Vade flipped his hair out of his face and paced around the room. He looked at the ceiling and took two deep breaths in and out. Aftertying his hair in his typical knot, he adjusted the sleeves of his leathers and pressed his shoulders back, steadying himself.
“Are you aware of what I am?” he asked Ivan, who was barely conscious. “Gods-dammit . . .” Vade muttered. He snatched a vial of seidr sana off the ledge and grabbed Ivan’s face, ignoring the agonized sounds. His left eye was swollen shut, lip split, and his left cheek was sunken where the bone had caved in.
“I want you to see every bit of this.” Vade bit the cork, pulled it free, and poured the sana into Ivan’s mouth.
Ivan choked, spitting up some of the liquid. Vade covered his mouth with his hand, forcing him to swallow the rest of it.
Within a minute, the elixir had taken effect, and the swelling on Ivan’s face receded. When his eye had returned to its normal state and his breathing came easier, Vade took a few steps back.
“Why?” Ivan asked after he’d spit blood onto the floor. “Why bother healing me if you’re just going to kill me?” His teeth had regrown but remained coated in blood, the metallic scent hanging in the air.
“Because you don’t deserve a quick death. Because you deserve to suffer, just as you made her suffer.”
A little light went out of the human’s eyes. “Is she your wife?”
Vade cocked his head. “Would it matter if she was? Would you treat any woman that way regardless if she was with someone or not?”
“No . . .” he said, defeated. “I suppose it wouldn’t matter.”
The flippant response would have sent Vade reeling when he first became the executioner, but he had learned to control his responses, knowing the wait would be worth it.
Ivan sat back, gaze landing on the weapon wall. “So, which of those will you use? All of them?”
“Are you aware of what I am?” Vade repeated more firmly.
Ivan looked him up and down. “A sorcerer, I presume. Someone who brings a person to a torture chamber and chains them up could only be as sick as one, you dark magic fuck.”
Vade smirked. He reached into himself, deep in his chest where his power came from and called on the Omnimagia. The darkness within rose and coiled like snakes in a barrel begging to be let out.
There was an evil in him he knew wasn’t from his father. It was inherent. A wolf incessantly chewing on the bars of its cage. He didn’t know how to tame it; he only knew the beast went quiet when Orelia was around.
Vade let his shadows slither out of each finger and slowly make their way across the room.
Ivan let out a high-pitched scream.
“I told you, it’s useless to do that,” Vade said with a smile in his voice.
The shadows slithered through the air and wrapped around Ivan’s face. With a quick jerk of the fae’s hands, they tightened around his neck. Not tight enough to make it impossible for the human to breathe but tight enough to keep his attention.
“You’re a Myrker Fae,” Ivan squeaked out.
Vade took a step forward. “And do you know what they call me?”
Ivan swallowed, and the movement looked painful.
Good.
“No,” Ivan said, clinging to the arms of the chair with a white-knuckled grip.
“They call me Death’s Shadow. I deliver death as my job. I kill those that need killing. And one day, when I was mutilating a group of Freebeasts in the woods not far from here, one of them said something I’ll never forget.”
Ivan’s petrified eyes were solely focused on the killer stalking toward him.
Vade gripped both arms of the chair, leaned over the man, and lowered his voice when he spoke. “The Freebeast saw what I had done to his friends. To his family. He saw how I ripped their limbs from their bodies with my bare hands. He saw how I choked them to death with my darkness and how I carved up the others with my axe until they were just pieces of discarded flesh."
Ivan’s bottom lip trembled and the tears started to come.
Vade deepened his voice. “When I was about to kill him, he said, ‘I never knew something as dark as death could still cast a shadow.’ And that’s when I knew what I was. When I fully accepted what I was meant to do. I was meant to maim. To hurt. To kill. To embrace the darkness I was born with.”
