Tempted by a Rogue Prince (8 page)

All he could do was bite out words in the elf tongue. “If I had my armour… if I were not enslaved… I swear by the gods I would kill you all. I would butcher you all!”

The demon guards released him and the king struck his head again, the blow splintering bone and sending him crashing to the floor. He coughed up blood and fought to remain conscious, battling the agony searing every break in his bones like lightning.

A voice within whispered to let go and allow the darkness to take him. He longed for oblivion to claim him, to steal away the pain and the world. The humiliation. He wanted to escape it.

He wanted to forget it all.

Kordula danced through his buzzing skull. She loomed over him, her crimson lips moving but her words too quiet to hear above the ringing in his ears. Her icy blue eyes slowly bled into crimson that matched the colour of her hair. She touched his face, black fingernails pressing deep into his flesh, drawing blood. Her countenance darkened, her power flowing through him and seizing control of his body, stripping away his strength. He fought her but he wasn’t strong enough to stop her, and the end result was always the same.

Whether he did as she asked, destroying lives and spilling blood, or denied her. It always ended in punishment.

She dropped her hand to his chest and his armour peeled away, leaving him exposed. He tried to fight her hold on him, mentally begged her to stop and leave him be. He had done what she had asked. He had slaughtered an entire village. Not only the males. He had brutally killed the women and their offspring too. He had bathed his claws in blood for her. Was that not enough?

Her nails raked down his chest and he shuddered, not because she had hurt him but because of the softness of her caress. He could take her punishing him, torturing him, but he couldn’t take this. He tried to raise his hands, bared his fangs at the thought of wrapping them around her throat and squeezing the life out of her. She clucked her tongue and pressed her palms against his chest, and gave him the worst form of punishment.

She kissed him.

And all he could do was let his consciousness slip away and bury himself deep, detaching himself from the situation and what was to come, and to pretend it wasn’t happening again.

He wasn’t strong enough to fight her.

The demon king was right.

He was weak.

He hadn’t been strong in a long time. He wasn’t sure he knew how to be strong anymore.

“Take him to the rack and continue our lesson in humility.” Those words shattered the hold the pain and the memories had on him, dragging him back to the cold hopelessness of reality.

He wrestled with the last of his strength, desperate and crazed, driven wild by one thought as the demon guards hauled him away from the king, taking him to the torture chamber. It wasn’t the knowledge of what awaited him in that room that sent him out of his mind, maddening him. They could do no worse to him than the one who had come before them.

No, it was another more disturbing and distressing thought that had him fighting even as his strength failed him, and filled him with a need to not give up and surrender to them.

They would drag him back to his cell, beaten into submission and no doubt unconscious.

He would pass the cells and Little Wild Rose would see him for what he really was.

A broken, weak and vulnerable male.

R
osalind sat by the bars of her cell, gripping them tightly, her eyes closed and jaw clenched. The crack of the whip echoed down the corridor again, turning her stomach, and the guard dealing the blows that wetly cleaved flesh grunted with frustration once more. The elf made no sound, though she could feel his pain flow through the dungeon, held back and endured in silence.

Why?

Tears burned her eyes. There was no shame in crying out. During her captivity, she had heard the strongest of men break under the torture and the steel whips, lashed by barbs and bled until they passed out.

Her heart pounded and the whip struck again. She swore she felt each strike, each lash of the whip on her body. Pain ran through her, quiet but there, buzzing down her back and over her thighs.

The whip cracked again. She heard flesh give but no cry, no other sign that it had struck its target and rent another gash in the elf’s body.

Rosalind tightened her grip on the thick steel bars, clinging to them so fiercely that her knuckles blazed white and her bones ached. Anger boiled within her, a seething need to do something even when she was powerless to act on her rage. Her magic was bound. The only thing she could do was endure, just as he did, and hope.

Hope that they would bring her to heal him.

She had cursed him, hated him with a force that had shocked her, when he had called her by another’s name, but when they had led him past her, she had known only pity for him.

He had walked with his head bent, his eyes cast downwards, and she had seen his shame in them. They had stripped him of his pride.

Silence finally fell, the strange sensation of pain in her fading as her heart settled at last. Had they stopped?

She craned her neck, needing to see along the corridor to her right, but couldn’t find an angle that would permit her to see all the way to the end of it.

What seemed like hours later, the same two guards who had marched him from his cell appeared again, not holding the elf by his arms but dragging him by his ankles. They had stripped him bare, leaving not a stitch on him and no shred of dignity, and they had done it on purpose. They meant to degrade him completely.

The tears stinging her eyes wobbled on her lashes, hot and fierce, as they dragged him past her. His arms stretched out above his head, the manacles holding his wrists clanking on the flagstones and his head jogging around as it hit the gaps between each stone. A river of blood, red and stark, followed in his wake.

Her gaze widened and she covered her mouth, stifling a wave of sickness when she saw the deep lacerations criss-crossing his bare chest and arms, and cutting deep grooves in his thighs. His head bounced off another gap and lolled towards her, his firm bloodied lips parting. She stared at his mouth in horror.

His fangs.

Mother earth.

They had ripped out his fangs.

Rosalind reacted on instinct, stretching her arms between the bars towards him, her fingers barely brushing his before he slipped beyond her reach.

She sagged against the steel bars, her right temple pressing into them and her arms laying on the floor of the corridor, one in a smear of his blood that also coated the chain between her cuffs. She would make the demons pay for their cruelty. He had done nothing to deserve such punishment. Mother earth, she would make them pay.

One day.

But for now, all she could do was sit and wait, and plot.

She shuffled back into the corner, as far from the bars of her cell as she could get, and huddled into it. She smoothed her tattered black dress over her knees, hugged them to her chest with the chain between her cuffs dangling across them, and rested her chin on them. The guards would come for her. They would bring her to heal him. Until then, she would wait in silence, saving her energy, the strength he had given her with his gift of blood.

She would bestow that same gift upon him.

She wasn’t strong enough to fight these demons without her magic, but he was strong enough to fight them without his psychic powers. She would make him strong.

Her eyes slipped shut and she forced them open again, unwilling to succumb to the lure of sleep. Sleep didn’t bring her the rest she needed. It only brought her pain, a horrific replay of the war and a parade of the souls she had destroyed in that single dark night.

Rosalind held her knees tighter and rocked, trying to focus on other things. Her garden would be overgrown by now. She would have her work cut out for her when she returned to her cottage. Many of her clients would be angry with her too. They were waiting for the potions they had ordered. She would have to apologise to them all.

Perhaps the demon king Thorne had been kind enough to somehow tell them what had happened to her, if he didn’t think her dead that was. So many had died in the war. So many lives snuffed out. Rivers of blood had run across the black ground.

Her eyes slipped shut again and the nightmare swallowed her, devoured her with sharp teeth that tore at her flesh and crunched her bones. Broken hands grasped her, missing flesh in places, and she fought them as they pulled at her clothes, tearing them from her body and leaving her exposed. They clawed at her, lacerating her flesh, leaving long red marks criss-crossing her body.

They grabbed her wrists and pulled her down into the endless darkness, into a vivid replay of the battle that had left a terrible scar on her soul. She saw herself killing, saw the faces of her victims this time, witnessed how her magic tore them to pieces and shattered their bodies, killing them in the most painful ways imaginable. She clawed at her hair and screamed for it to stop, but no sound passed her lips. With every death she dealt, her heart grew blacker, the darkness in it spreading.

Until she called on all that death and darkness, reaching beyond the grave to the other side.

Rosalind shot awake, her heart racing and breath sawing from her lungs. She ran trembling hands over her matted blonde hair, pulling it back from her face, and forced herself to take in her surroundings. Tears blurred her vision and she blinked them away. She was in her cell. It shouldn’t have been a comfort to her, but it had become one. She was in her cell and her power was locked inside her, beyond her reach.

She couldn’t kill anyone without it.

She couldn’t destroy another life.

She couldn’t take another step closer to the darkness.

She rocked back and forth, slowly purging the effects of the nightmare. How long had she been unconscious, trapped inside a twisted replay of her past?

There were five clay bowls outside her cell. Five feedings of disgusting and questionable slop meant two and a half days.

It had been two and a half days and the demons hadn’t come for her. Because she had threatened that the elf could heal himself next time?

No. The demons didn’t care about such things. If they had wanted him healed, they would have forced her to do it.

A dark-haired demon stopped outside her cell and curled a lip at the five bowls and then at her as he preened his dusky grey horns, stroking their curved lengths from the root behind the top of his ear to the tip near the lobe. His emerald eyes shifted to her, he rolled his bare shoulders, and then unlocked the door.

“Out,” he grunted.

Rosalind dug her fingers into the gaps between the thick stone blocks of the wall beside her and slowly pulled herself onto her feet. She straightened and did her best to walk confidently across her cell to the door, unwilling to show weakness in front of the huge demon male glaring at her. She wobbled at times, the drain of her nightmares combining with her lack of sustenance to make her weak. She felt sure that without the elf’s blood in her body, she wouldn’t have managed to walk at all. She would have been crawling to the demon.

He grabbed her arm in a bruising grip the second she was within reach, scooped up one of the bowls and shoved it at her.

“Eat.”

She eyed the unappetising slop that matched the colour of his horns and considered refusing it, her stomach rebelling at the thought of eating it when she wasn’t sure whether it was food that was two days old or freshly delivered today. The demon’s grip on her arm tightened. She took the hint and the bowl, closed her eyes and grimaced as she swallowed the thick lumpy liquid, choking on it.

The demon snatched the bowl away and tossed it onto the floor, knocking over the others and spilling their contents across the flagstones.

“Come.” He dragged her with him along the corridor, mercifully away from the torture room.

Following the dark crimson stain that formed a trail towards the elf.

Was she to heal him? She didn’t dare ask the demon. They didn’t like it when she questioned them. It normally earned her a trip to the rack and she wanted to see the elf. He would be healing by now, but she didn’t have the heart to carry out her threat and leave him to suffer. She would heal whatever injuries remained.

The demon stopped outside his cell and Rosalind stared in horror.

The elf hadn’t healed at all.

He lay on the stone slab, as nude as the day he was born, left there for everyone to see. His eyes darted around behind their closed lids and he muttered things beneath his breath in the elf language. He was in that strange state again, trapped inside himself just as before.

“Heal him. King Bruan wishes to speak with him.” The demon shoved her into the cell and locked the door behind her.

The king wanted to see him again, after he had subjected him to such vicious torture? Why?

Rosalind walked to the elf where he lay chained to the stone slab, bent and tore a strip of material off the bottom of her black dress, bringing the hem up to above her knees. The chain between her manacles swayed and clinked as she draped the piece of material over his hips, covering him with it and giving him back some of the dignity the bastard demons had stolen from him.

He growled.

“It’s okay. It’s just me,” she whispered but the sound of her voice only made him worse. He struggled against his restraints, rattling the chains that fastened him in place, splitting open several of the gashes across his chest and arms.

“Out,” he snapped. “Leave.
Witch
.”

Her heart sank. She hadn’t been very nice to him during their last encounter and hadn’t expected him to be thrilled to see her, but for some reason it hurt that he was back to wanting her away from him.

She drew in a deep, fortifying breath. “I hate to remind you, but I don’t exactly have a choice here. Either I heal you, or they do to me what they have done to you.”

He stilled, tensed and then growled again, darker this time, a rumbling sound that sent a ripple of danger through the air and rang her internal alarm bells. He was gearing up for a fight.