As if I wasn’t bound amid all of it and being tortured by that Temperance creation, my body shuddering, me fucking panting.
And that wasnothing,fucking nothing, compared to the mental and emotional torment threatening to shatter me to pieces.
Because of what he’d done.
I felt a wisp of his power and swung my head—the only part of my body that I could actually fucking move—to see his shadow had fallen over the open door of this bedroom.
Somewhere inside Sanctus.
Rage surged without my full conscious control. All I could see was the memory of him driving the Spiral Thorn into my dad’s chest.
I bucked and roared, cursing him, laying down threat after threat.
I felt the binds tightening.
More were added to the nightmare.
And then that harsh pull—unnatural, sudden exhaustion.
It latched onto me.
He was intensifying theNihilumbra,yanking me in and out of consciousness over and over again, trying to break my rage and upset.
Forcibly.
Like the way he did fucking everything.
“I’ll kill you! I’ll fucking kill you!”
My screams echoed off the walls before sleep pulled me under once more.
My eyes snapped open.
Awake again.
The disorientation was real.
I was grunting within moments as stabbing spikes of that ice from that nasty substance started to assault me everywhere, all over my body, driving agony into me that collided with the emotional anguish already wrecking me from the inside out.
It was another aspect of theNihilumbra. And it was also similar to what he’d done to me in the pool dreamscape.
“Ah! Ah! Stop! Fucking stop!”
“You will not kill me,” Ruxnoth spoke, his voice rolling all around me almost hypnotically. “You’re not capable of that, gentle one.”
A hand snapped to my throat, and I blinked to see the monster right there before me.
What was… he hadn’t appeared to me for ages. Or what had seemed like ages in this half-conscious state I’d been trapped in for… I didn’t know how long.
His black hair cascaded down over the shoulders of his gold and navy ornate coat, and I noticed more blue veins and fissures than ever infecting his bare chest, his face.
I seethed up at him. “You’ve changed the rules of the game. After what you did, all bets are off. You don’t know this version of me.”
He tried to hide his unease at my threat behind a snarl, but I saw it. I saw it had unnerved him, that it had gotten to him.Good.He was questioning whether he really knew what he was dealing with any longer.
“Do you know what he did to you, why I had to neutralize your father to whom you gave far too much credit?”
“Shut up. Just shut up.”
