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"Nothing," I assure him. "But you forgot your helm. Your cloak."
"Darling Elva." He pulls me by my hand closer until I have to tilt my head up to look at him. "No one in that room who is about to see my face is going to live to tell anyone about it."
"Oh." I nod, the finality of what's about to happen coming into focus. I've been a part of negotiations before, and my talents were incredibly useful during them. But I've never allowed myself to fully explore how horrid they could be. And I suppose now I'm finally going to. And in the end, Kairon will kill them.
I tell myself it's not because of me. But because they betrayed him, they infiltrated his home, which can't go unpunished.
When the room comes into my line of sight, I nearly double over and vomit. Rusty weapons sit just outside the barred cage. The Syrens are scraping at the floor, fingertips bloody and raw from trying to reach them. There are pieces of what looks like bloody lumps of scales and light pink flesh scattered amongst the floor. Both Syrens have red eyes, swollen from crying.
Shan sits in the back, hacking away, hardly able to move at all.
Kairon tilts his head, looking at him strangely. He leans down to quietly mention, "They've only been down here a day or two. No infection should have taken hold that quickly."
"Perhaps he was already ill." I shrug. "Does it matter? You'll kill him long before any sickness could."
He grins at me, playful and malicious and devastatingly handsome. Almost hauntingly so, like he's the God of death himself. Which, I suppose, is an entirely accurate description. If ever there was a man who possessed a godlike power, it's this one.
And he's going to use it all to avenge wrongs that were done to me.
Before I can let that thought get too far, before the warmth it fills me with can push me to do something foolish, something slams into the bar in front of me, startling me out of the staring contest Kai and I were having.
Kai presses me behind him, and we both watch as Shan throws himself against the bars again and again.
"Kill the girl," he mutters to himself. "Kill the girl and then hide. Kill girl. Kill, kill, kill."
The Syrens beside him shrink back, hiding in the corner together and whimpering from fear and pain as they scrape their legs on the hard floor, fleeing from Shan's madness.
"Shan," Kairon says, trying to get his attention.
Shan looks right through him, veiny eyes wide open and trained on me as he runs and hits himself against the bars again, tearing at them desperately and screeching his frustration. Repeatedly, he mutters kill girl, doing anything to crawl out of the cage he's within.
"He's gone completely mad," I say, stepping around Kairon. I refuse to hide from this, from the carnage in front of me.
Kairon sighs. "It must have something to do with whoever destroyed his memories. All he knows is that he has to kill you, then wait. Now that he knows you're alive, nothing else will register in his mind."
"So what do we do?"
He shrugs, watching impassively as Shan tears his own skin apart on the hard columns as he tries to squeeze through the bars. "Put the fucker out of his misery."
"But we don't have any answers from him." I tug on his arm, pulling his attention back to me. "You can't kill him yet."
"Once he dies, he might calm the fuck down and give us something useful," he suggests. "If not... well, he'll be dead and harmless. To you, anyway."
"To me?" I ask.
He nods, leaning in to share a secret with me, "I'm still very much going to use him to kill our enemies. Call it a cruel irony, a vicious and poetic end."
My cheeks warm. His overwhelming attention while so cavalierly demanding someone's head makes my body heat all over. He notes the change, his eyes heating as they search my face. For a fraction of a second, his gaze drops to my lips, and I'm reminded of that day in the market so long ago when, even then, my body craved to give in to his wicked taunts.
"And we still have two more prisoners. Once Shan is neutralized, you can do all the torturing you want, and I'll happily watch."
Torture. It's not always an effective approach, but it's one I can almost guarantee working when it's done my way. External torture will never be as effective as the tricks our own bodies can play on us.
I nod, and within seconds, Shan's body falls to the floor in my peripherals, the Syrens' screams filling the air as he does. Kairon's eyes never even left mine. He didn't so much as flinch, his power silently stealing the life from Shan without the king showing an ounce of effort.
From the corner of my eye, the corpse starts to rise again. Kai turns to him, not speaking aloud, but I get the feeling he's giving orders of some kind. While I'm not entirely sure how his power works, I do know he doesn't need to use his voice to make commands.
He exhales heavily, frustration evident, before letting the body drop again. "Nothing useful. His memories are effectively completely empty, aside from orders to kill the girl and wait for someone to come find him. No faces, no voices even. The only glimpse of a memory in there is a Syren song infiltrating his every thought, the music taking him from one disjointed thought to the next."
