Chapter Twenty-Three
Joy
Pain—unbearable, soul-crushing pain—pumped through me, blinding me to everything else. My vision went white at the edges, my ears ringing with the echo of my own screams. My legs quivered like broken branches in a storm, and the last bit of strength abandoned me completely.
I collapsed hard, my knees hitting the stone floor with a sickening crack. My arms stretched out, trembling as they bore what little weight I had left. Every breath felt like swallowing glass.
“Damn it, Alanna!” Darius’s voice cut through the haze of agony, hoarse with rage. “Leave her alone! Can’t you see? She’s spent! There’s nothing left!”
I lay my head on my arm, my whole body shaking as I panted like a dying animal. Tears mixed with sweat, creating salty rivers down my face that dripped onto the cold stone beneath me.
“She does look rather...fragile,” Queen Alanna mused. “Perhaps we should give her a moment to recover. We wouldn’t want her to break completely. Not yet.”
Rough hands grabbed my shoulder and spun me around. Through the curtain of sweat and tears that blinded my eyes, I couldn’t make out Ari’s features clearly—but I could feel his presence, could sense the sick satisfaction radiating from him like heat from a flame.
“I quite agree.” Ari’s eyes glowed with satisfaction. His complete lack of empathy crushed the last flickering ember of my defiance. “I don’t think she’ll give us any more trouble unless she wants a repeat of what just happened.”
The threat was like a sword piercing my heart. My body screamed in protest at even the thought of enduring that torture again, every nerve ending still on fire from what they’d already done to me. But deep in my battered soul, a stubborn spark of rebellion still burned.
I wouldn’t do what they wanted me to do. The thought was a lifeline in the darkness, something to cling to when everything else had been stripped away. But I refused to say anything or beg for mercy—that would only give them more satisfaction. Let them think they had broken me completely. Let them think they had won.
“Hang her up next to Darius,” Queen Alanna commanded with casual indifference, as if ordering tea. She moved to place the blood-soaked whip among a collection of other instruments of torture mounted on the wall—a horrifying gallery I hadn’t noticed before through my pain-hazed vision. Some were stained dark with old blood, others gleamed with cruel newness.
The sight made everything worse. But even as despair threatened to swallow me whole, I held onto one precious truth: they might control my body, but my spirit—battered and bleeding though it was—remained my own.
Ari undid my manacles with rough, impatient hands and half-dragged me across the stone floor to where Darius was still chained to the wall. My shoes scraped against the cold stone asI struggled to keep up, leaving scuff marks in my wake. Darius glared at Ari with pure hatred, his silver eyes blazing even as Ari ignored him completely, focusing on securing new shackles around my raw wrists just below the binding bracelets I still wore.
My battered body slumped downward, my arms screaming as they bore my full weight. Every muscle fiber felt torn, every bone ached with a deep, throbbing pain that seemed to echo in my very soul.
Darius suddenly spat at Ari, the glob of saliva hitting him square in the face with a wet splat.
Fury exploded across Ari’s features like a wildfire, his face twisting into something monstrous. He wiped the saliva off with the back of his hand, his movements slow and deliberate—a predator savoring the moment before the kill. Then his hand cracked across Darius’s face with bone-crushing force, splitting his lip wide open.
Blood splattered against the stone wall. “You’ll get far worse if you ever try that pathetic stunt again,” Ari snarled through clenched teeth.
But Darius just smiled through the crimson rivulets streaming down his chin, his grin wide and unsettling—almost gleeful despite the pain. “Ah, but it would be so worth it for another performance like that.”
Queen Alanna sighed with the weary patience of a mother dealing with an incorrigible child. “Darius, won’t you ever learn?”
He tilted his head back and forth like a curious bird, then flashed her a blood-stained, maniacal grin that belonged in nightmares. “Learn? Oh no, Your Majesty. I’m afraid I’m a little mad, you see. Mad as a hatter, one might say. And mad people? Well, we never learn the proper lessons.”
The queen put her palm on his broad naked chest. “Oh, darling. If you would just say yes?—”
“Never,” he said as he lifted his head higher.
She curled her palm into a fist. “So be it. You’ll stay here and rot.”
He winked. “You’re such a romantic diplomat.”
Her face curled into an angry sneer. She slapped him across the face—hard enough that his head snapped to the side and blood welled at the corner of his mouth—then turned on her heels. “Come, Ari. We leave at dawn.”
Ari pinched my cheeks tightly. “Be ready, Joy. Or you just might lose your head.”
He followed the queen out of the dungeon, and the heavy door slammed shut with a bone-jarring clang that echoed off the stone walls. The sound of their footsteps faded, leaving us in suffocating silence broken only by the occasional drip of water somewhere in the darkness.
Pain overwhelmed me like a crushing wave, stealing my breath and my vision. My knees buckled, and I collapsed to the cold marble floor, darkness swallowing the anguish whole. Sweet oblivion wrapped around me like a blanket, mercifully pulling me away from the horror of what I'd just learned.
"Joy? Joy, can you hear me?"
