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Chapter Ten
Maxim
Days pass. Maybe weeks.
Months?
I lose all concept of time.
There is no day and night, no light or sun, only the darkness of the stone room and the sound of my own screams—or the absence of them.
Sometimes my throat is too raw for screams.
Sometimes I open my mouth and only a soft wheezing sound seeps out.
Sleep is my only escape and even there the pain haunts me, infusing my dreams with terror and foreboding. Even when I’m unconscious, I know there’s something terrible waiting for me on the other side of my closed lids. I cling to sleep with the stubbornness of a teenager who partied too hard the night before, but my Fey tormentor has ways of waking me when he chooses.
There are only his choices now.
He is in complete control, and I hate him for it, though hate seems too small a word for what I feel for that man. I despise him with every cell of my being and the day that I spill his blood—for that day will come, no matter how certain he is of his absolute dominance—will be one of the best of my life.
I’m fantasizing about Gray’s death—I call him Gray for the flat, merciless color of his eyes—as I lie on my stone bed, waiting for sleep to return and take me away from my wretched new reality when the wooden door on the other side of the room opens and someone new steps into my torture chamber.
Someone so familiar I know it would break my heart if it weren’t already a shredded, useless piece of torture-traumatized flesh.
“Brother,” I mumble through my swollen lips, still puffy from the fist Gray slammed into my mouth a few sleeps ago. “I wondered if you had a hand in this.”
Bane smiles, sending starbursts of wrinkles exploding around his eyes.
He looks so much older than I remember—thicker and stronger and with a hint of gray at his temples—but that’s my brother. Or at least, some version of him. Even after Mother’s death, when our relationship was on its rockiest ground, he would never have taken pleasure in seeing my body broken and brutalized, but he’s clearly enjoying it now.
It seems to be all he can do to suppress laughter as he crosses the room, letting his gaze drift from my swollen face, past my nail-free fingers, down to the leg I’m fairly certain is broken.
My neck is pinned to the stone table so I can’t lift my head to see it, but I’m certain I heard things shatter under Gray’s wooden mallet sometime in the pain-fogged past and my shin bone has throbbed fiercely ever since. At first the agony was so intense it kept me from sleep. But eventually my brain was able to cut off my awareness of the poor, suffering appendage, to erect a roadblock keeping the nerves from carrying reports from the front lines of the war.
The reports were useless anyway. There’s nothing the rest of me can do to help my poor leg.
If I could shift back and forth between my forms and get something real to eat, the bones might start to heal themselves without medical attention. But trapped in my human body, the best I can do for my ravaged bag of bones is sleep as much as I can.
“Consequences, little brother,” Bane says, crossing his arms over his chest as he leans down to get a better look at my throbbing leg. “You always were good at avoiding them, but karma catches up with all of us sooner or later.”
I’ve done nothing to deserve this kind of karma, but I don’t bother defending myself. My instincts assure me Bane is beyond logic and far beyond love.
Whatever path he’s chosen, it forced him to leave the brother love we shared far behind him. He’s still walking around, talking and breathing, but the brother I knew is dead, and he’s never coming back.
It would make me sad, I think, if I had any energy left for feeling things other than pain and hate.
“So, there’s only one thing left for you to decide.” He reaches out, tracing a finger along the crooked line of my shin bone.
The skin is so swollen and hot that I can barely feel his touch, but it still sends a shiver of terror up my spine. It would take so little effort on his part to send me back into the brightest part of my suffering.
Before my time on this stone tablet, I would have imagined agony as a shadowed place. But now I know it is a cramped room filled with blinding light, screaming instruments playing off key, and acid poured into every inch of tender tissue. It is a place no soul should ever be forced to inhabit—at least not more than once, just before they’re granted the mercy of death—and it will haunt me for the rest of my life, long after I’ve escaped and left this pit far behind me.
But I will escape. I will.
I hold tight to the thought as Bane says, “How much do you love your mate?”
A record scratches and skips in my head as my weary mind tries to make sense of his words, but Bane doesn’t keep me guessing for long.
