CHAPTER 6
CAT
The safe cocoon I’d built around my mind without really meaning to began to collapse. Cruelty had Tor. She’d hand him to Violence, and that monster would torture him until nothing remained of the man I loved. Violence only had me for a day, and I wasn’t sure there was much left of me.
“How long?” I demanded, my breathing racing, panic spiking my chest like an arrow. “How long has she had him?”
“Three days,” Death said sombrely, trying to catch my hand as I paced. “We’re going to get him back, but first we need you back with us.”
I jumped when the four-poster bed folded in on itself with a cracking of wood, the beams snapping, covers swallowed into a pit in the floor. I eyed it with a strange knowledge, my arms tingling. That was the way out. I could fight to cling to this place, could stay here and avoid the pain Violence had tortured into mybones, my mind, and every last bit of me, or I could jump into the void.
“Why is there a hole in the floor?” Pain asked with a deep frown, a tendril of his shadow exploring the broken floorboards.
“It’s a pit,” Madde replied.
“How is that any different to a hole?”
“It’s more ominous. Adds a sense of unease.”
“Why the hell would we need extra unease right now?”
I stopped pacing when Miz threw his hands over both their mouths, shutting them up. Amusement trickled through my chest, but not enough for a smile. “How do we get him back? Do you know where she took him?”
“Not yet,” Death admitted, running a hand through his braids, looking far older than when we first met. The hellish months under Nightmare’s torment had aged him, and that was before Cruelty took over. It was pure instinct to cross the room and take his hands into mine, to squeeze tight. “We’ll find him,” he said. “I swear to you.”
“I know. You found me.” Something occurred to me, sending a spill of cold through my body. “I was alive, right? When you found me? They didn’t—kill me?”
“You’re alive,” he promised, his smoky eyes endlessly sad. “Come home, Cat.”
“I—” I hesitated. The memory of pain was so severe, consuming all my nerves, that I could feel it now. It scorched through my body like a lightning strike, making me at once numb and in true, final agony.
“Trust us to take care of you,” Miz entreated, his gaze raw with hope when I looked up. My stomach tangled into a knot at the naked plea on his beautiful face. “I can’t—I don’t think I can do this without you.”
“I can’t face the memories without you. All of you. I—I need Tor.”
Cruelty called them my bonded ones, and while she’d deceived me over and over, and manipulated me into a piece in her grand game, I didn’t think she lied about that. They were part of me and had been since the Halloween party that made me their bride. Even Pain, I suspected. We hadn’t had much chance to talk after I realised his true identity.
Memories fractured the protective haze over my mind, and a clear one broke through, of being encased in iron, unable to move, the stench of rotting corpses making vomit burn my throat. And Pain, keeping me sane minute by minute, hour by hour.
“I’ll go back,” I said, interrupting whatever Madde had been saying. “I’ll go back.”
Even if it hurt, even if it ripped apart any peace of mind I’d ever had, even if the anxiety left me a shell. I wouldn’t leave Tor at the mercy of the sibling gods. I wouldn’t let Cruelty lock him in that iron maiden.
“When I wake up, I want you to tell me everything. Don’t try to shield me, don’t keep secrets. I want to knoweverything,no matter how bad it is.”
Death’s throat bobbed, but he nodded.
“Uh, howdowe get out…?” Madde asked the obvious question, finding the door didn’t open no matter how hard you pulled on the handle. The window was the same. It wouldn’t even smash. And yet the hole in the floor gaped wider.
“The pit,” Pain realised, shadows trickling down his arms. “Please tell me we don’t need to jump into the pit.”
“Nah, that would be crazy,” Madde dismissed, pulling at the window latch with no success. When he turned, he caught sight of my face and his eyes went wide, his blue irises so vivid that they glowed in his face. “Oh shit.” He grinned. “It’s a good day to be crazy.”
He returned to my side and sketched a bow, gesturing at the gaping hole in the floor. It grew bigger by the second, like it could sense I’d decided to rip down this safe space and return to the real world. “After you, my lioness.”
“Cat, I’m not sure—” Miz began, but his words dried up when our gazes met, pain reflected from me to him and back again.
“This is the way out,” I said, pretending my voice was normal and not scratchy, my face not hot with tears.
