ChapterSeventeen
“Gartox?” I confirm to break up the silence and give my mind a few more seconds to scramble for a plan B.
His green eyes light up with interest, but he doesn’t answer. I start to wonder why no one else has kicked in his door to investigate the screaming, but they’re all Order members; maybe bloodcurdling fear is just what they need to sleep easy throughout the night. I guess that means I’m really on my own here. No one is coming, no matter how much I might beg for it if things go badly. Three glamoured skeletal men rise to the surface of my thoughts before I shut everything down and prepare myself for whatever is about to happen.
“Good enough for me,” I grumble, done stalling, and then as fast as fangs, I step to the side.
I see Gartox stiffen, preparing for the attack we both know is coming, and then I see his head snapping left and right in shock as I step deeper into a shadow and disappear altogether. I pop up in a dark recess to the Bruin’s right, and I’m on him before he can track me. Fairy light flashes on the metal of my blades as I bring my two daggers down his naked chest from shoulder to ribs. Swiftly, I retreat back into the darkness again, moving myself to a pool of shadows at his back. This time he reaches for me, but I’m gone before he can so much as whirl around.
The gouges I leave in his back and front are deep but not deep enough to bring the colossus to his knees. They’ll weaken him, and that’s half my battle. He howls as I strike out at him again. It rings of rage more than pain as I vanish once more just as he turns to face me.
“Stand still, you miserable cunt!” he snarls, his body and muscles taut as he spins around in place, frantically searching for me.
My only response is to step back into the light across the room and pitch two push daggers at him. One sinks into the base of his neck on the left side, while another blade buries itself hilt deep just below his collar bone on the same side. I’m gone before his furious eyes can track me, and then he does what I was hoping he wouldn’t do until I’d gotten a few more hits in. He steps as far from the shadows as he can and growls an incantation that makes the fairy light in the room flare. The light doesn’t banish every shadow in the room, but it illuminates enough that things just became pointedly harder for me.
“It seems Tilleo has been holding out that he owns a highborn bitch,” Gartox snarls, plucking the two push daggers from his skin and muscle like they don’t even faze him. “Shoulda known as much when the Scorpions didn’t want me to even look at ya.”
Blood gushes from the wound at his throat, but not enough to give me hope that he’ll drop dead from it or that it’ll force him to shut the fuck up.
“Does that highborn slit taste sweeter with all that rich blood pumping between your thighs?” he asks, reaching down to cup himself again as his eyes dart around the few shadows that still remain in the room. “Is that what the Scorpions like so much about ya? Why ya mum sold ya off? Your highborn cunt too much of a distraction for your pa?”
He starts to laugh, but I ignore the taunts and debate where to attack from now.
“Did you think you could save your little friends?” he mocks. “It’s the brave ones who always end up screaming the loudest,” he jibes just as I step out of the left corner behind him, wrath seething from every pore.
Before I can so much as raise the knives in my hands and leap for him, awhooshfills the air and then pain slams into me. I stumble back into the stone nook at my back and then look down to find both push daggers buried deep, side by side, in my shoulder. The blade I had ready in my palm clangs to the ground as my right arm goes completely numb.
Shit!
I push past the alarm that sounds in my mind and shut down the pain. The shadows pull me back into the safety of their cool embrace a mere millisecond before two huge arms try to wrap themselves around me. Gartox yells his frustration and then starts to stalk from one shadow to another, waiting for me to appear. My options are severely limited. There’s a sliver of darkness by the large wardrobe that he hasn’t noticed yet, or I can hide beneath the bed; I’m screwed either way.
“If you run, little gash, I’ll find you,” he snaps when the room once again grows quiet and I stay hidden for too long. “Tilleo can’t help ya now, ya stupid whore. The moment you interfered in my business, you becamemine. If I have to bid on your cunt to own it, I will. I will rip ya open and fuck you till you can’t scream anymore. Then I’ll get ya a healer and do it all over again and again and again. You’ll wish you’d left your wee friends to die before I’m done with ya,” Gartox shouts into the room, his threats bouncing from stone wall to stone wall, making them impossible to escape.
A chill slips down my back as I watch him from the safety of the gray darkness that’s both a part of this world and yet isn’t. The Bruin grows even more enraged as I refuse to step into the light and give him an easy target. Warmth drips down my chest, and the tunic under my chest plate starts to grow tacky as it soaks up my blood. Gartox picks up a chair and throws it across the room with an unhinged howl, and just as the chair comes to rest askew against a wall, I see an opening.
I jump from one shadow to another, crouching in a new pitch black pool made by the leaning broken chair, while Gartox rips a panel of fabric from the ceiling around the bed. I leap for him while his back is turned and, with my one good arm and hand, sink the long blade of a dagger into his upper back. I hit bone, and the blade sticks. Panicked, I push against his body with my knees, trying to free one of the few weapons I have left.
Before I can stop it, I’m ripped from Gartox’s back and pinned against a wall. Air abandons my lungs as quickly as a plan abandons me. I struggle against his hold, a salacious smile all I see as Gartox presses his thumb into the blades still sticking out of my shoulder. I left them in, not wanting to deal with the damage and blood loss of taking them out, but now I’m regretting that choice as the small, serrated edges start to dig deeper. I bite back a whimper, and Gartox’s dark chuckle fills my ears as he slams me back against the wall to try to stop my attempts to break free of his strong grasp.
The rich smell of blood drowns out everything else as I fight the dread and pain that starts to take hold of me. My instincts scream for me to get as far away from this beast as I can, but he’s so damn strong I can’t break away. He presses into me, the blood from his own wounds stamping my armor as he does. A familiar tingling starts in my gums, and I lift my good arm and dig my thumb into Gartox’s eye, pressing as hard as I can and hoping the shock of it will loosen his grip.
He laughs even as I feel his eyeball start to give way. I push harder, trying to destroy his eye, but the fucker just grinds his disgusting length into me as though nothing matters more than that terrifying promise of things to come. Fangs drop in my mouth, my fear entirely too potent to keep my body from revealing my secrets. Before I can question the instinct, I lean forward and sink my two razor sharp canines into the fucker’s neck. I tear into the wound left by my push daggers, the very same daggers that are now digging further into my shoulder. I rip at him with my teeth, trying to do as much damage as I can while reaching for the long knife I left in his back.
Gartox roars in pain and shock, and it spurs me on as he reaches for the braided tails of my long hair. He wraps them around one fist and yanks hard in an effort to force me to pull my teeth from his throat.
“What the fuck are you?” he bleats, just as I involuntarily swallow a mouthful of his blood.
I’m shocked and disgusted at just how good he tastes. I suck down another swallow, unable to help it, while I simultaneously question what the fuck I’m doing right now and fight the growing need to gulp down more. I’ve known about my fangs since the first time the masters starved me, but I’ve never felt the urge to drink blood from another fae before. I always thought the fangs were a response to either being too hungry or too emotional, but there’s no denying I’m getting something from this, that Gartox’s blood is workingforme.
I’ve done everything I can to keep this part of me hidden. I learned all too quickly what happens if you stand out or show how different you are from the other blade slaves. But if my secrets can save my life, I’ll use every weapon I have in my body’s mysterious arsenal.
I clamp my teeth down harder and greedily suck more blood down. It heats through me like a soothing balm, healing and strengthening as it works through my system. I’m stunned by the sensation, lost to it, and then pain blinds me when Gartox gives up on ripping my hair out of my head to get me off of him and starts punching me instead. My ribs break with the first hit, and I gasp against the throbbing sting of it. He punches me again just as I finally get my hand around the knife in his back. I pull for all that I’m worth as he pounds against my head and abdomen. But his blood in my body works to counteract the damage he’s doing. I hiss from the anguish of him battering my outsides, while his blood painfully fixes things from the inside.
The dagger in his back just starts to come loose when, out of nowhere, something stabs into my chest. I ignore it at first, all of my focus on getting the weapon free from his back and into my hand so I can shove it through his throat. Then, all at once, Gartox gasps and slackens against me. His fist glances off my cheek, but not nearly as hard as before, and then his hand drops away altogether. I rear back, preparing myself for the new attack he must be mounting, but all I find is a shocked look on the Bruin’s face, and then he stumbles back away from me.
As he does, the tip of a sharp sword pulls free from my chest just above my right breast, and I discover the glinting metal is also protruding from Gartox. It pierces through the exact spot where his heart is. Astonishment paints the Bruin’s face as he reaches for the pointy tip sticking out of his chest, like he can’t understand how it got there. My heart pounds like it’s banging on a door to salvation, begging to be let in, but it won’t budge. Confusion battles my relief as I look up to see who just stabbed the bastard, but there’s no one standing around eager to take credit for it.
Blood starts to leak out of the beast’s mouth, and he wavers on his feet. I slide down the wall, my body and face throbbing with pain as the blood I stole continues to try to erase it from the inside out. Gartox falls to his knees, and it’s then that I see the lean girl with the bright red hair now tangled around her shoulders standing behind him. She looks at me once, her hands limp at her side and covered in blood. She blinks and then pitches forward, her body finally giving out and taking her soul with it. I try to grab her, to keep her from falling next to the fucker who did this to her, but I’m too hurt and too slow.
