This was all his fault.
“Stop!” The word ripped from him, tearing at his vocal cords. “Stop it, don’t fucking touch her!”
His voice bounced off the glass, echoing back to him in mocking repetition. Useless.He was fucking useless.
“I’m right here!” he yelled, straining against the cords until he could feel them cutting into his skin, slicing through flesh. Pain shot up his arms, his legs, his chest, but it was nothing, nothing compared to the agony they would put her through. “You want to hit someone, hit me! Hurt me instead, you fucking cowards!”
His only answer was another blow, another muffled cry that shredded something fundamental inside of him. She was trying not to scream, he realized. Trying to be strong, to not give them the satisfaction.
But he could hear the toll it was taking, each suppressed whimper, each choked off gasp. She was breaking, cracking, crumbling under their brutality, and there wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do about it.
“Please just hurt me!” he shouted, his voice cracking.
He wasn’t above begging. Not now, not with her pain echoing in his ears, reverberating in his skull. He would grovel, plead, debase himself in any way they demanded if it would make them stop. If it would spare her.
A new sound snapped through the air—the impact of something harder than a fist. Shadera’s pained gasp this time was followed by the unmistakable sound of bone cracking.
“I’ll fucking kill you!” Greyson screamed, fury unleashing through his body. “Every last one of you. I’ll hunt you down and cut your throats myself!”
The threats poured from him, vicious and detailed. He described precisely how he would end each of them, how he would ensure their deaths were witnessed and remembered. The words flowed like poison, like blood, like all the darkness he’d kept contained for so long.
But his words fell on deaf ears. Or perhaps they simply fell on cruel ones, ears that reveled in his desperation, in his anguish. The blows continued, relentless, merciless, each one a fresh hell, a new lesson in the depths of his father’s brutality.
Between his screams, between her gasps and the blows and the all-consuming rage, another emotion began to take root in the center of Greyson’s chest as he listened to them torture her. An emotion he’d been denying, suppressing, hiding from.
Strapped to this chair, listening to her agony, that emotion demanded to be named.
Still he refused to acknowledge it.
Her cries were weakening now, fading into little more than ragged breaths and soft, broken whimpers. Greyson’s heart seized at the sound, at the wet rattle in her lungs that spoke of internal damage, of injuries that might never heal.
“Shadera,” he breathed, his voice cracking into shards on her name. “Hold on. Just hold on. I’m here. I’m right here.”
The blows finally ceased, leaving a ringing silence in their wake. Greyson held his breath, straining to hear any sound, any indication that she was still breathing, still fighting.
Then, out of the terrible quiet, a new sound emerged. Footsteps, slow and measured, echoing in the space beyond his cell. The deliberate tread of expensive shoes on concrete, each step a declaration of power, of control.
Greyson knew that walk. He’d heard it on marble floors and parquet ballrooms, had felt it vibrate through his bones as he hid in closets as a child.
It was the sound of his nightmares, of his darkest fears and deepest shames.
The sound of his father.
Maximus Serel stepped into view, his golden mask gleaming in the harsh light. He stood before Greyson’s cell, his posture relaxed, almost lazy in its arrogance. When he spoke, his voice was the rich, smooth baritone of a practiced orator, a charismatic leader. A lie given form.
“Oh, my son.”
Despite the pain, despite the fear and the soul deep anguish still reverberating through him, Greyson felt his lips pull back from his teeth in a snarl. “I am going to fucking kill you.”
Shaderawascaughtina world of blood and pain, each nerve ending shrieking in agony. The blows stopped suddenly, the absence of new pain almost as shocking as its infliction. She drew in a shuddering breath, tasting copper on her tongue, feeling it bubble in her lungs.
She blinked through the swelling around her eyes, squinting against the light. Her cell resolved itself in increments, the details filtered through a haze of concussion and Maximus’s best efforts to break her.
She would not break for the devil.
Red cord bit into her flesh, weaving across her body in a grotesque web, binding her so tightly she couldn’t tell where her battered skin ended and the restraints began.
She was no stranger to pain, to imprisonment, to the unique cruelties the Heart reserved for those it deemed enemies. But this . . . this was new. This was intimate, personal in a way that chilled her beyond the freezing cold of the cell.
