A scream began to vibrate my vocal cords, but before it could spill out, I squashed it. Lenus didn’t deserve to bathe in my howls.
He’d touched Kali.
His actions had brought him the fate of delighting in the strokes of my blade as it peeled exceptionally long strings of his muscles so I could weave a crown out of them. Kali would appreciate such a present.
With a final jerk, Lenus prised my tooth out. “This should placate Ezra.” Turning the pliers, he surveyed the crimson smearing the ivory surface. Pleased with his inspection, he dropped it into a bowl on the cart and returned to me. “With this out of the way, we can begin. Where did your people go? We went to your compound, only to find it abandoned.”
My fists unclenched. About half of our total numbers had managed to reach Ilasall either through the catacombs or the city gates before they’d shut down both. But if Ardaton had sent their forces to our location and found nothing…
Gedeon’s last-minute agreement with Damia had worked. In the case of failure, he’d tasked her with evacuating our compound and anyone who’d returned to it. And the woman always fulfilled her duties.
I licked the hole where my molar used to be. Hot liquid filled my mouth, giving me an idea.
“I—” I started to cough, pushing past the soreness, the throbbing in my head, and the flames in my wrist as convulsions rattled my fractured joint. “We,” I whispered, and for an added effect, croaked out, “To?—”
“What?” Gripping my chair, Lenus leaned in so close I could feel his breaths on my mouth. “Speak up.”
Clearing my throat, I spat the pool flooding my mouth at him.
He froze.
Bloody drool ran down his forehead, down the left crease of his nose and beneath his medical mask, drenching in from the inside.
Mute, he gaped at me, causing laughter to rumble from my chest. As I shook, saliva mixed with blood dripped onto my bare front.Tap, tap, tap,it hit my flesh in rhythm to my cackle. The sound reverberated off the bare walls, closing us in a vortex of high spirits, and I unleashed a bout of snickers at the perfection of acoustics. Loud enough to bust your eardrums.
Lenus unhooked the soaked mask from his ears. “I’m going to take my time with you.”
I coughed, this time for real. “Good luck with that.”
“I don’t need luck.” Smiling, he brushed down my pectorals, until he located my nipple?—
A twinge rocked through me, and then fire erupted in the sensitive tissue. My jaw flexed as a pained grunt threatened to flee me. Lenus had proved me wrong—he had some creativity juice in him, after all.
“That was my favorite nipple,” I muttered as he studied the barbel. The jerk had ripped my piercing out.
Taking his time, he discarded the small metal bar on the cart, instead selecting another instrument, a much heavier one than the pliers he’d used before.
My abused nipple pulsed in tandem with Lenus’s steps as he approached me again. “We couldn’t do much to her”—he pointed to the mirror-like wall hiding Kali—“but our orders for you are different. They consist of two words: anything goes.”
80
KALI
The incessant throbbing in my stumps matched the pace of the maskless man as he approached Zion. A meat pounder hung at our tormentor’s side, the thick head of the tool tapping his slim thigh.
I wished it was drumming against the glass separating us, not his leg. When the wall-sized mirror had changed and Zion had appeared on the other side, I’d almost sobbed.
But not from relief.
Horror had made my eyes water. I wasn’t the only one in captivity.
Any memory of the last hours evaded me, and awakening in a strange room, with no clothes and my body cleansed, had unsettled my gut, to put it nicely.
So when the couple set on extracting answers out of me had taken a break between battering my body into mush and complaining how they couldn’t do much else because I’d still have to do mydutyto Ardaton, I wanted to bang my head against the metal armrests my limbs were secured to.
Cheating Ilasall’s fertility system had finally come to bite me in the ass.
It was clear Ardaton’s citizens were as brainwashed as Ilasall’s. Whatever they couldn’t understand, they condemned. Like my choices. Our compound. Our fight for freedom. Our way of life in general. Our?—
