He tips my face back and forth, examining me from all angles. “Such a pretty one, and with such a beautiful mind. You were doing so much for my research, really. It is a shame it came to this.”
“Don’t fucking touch him,” Xeni growls.
Zadeus whirls as Xeni’s arm swings in an arc, his blade headed straight for his father’s neck, but he catches Xeni’s wrist mere inches away with a smug grin.
“Oh, I won’t kill him, Xenesis. I’ll just enjoy the show.”
The guards recover while Xeni’s attention is on his father, and they rush him again, dragging him back to his knees.
Zadeus turns to me with a voice that rolls over me like smoke.
“Take your friend’s knife, Sebastian.”
Fuzziness overtakes my body with the command, that sense of floating in the clouds, but instead of the soothing edge I found in Xeni’s, this one is brambled and full of edges that cut down to the bone.
My hand moves without my permission as Xeni’s face twists to panic, and my fingers defy my internal screaming protests as they wrap around the hilt of Cato’s blade. Strength I don’t usually possess pulls it away even as he fights me, and I wrestle free from his hold.
“That’s it,” Zadeus encourages. “Do you feel how hard your heart is beating in your neck?”
When I only bare my teeth, he bares his right back.
“Answer me!”
“Yes,” I grit.
He nods as his lips ease into a smirk. “Good. Put the point there.”
I’m glued to the cloudy depths of his eyes, no better than a puppet on his strings. The knife pushes into my neck until it indents the skin.
“No!” Xeni screams, his power filling the room in an oppressive cloud as he shoves the guards away and scrambles to his feet. It drops his father’s influence on me long enough to let me meet his gaze.
Guards surround him once more as a tear slips from my eye.
The magic forces my attention back to its wielder, and the blade sinks deeper until I wince with the slice. A sticky drop of blood trickles down my neck, scorching against my skin.
Zadeus tracks its path with cold fascination. “He makes you weak, Xenesis. You know what has to be done. You’ve known all along, haven’t you?”
Xeni’s scream is closer to a wail as his father reaches forward to drag his thumb across my cheek, mirroring the way he’dtouched Xeni moments before. The gesture is intimate, almost tender, and it turns my stomach.
“Tell me, son,” Zadeus continues, eyes never leaving mine. “How much did it hurt, being separated from him? What will his death do to you?”
The coercion burns like fire in my veins, and my limbs shake as I fight to pull my arm away, but the blade only slips deeper. The trickle of blood turns into a steady stream that warms my collar and drips onto my chest.
My eyes flick to Xeni, tracking the clench of his jaw and sickly sallow of his skin as rage and helplessness war across his features.
“I love you,” I whisper, the words torn from me in quiet defiance.
Xeni takes a slow, gasping inhale that seems to freeze time.
He closes his eye and throws his head back.
His lips part.
And he detonates with an otherworldly scream.
Magic blasts out of him in an explosion that knocks me flat on my ass, the force snapping the chains of compulsion from my body. My grip on the knife releases, and it skitters across the ground, spinning away into the shadows.
Xeni charges at his father with a fury that’s pure and unbridled.
