Chapter 22
Ashley
my spirit cries out to the Holy One,
Hallel for I am reformed!
Every single atom in my body aches. My fingers, my toes, my face…
hell, even my hair hurts. And I don’t know how the heck I ended up on the floor.
The last thing I remember is that bastard tying me to the chair, followed by a hard thump in my chest that warned me to protect myself.
Then, the room dissolved into nothing. Groaning, I lift my head, every movement a little war.
My eyes find the Captain immediately. He’s in his usual spot.
That chair. But blood is pooling under him and seeping into the cracks of the stone floor.
With everything I’ve got, I haul myself to my feet.
The cell bars are melted, like they’ve been cooked in a furnace, and he is a mess.
Long, jagged gashes up to his thighs, thick splotches of blood soaking his shredded top.
My stomach churns at the deep wounds climbing his shuddering torso.
“What happened?” My throat is burning. Like I swallowed a lit match.
His head hangs limp, but his dark lashes flutter ever so slightly, and something in my heart leaps in desperate hope. A shadow of whatever I felt that night he took those steps towards me. A shadow of magic.
“Please… Captain? If you can hear me, I just… I just want to go home. Can you let me out? Please?”
I cling to the bars with bloody hands. His eyelids flicker again.
Confusion wars with panic, and I try to drag in air, but it doesn’t feel like enough. “Kaed?”
He repeats the motion and I try to make sense of it. Is he trying to tell me something?
“My door?” I ask. He blinks twice, though his eyes are half closed. I ask him again. And again. The blinks are too uniform to be a mistake, so I stagger across to the door of my cell, gripping the iron bars as I go. My heart pounds in my ears when I push against it, and it doesn’t budge.
“I don’t understand. I don’t—” My words are coming out in bits and pieces, forced out between the sobs I’m trying so desperately to pull back into my throat.
Not to mention how sick I feel begging a man for help, when does that ever happen?
But the more we communicate, the more that tingle of power grows in my heart.
Only slightly, though, it feels tired, like it’s been used and it’s exhausted.
Like it’s injured. For the first time, a frown creases his otherwise blank expression.
His fingers twitch, again. Urgh, I get it, the fucking door.
But what? I press my cheek to the bars and look through them, toward the front of my cell door.
My heart skips a beat as something catches my eye.
“Oh,” I gasp. “Oh! The key. Thank you, Kaed!”
It hangs from the lock on the other side.
“Can you unlock it for me?” My voice is so messed up, I must sound like a hundred-year-old smoker to him.
But I hear a child. A desperate little Victorian orphan trapped in a broom cupboard.
He doesn’t move, so I guess that’s a no.
My trembling fingers stretch through the nearest gap in the bars.
But it’s too far. My muscles scream at me as I try and try again.
Fuck. And again. Fuck. Kaed’s chest is rising and falling in shallow, wheezy breaths, his blood still flowing onto the floor.
And I don’t know why, but it’s making me feel things I shouldn’t.
I’m sad, but it’s not normal; it’s mixed with an anger at whoever or whatever did this to him.
But he doesn’t deserve my sadness, considering what he’s done to me.
Right? Even as those thoughts wind through my mind, I don’t think I actually believe them.
But why help me now? It could be another trap or maybe he just needs me to help him.
Though it doesn’t feel like that. Good God, Ashley.
My reasoning right now is it doesn’t feel like that.
He must have removed some of my brain for their little experiments whilst I was knocked out.
“I can’t reach it,” I rasp.
His body remains frozen. He doesn’t so much as try to wipe away the blood trickling into his eyes from the cut on his forehead. He doesn’t seem to do anything at all unless he’s directly told to do it. Then something clicks.
“Are you under like, a spell?”
Two blinks.
My throat tightens, and realisation creeps up my back as I put two and two together. “Is that why your eyes… is that why you’re like this? Why you do what they say? That thing they make you smell…”
Another two slow blinks. Okay, so whether it’s because of his injuries or because of magic, he can’t help me.
For fuck’s sake. I’m going to get that blasted key even if I lose an arm in the process.
I need to get out of here — and maybe he does too.
His fingers twitch weakly, as if pointing behind me.
I trace the invisible line to the corner of my cell, where a bucket sits forgotten.
I haven’t used it. How could I? When everything from my stomach comes back up in retching fits or soaked through my leggings during hours of fucking torture?
“You evil fire-bat genius,” I mutter, a little grim humor in my tone, and I swear I hear the faintest sound of a deep chuckle.
I fumble with it clumsily, clawing at the twisted wire handle, but it won’t budge, so I pull harder.
My broken fingers scream, and the metal cuts into my skin, fresh blood staining the silver bucket.
A strangled whimper escapes me as I brace it between my thighs and yank with every ounce of strength I have left, begging that tiny tingle in my heart to help.
Finally, with a metallic snap, it comes free.
A cracked sound of triumph bubbles from my throat.
Twisting the wire into something that looks a little bit like a hook, I stretch through the bars again, edging closer.
Almost there. The loop hooks over the key, and hope burns through my exhaustion until the wire slips from my grasp and clatters to the ground outside the cell.
A frustrated cry tears from my throat as I fall back onto my knees, my head dropping in despair.
whoosh. The most delicate wisp of smoke, so faint I can barely see it, spirals lazily from Kaed’s fingertip.
Small as it is, I scramble back, but it wanders through the air and nudges the wire toward my cell.
A trickle of blood slides from his nose, and his eyes completely shut.
My stomach twists, and panic surges through me like electricity.
I’ve got to save him. Save him? The fuck?
I’ve dreamed of watching this man die a thousand different ways since the day he dragged me from my apartment.
Under a spell or not, he maimed me! Ashley. Focus.
I grab the wire and try again. My breath comes in short, shallow gasps as I twist and tug and stretch.
A metallic click makes my heart stutter in my chest, the noise dredging up nightmares, but the door swings open.
I take a careful step outside the cell, half expecting some invisible force to push me back in again.
But it doesn’t. I don’t know who or what is waiting outside, what kind of weapons or magic or spells they might have, but staying here is not an option.
I won’t die in this hellhole. I make for the main door, but something tugs at me, gnawing at the back of my mind.
Him. His body is slouched, shoulders sagging, and blood from his nose dribbles down his chin, dripping onto the hand that rests limply in his lap.
“I don’t know how to help you,” I hiss frantically, half to him, half to myself.
He lets out a low grunt, his dull eyes opening slowly and locking with mine, his brows furrowing in a silent message. Go. And God knows I try to, but my whole body betrays me. I take a hesitant step toward him, then another, even as my instincts scream at me to turn back.
“I—I can’t leave you.”
He grunts again, almost pleading, but my feet make decisions for me until I’m standing over him.
Close enough to see every slice of his skin.
It’s so much worse up close. Bright red covers his body, and bits of bone poke through his clothes.
I circle him carefully, trying my best to ignore the squeamish side of me and push down the bile in my throat.
A memory flickers. A force tearing through the air.
The Captain’s body slamming against the bars with a sickening crack.
I did this. Fuck me. I don’t know why I feel bad, almost angry at myself, it wasn’t on purpose.
But it never is, is it? My parents. Maurice.
My bed. And if the commands and magic smelling salts were making him hurt me, then that wasn’t on purpose either.
“Can you hear me?” I crouch down, ignoring the pain in my knees. “Can you get up?”
Even though he is slimmer than when I’d first got here, he’s still a solid mass of muscle.
I can’t carry him, no chance. Up close, it’s obvious that the time here has worn him down.
Torturing people must take a lot out of someone.
Dark circles hang thick and heavy under his eyes, and his hair is longer and even more matted.
I didn’t realise he was wearing the same clothes all this time.
Panic pushes me back to reality, and I look around searching for, I don’t know what.
Ashley, make a fucking decision. I’ll have to drag him, and the bleeding will have to wait.
Grabbing the thin maroon material on his bed mat, I pull at it, trying to tear the stiff blanket into strips.
But it’s not maroon. It’s caked in thick layers of old blood.
Shit. Frustrated, I resort to wrapping the entire thing around his torso and the chair, double knotting it.
It’s so strange to be this close to him, and I’m the one in control.
A mixture of satisfaction and sympathy pits in my stomach when he lets out a low, pained grunt.
Crouching between his knees, I grab the front legs of the chair.
My broken fingers jut out at a strange angle, and my back burns, but I ignore it and drag him toward the exit.
The chair screeches against the floor far too loudly.
I tiptoe, peeking through the small window in the door.
The hinges squeal when I nudge it open. A hallway stretches out in both directions, eerily empty.
By the time we reach the end of the corridor, my chest is heaving.
I glance up, and instantly my heart deflates.
Light from a small square opening spills down a tall flight of stone stairs, burning my eyes.
How the fuck am I supposed to get him up there?
Hope wavers in my chest, and my ears catch the distant sound of shouting.
The clash of metal on metal follows. It’s nothing like the normal commands and laughter I hear sometimes from my cell when I’m conscious.
This is violent. And loud. And it’s getting louder.
Maybe there’s another way out. I start dragging him back the way we came, when light flickers behind me.
My heart sinks as a figure marches straight down the stairs towards us.
Theron. I step in front of Kaed. My legs threaten to give out beneath me, but I somehow find the strength to hold my ground.
I reach for my magic, begging, pleading, bargaining.
Then I feel it, right there. Theron’s eyes lock onto mine as he closes the distance, each heavy footfall reverberating in my chest. He is only a few steps away—
BOOM!
A deafening blast and stone explodes around us. I stumble as the entire wall caves in. Dust and debris fill the air.