Chapter
One
KADEN
Hellfire wasn’t lethal to demons, but it was agony.
Over the centuries, I’d put my share of our kind to the pyre — let them burn until their charred skin sloughed off in flakes. Some of them until their flesh melted and their bones turned brittle enough to shatter.
Most I’d tortured for minor transgressions. Offenses so petty I couldn’t even recall.
A request too presumptuous.
A less-than-gracious reply.
A fleeting glance that set me on edge.
I’d burned them all and made a spectacle of it to show my court that I was not to be trifled with, despite my Drathen blood.
Perhaps it was fitting that I now languished in a tower of hellfire. Thick manacles of shadow held me suspended by the wrists, dangling along the wall of flames that lapped at my half-naked body. My skin sprouted weeping blisters that were quickly scorched off, replaced by blackened flesh.
The pain in my shoulders had dulled to a throb, both of the joints dislocated. The ache was enough to distract me from the searing agony of the flames that charred my sensitive wings.
Every so often, those smoky manacles would tug me out of the fire, my knees slamming into the obsidian floor. My father would wait for my body to regenerate so that I could give him the answers he sought.
When I didn’t, he’d start again.
Sweat poured down my face, stinging my eyes. The brightness of the flames further obscured my vision, but my father’s dark form loomed through the dancing pinpricks of light.
“A filthy half-huntress,” the demon king mused, staring out the narrow window that overlooked the bubbling pit of lava below. “An odd choice . . . even for a half-Drathen mongrel.”
I gritted my teeth as the flames surged higher, stoked by his flash of disgust.
Disgust as he recalled my fae mother, whom he’d raped and impregnated with his heir so he could claim the throne of Anvalyn.
“Is it not enough that you dishonor me with your blood? Your disobedience? You must also disgrace my crown by bedding the half-huntress whore?”
Rage burned within me, hotter than any hellfire, but I forced myself to remain silent.
I knew what he was doing — baiting me in the hope that I’d get carried away by my emotions and reveal some piece of information he didn’t already know.
That Lyra was half witch — half Coranthe witch, to be precise.
That she carried a blade with a rowan-wood core capable of killing my father.
That she was the one he’d sent me to hunt.
Or, most dangerous of all, that Lyra was my mate.
It was this last secret that I swathed in shadow — hid and protected within the deepest confines of my mental fortress.
To my father, it was bad enough that Lyra had infiltrated his kingdom and escaped unscathed as my royal guard demolished an entire wing of his palace.
A half-huntress was an insult, assuming, as he did, that mortal blood flowed through her veins. She was merely an inconvenient pest to be exterminated.
But his disobedient heir’smate. . .
I fought back a shudder.
