CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
SANORA
I didn’t know how long I’d been lying on the steel while fire burned beneath me. It hadn’t been thirty minutes yet—if what Winifred had said was true—because I still wasn’t feeling the heat fully.
Maybe ten minutes?
The fire there must have been truly small. My skin was warming steadily, rising in temperature, but it was still tolerable. For now.
I was exhausted. Every muscle weakened with fatigue from fighting—fighting the ropes, fighting their voices, fighting the terror clawing at my mind. My ears rang with the echo of my own sobs, and my skin burned where the ropes had rubbed me raw, where the knife’s edge had pricked over and over from my thrashing.
Still, they hadn’t stopped chanting.
They’d been at it without a single break since the ritual began, their voices weaving through the night air endlessly and loud.
I lay there, panting raggedly as the pain from my struggle settled over me, the blood soaking through my blouse from where the knife had pierced, the bruises blossoming under the ropes where they bit into my calves, arms and torso.
My voice was gone, my throat scraped so harshly that even if I tried to shout again, it would come out as nothing but a rasp. No matter how much I screamed, they wouldn’t stop.
It hurt. Everywhere hurt.
It hurt to move even a fraction of an inch.
It hurt to breathe.
It hurt to make a sound.
My eyes burned from crying. My head pounded from the endless screaming. Pain had replaced everything else; it was all I knew.
And to top it off, I was being roasted alive.
Fuck.
I closed my eyes, hot tears sliding sideways into my ears. I had no fight left inside me—I could only lie there, waiting for either death or salvation, whichever reached me first.
I’d imagined dying before—Gods, I’d even fantasised about it. The ways it’d be, the places I’d draw my last breath. But that fantasy had shifted over the past few days.
It had gone from slipping away quietly in my sleep at a very old age—or dying drowned in too much money—to something else entirely.
One particular reason.
One particular person.
If I had to die at all, I wanted it to mean something. I wanted it to be the way that would make Thrax mortal again. Without me, he’d wander this world empty forever.
Even the thought of it dragged more tears from my eyes. I didn’t want that for him. I didn’t want to die and take away the one thing he needed most.
I loved him so much that the thought of him still walking this earth after I was gone broke my heart into nothing.
He didn’t want me dead. He didn’t want my soul. Yet here they were, doing this as though he’d want it one day.
He wouldn’t even let me talk about it for fuck’s sake!
A few minutes later, their chanting slowed. The endless hum cracked and began to unravel until it fell silent.
The air turned eerily still. So still that the chirp of insects and the sound of other night creatures could be heard.
It should have been my moment to speak, but I knew nothing I said would reach them.
