He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.
We were thinking the same thing. This place wasn’t meant to contain men. It was meant to consume them.
We moved forward, the chains between us scraping against basalt. Our sandals slipped on slick stone. The corridor ahead was narrow, but empty. Every sound we made echoed back to us—two prisoners alone in a place built for hundreds.
“Hope you like your new home,” one of the guards sneered behind us. “Don’t get too comfortable. You’ll be dead soon enough.”
Their laughter followed us down the passage.
Resin torches flickered in iron brackets, coughing up black smoke that smelled of pitch and decay. The flames fought to reach the walls but died before they could touch them, devoured by the dark.
The deeper we went, the colder it became. The air thickened, wet and heavy. My wrists burned beneath the chains, my breath turning to mist. The silence between our footsteps grew longer, darker, until it felt as if the fortress itself were listening.
And then—after what felt like an eternity of stone and shadow—the passage widened.
A vast chamber spread before us, swallowing the torchlight whole. The darkness was alive, waiting.
The room yawned open, a hollow amphitheater of stone, tiered like a temple raised to cruelty. At its center lay a sunken pit of red-packed earth, ringed with jagged pikes that jutted up like broken teeth. The stains that clung to them weren’t relics of the past. They were fresh. Wet in places. Black smears glistened down the metal, whispering of agony, of flesh that had begged before it broke.
“The Enforcer,” one of the guards said.
He emerged from the shadows like something born from it. Massive. Unholy in scale.
His skin was the color of sunbaked clay, scored by a web of scars that crossed his body like a war map. A thick leather harness bound his chest, weighed down by rusted hooks, iron rings, and tools of obedience—implements not meant to kill but to dismantle.
His arms were monstrous, each muscle corded like a rope drawn taut from years of brutality. In one hand, he carried a cudgel so black it seemed to swallow the light itself. Bone charms rattled at his throat—knuckles, teeth, even shriveled fingers curling like dead spiders.
He was a man built for suffering—and to make others taste it.
Not the kind of pain that bled clean.
The kind that dragged you across the edge of death and left you begging to fall.
A cold current of fear crawled down my spine.
Beside me, Lazarus stiffened, his fists tightening against the chains. He said nothing. But his eyes never left the Enforcer.
“Get them on their knees,” the giant said at last. His voice rolled like thunder across the chamber—low, unhurried, the kind of sound that belonged to someone who had never once been defied.
“You heard him!” a guard barked. “Down!”
The command rang out. Chains clattered.
Lazarus and I sank to our knees. Not in surrender—but in something deeper. The air between us thrummed with defiance, silent and burning beneath the inevitability.
The Enforcer began to speak.
Reciting our charges as if he were reading a scripture written in blood.
“Salvatore Lorian,” he said. “Guilty of murder. Your father, Lord Lorian. The nobles Azarel Miran and Dagonel Sulik. And the virtuous Helena Elani—your late brother’s widow.”
I laughed, low and sharp, though my pulse thundered.
“Virtuous, my ass,” I spat. “She was nothing but a fucking whore.”
The words had barely left my mouth before his hand moved.
He drew a barbed strip of metal from the harness across his chest—thin, cruel, rusted with old blood—and slashed it across my face.
