Dain gurgles, a wet, sticky sound that only infuriates me further. “She might have to be if you can’t even keep a leash on her.”
“Your human took her,” I spat back. “Maybe you should keep a leash on him.”
The grating scream of hooks scraping across stone distorts Dain’s choked cackle.
“Don’t get testy with us, brother. This could all be over if you let us feed the way we were meant to.”
Rase slips up at my other shoulder, his tier of chains rattling in the muggy stench of Dain’s bloody haze.
“Perhaps you should let us eat him then,” Dain slurs in a whisper barely loud enough to be heard over the steady drip coming off his veins. “Imagine how complacent she would be without the distraction.”
“No,” I snap before he can finish.
“You can’t tell us what to do with our human, Veyn,” Rase growls into my left ear, the sound, an uncomfortable hiss of rusted chains rubbing together.
I face them.
My brothers.
The halves of me torn from my body and forged into the idiots standing before me.
“You seem to forget who is in charge,” I remind them, glancing from Rase’s gray, rusted complexion to Dain’s flayed flesh. Both glower with displeasure that only heightens my own. “You will do nothing until I allow you otherwise.”
Only Dain bares bloodstained teeth from a lipless mouth. Rase’s mouth hasn’t opened since I sewed it shut centuries before. The crudely stitched lines have long since become a permanent fusion to match the coils of chain looped through his wide, solid frame — a ring for every time he displeased me. There are rows upon rows bound across his chest, piercing through the hard cords of his thighs. They hook around and through his throat.
He’s fortunate.
I could have turned his flesh inside out the way I had Dain. It could be his blood pooling at our feet with every useless pump of his veins.
Yet he does not seem grateful. Neither of them do.
“She wants him alive,” I tell them.
“Since when does the all-mighty Veyn adhere to a human’s wishes?” Rase sneers, blood welling and soaking into the crusty stitching with every word.
“Since I fucking said so,” I bite out. “You do not eat him or hurt him.”
The torn edges of Dain’s mouth cut up into a smirk. “Have you fallen for her, brother?”
I slam the barbed wires curled around my fist into the soft muscles of his exposed belly. His shriek surges through my very soul with pure bliss that I prolong with a twist. Blood splatters. It spews in jets. Even when he clutches the thin layer of exposed nerves, he’s already sinking to his knees.
“I would be very careful about what you say next,” I warn them both. “I created you and I will destroy you just as easily.” I turn my attention away from the worthless creature wheezing at my feet to the stone-faced demon watching me with pure loathing in his hollow eyes. “Feed, but if you hurt him or touch her, I will use your skin to paper the walls and hang your innards from the ceiling. She is mine and he — momentarily — belongs to her. Now, go back to your hole. Don’t come out until I summon you.”
Rase reaches down with thick fingers and pulls our brother to his unsteady feet. Dain clutches his shredded abdomen with a bloody hand and lets himself be led from the room.
I watch them until the hiss and scrape of Rase’s chains are a mere memory and the room no longer stinks of copper. Only then, only when I am certain they won’t go near Lenora do I face her.
I have notfallenfor her.
Love is not in my capacity, nor would I wish for it. I’ve seen humans who fall prey to such nonsense. I watched how it tore Lenora from the inside. How it broke her.
Has broken her.
Love is dangerous and unnecessary. I will not allow it.
What I am is fascinated. Fascinated by her odd battle she seems to be having. Curious by the process of her mind; even on the cusp of dark madness, she clings to that … thing humans seem to have. That light. Even murky and dim, it persists and … it’s just so strange.
“I don’t think he’s dangerous,” she’s telling the human. Talking about me, I assume.
