Page 158 of The Lure of Wolves and Whispers

I am my mother’s last hope too.

“No?” The spymaster twists what looks like a knob throttling the power of the upper half of the silver wire where it snakes down the wall. “Your choice.”

The smell of burning fills the air.

The wire turns white-hot.

And a scream rips my throat to ribbons as a bolt of agony locks every muscle and shreds my mind to tatters.

Strange, to think my skin once felt anything other than pain.

My mind remembers the soft touch of his skin on mine, and the warmth of his breath on my ear. Heat and relief and escape. Icling to the memories, to someone’s touch causing anything other than… agony.

Pain is all that exists now, and it’severywhere. There’s no part of my body that isn’t screaming. No part of me the Lady of Shadows hasn’t found a way to punch or burn or shatter.

My hands are ruins. I look down to see my fingers jut out at sickening, impossible angles.

She took a hammer to my forearm somewhere between the third round of white-hot shocks. The strange, tented skin where the hammer collided with my flesh purples with every heartbeat, and it feels like my pulse is pounding all over my body, in every swollen, broken place. Blistering marks matching the ones branching out over Wolf’s body weep, raw and fresh, at every place where the shocks tore through me.

In the dying candlelight, I wonder—did she do this to him, too?

Wolf’s skin might’ve healed—mostly—but what’s underneath never did. I see that now. Like a once-broken bone set crooked inside him. And maybe it’s too late for those parts of him to ever heal right, but Old Ones, I wish I could live to see it.

A sharp ache blooms in my chest. I wish I could see himtry.

And me, too.

I would watch the sun rise just one more time, and see my sister’s laughing face.

My mind plays tricks on me. Cruel tricks. I think I hear my sister, that familiar tenor of Finn’s voice, and the steady scrape of her boots. Metal clanging with each step, like when she used to arm herself to the teeth from our father’s weapons stall and sneak off with me for training drills.

Your father’s the one who betrayed your mother.

How could Finn not tell me?

My vision swims. Voices rise outside the iron bars. Rough, and I can hear the Lady of Shadows with them. I fight against the chair, against the shackles holding me in place. It accomplishes absolutely nothing other than more pain, and I vomit all over the floor.

There’s no light here. No window to gauge whether time is passing. The candle has burned down to a nub, and the silver wire climbing up the wall glows less often now than it did at the start of this torture. How much longer could it be before she kills me?

“Put her in there with the traitor.”

The iron door rattles, and the Lady of Shadows returns with two gardai and a woman with a bag over her head. One of the gardai carries a wooden chair and an armful of rope. She sets them down, and the woman’s head lolls on her muscled shoulder as the other guard drops her onto the chair. They make quick work of binding her ankles and wrists with the rope.

Jealousy gnaws at the walls of my empty, aching stomach. I’d trade my shackles for rope in an instant, just for the chance that I could find a way to cut through and escape.

Not that I could go far.

My feet are almost as bad as my hands. I think the Lady of Shadows enjoyed shattering each toe on my right foot even more than my fingers.

She runs a hand over the woman’s shoulders and tilts her head at me.

“You’ve surprised me.” Her eyes narrow over my swollen face. “Most people break after the first shock, though one once lastedthrough a dozen. Since you don’t seem… cooperative, perhaps we need a little encouragement.”

She rips the bag off the woman’s head, and my heart stops.

Finn.

There’s not a mark on my sister’s face. Not a scratch anywhere on her, and that only makes the terror bite harder. I’ve taken every single thing the Lady of Shadows has done to me. Every scream, every split in my skin, every agonizing shock ripping through me.