’s as the beast started to emerge. I’d spent seven years in here with only one part of the beast appearing to protect me from the degradation of this place, but on the day I reached maturity, at the age of twenty-five, something more materialized.
And it was something the casters never could have prepared for, and it allowed me to tear through these vines. I didn’t realize it at the time, but what I could become still didn’t fully surface on that day; that wouldn’t happen until I was far from the harem and alone.
On the day I escaped, enough of it emerged to break me out of the vines, but the spells the casters wove over the harem kept some of that monster suppressed. I’d created a fair amount of damage to the room, but I couldn’t do anything about that.
Despite my thirst for freedom, I managed to get myself under control again before fleeing my room with the caster who’d entered it. Even in the throes of my first shift toward the creature I could fully transition into, I’d known its existence had to remain hidden.
I couldn’t free everyone in here, and I wouldn’t have them telling the casters what they’d seen. That was my secret to unveil when the time was right; not even Pierce, Dromon, or Lyra knew what I could fully shift into.
The animal I’d felt lurking beneath the surface throughout my earlier years of life, the one who marked Briar, was destroyed by the casters and buried beneath the beast that rose to replace it.
But there were more levels to the curse they’d bestowed upon me and my kingdom.
Levels that Marina, in all her arrogance, didn’t know existed.
While I didn’t have time to free everyone, I could free the three other shifters within. I wouldn’t leave here without my kind. I could never return to Wildwood to face my father or their families if I left Lyra, Pierce, and Dromon in the harem. It turned out it didn’t matter.
Now, I didn’t let the full power of my creature out, but I drew on its strength as I pulled at the vines.