With a sigh, she pulled off her ruined tunic, wiped her mouth and hands with it, then tossed it aside. She spread her coat on the ground and settled on it, resting her chin on her raised knees. While the fire warmed her, its glow gilded the hard lines of Race’s profile, turning his silver hair into molten light.
Ridiculously handsome. And about as reachable as the bloody moon.
“Stop looking at me like that,” he growled, his attention still fixed on the flames.
Her heart tripped then skidded at lightning speed. “Like what?” she rasped. “Besides you and the walls with those etchings, there’s nothing else to look at. And you’rereeeallypretty.”
He glanced at her sharply, then went back to stabbing the fire.
“Why do you hate Skaldr, Koal, and Attor?” she finally asked.
“Hate’s not it. It angers me they abducted you to force my hand.”
Okay, she could get that. “Then why did Skaldr call you a martyr?”
“Because he’s an ass, with no clue about what he speaks of.” He rose to his feet, his expression shut off. “Go to sleep, Ash. I’ll be outside. Need to do a quick recon.”
Race paced the clearing. His head pounded, his back ached, and his skin felt ready to split—his dragon had been snarling inside his skull ever since Skaldr’s damned jab.
Martyr?
Fucking Skaldr!
Memories he’d buried—Tartarus, the chains, the screams—surged up from the dark to ambush him, and he clutched his head?—
Wraith-warders in rotted armor, wrapped in shadows,voices like knives scraping bone… “Void-iron sssuits you, princeling. Feel those Titanssscript null-sssigils? They drink every spark of your esssence…”
Race grunted, agony whipping through him. Molten shackles seared his wrists, throat, and ankles, and chains rattled as he tried to move.
“Hsshh…the sssweet scent of pain as you break, wishing for a death that never happensss…”
The iron plate embedded in his sternum, the sigils etched on its inner surface, pulsed with sickly power.
Each heartbeat sent waves of fresh agony through him as the glyphs systematically continued to suffocate every spark of his dragon essence. His flame, his strength, his very nature crushed under their suffocating grip.
“Sssubmit,” the wraith hissed. “We’ll loosssen one sssigil.”
He gritted his teeth.Can’t give in…can’t…
“F-fuck… Off,” he spat, bloodied spittle flying everywhere.
His dragon raged against the bonds it couldn’t break as blood poured down his naked form. Oblivion hovered, a blessing they never let him succumb to, dragging him back to consciousness again and again…
Then nothing.
Days of silence in a coffin cell no wider than his shoulders, no room to stand, to shift, to move around. Just darkness and the endless pressure of stone pressing in on him. His dragon, caged, crushed…slowly going mad from the confinement.
“C-Calm…Kaelthar,” he rasped to his beast. “I…I am still here. We’re still together. One day, vengeance will be ours…”
Five and a half centuries of torture, crammed into a space too small for a human, let alone a creature born to soar—and the nightmares still haunted him millennia later.
By the dark gods.Never again. Never. Fucking. Again!
He trudged the weed-choked ground, trying to outrun the memories, but they clung to him like poisonous smoke.
A sound cut through his dark thoughts—chattering teeth.
His dragon side stirred, pushing past the remnants of remembered pain and horror as Race slipped back into the cave.
