Those are the last words I utter as he lets out the depraved side of him that grins with every slice to skin, every bone that snaps beneath his hammer, and any small groan that manages to break through my wall of silence.
Blood trickles warm down my chest to my stomach. I feel it dripping from my fingers and toes as well, the soft splatter against the floor a reminder of the precious resource he wastes.
I keep my chin high, but the scent of my own blood is thick in the room as he continues to try to break me into submission.
I never look at him through it all. I look past him and it pisses him off, twisting his face into an ugly sneer.
The head of his hammer lines up with my knee and I turn toward the brothers for the first time, needing to see their reaction to this.
Callum stands to the left, arms folded so tightly his knuckles are stark white as his fingers dig into his biceps. His jaw grinds, clearly tense, but he doesn’t move. Elias stays distant and unmoved, but I watch the way his eyes cut away as the hammer strikes, crunching bone.
Time ticks by until my body is trembling from the pain that each passing minute brings. I’ve begun to zone out in an attempt to dissociate from it all, but a shadow moves at the edge of my vision. The broad guard with the gold chain. He steps forward, not to stop this, but to place another tool that was yelled for into the waiting hand of the man cutting into the flesh on my thighs before peeling it off with his fingers.
But the whole time, his eyes never glance at me. He stares at the floor, at the wall, anywhere but at the body he’s arming this man to carve. I had to have imagined the soft rumble of laughter in his chest when he carried me, because the man in front of me now looks like he’s built to not have any feelings.
Pain sears down my leg, sharp and fresh. My body jerks against the restraints, but I drag my mind elsewhere. Away from the white walls and away from the blood.
I picture my mother’s hands, elegant and steady, brushing my hair before a gala. The faint smell of her cherry blossom perfume clinging to her skin as she smiled at me in the mirror.
My father’s laugh breaking loose when I once tried to scare him in his office with a mask I’d painted at school.
Lyra and Kael squabbling over whether I should sneak into a private meeting with Aunt Jade and my parents.
The memories come fast, overlapping, and I cling to them with everything I have left. Each one is an anchor against thepain. Each one proof that I’m more than what this man tries to reduce me to.
I’m not the monster this man paints me as and I’m not a prized animal to hold captive and drain of blood.
I’m a daughter who is loved beyond measure.
I’m a woman with her entire life ahead of her once I find a way out.
I’m the vampire that’s going to rip the heart out of the men in this room.
The pain doesn’t stop, but it doesn’t own me either.
I lift my eyes to the ceiling as blood trails from my mouth.
Each time his hand closes around a new tool, I fall back into myself. Back into memory. It’s the only way to keep from crumbling.
The burns come next, hot iron pressed against my flesh until my body arches off the slab. The screams tear from my throat before I can trap them, but in my head I’m somewhere else.
My papa’s study at the academy. His voice floats through my mind as he tells me I’m clever enough to run the world if I want to. His radiant smile, proud and certain.
Movie nights with Dad, where we’d make friendship bracelets together and force the others to wear them the next day.
One wave of pain folds over the next until every passing second that I force air into my lungs is misery.
I don’t know how long it’s been. Minutes. Hours. Days.
All I know is that the light overhead has never dimmed, and the man circling me has never stopped smiling.
My body sags against the restraints, every breath thin and shallow. I dangle on the edge of unconsciousness, weightless, caught between wanting to sink into the dark and clawing to stay above it.
Still, even broken, bleeding, and barely clinging to my conscious state, I spit blood onto the floor the second there is a slight reprieve in fresh pain.
“Done already?” I rasp out.
A growl echoes through the room as my eyelids droop.
