“Who do you love, Roxanya?” Lionel demanded as Clara withdrew and the agony in my flesh threatened to consume me once again. But they wouldn’t let me pass out. Any time I did they just healed me and started again, feeding me potions to replenish the blood I’d lost and making sure that this cycle of horrors could go on and on indefinitely.
My head bobbed and Lionel caught my chin in his grasp, his nails biting into my flesh as my own blood slid across my skin and he forced me to look at him.
“I can make it stop,” he purred, his gaze sliding down my body and drinking in the sight of my wounds, the cuts and burns which marked me and branded me as his plaything. But I wasn’t. I was Roxanya Vega, daughter of the Savage King, sister of the most powerful and beautiful woman I’d ever known, child of the greatest Seer of all time. I wasn’t born to bow to him. I was born to rise.
“I love him,” I hissed between my teeth, ignoring the flare of fear which tried to ignite in my core as I thought of Darius, the son of this monster and the man who had stolen my shattered heart irrevocably. I didn’t care how much Vard tried to force me to believe the worst of Darius. Because I’d seen the worst of him, the best of him and everything in between and he was my perfect match in every way. So they couldn’t twist my mind or heart against him anymore and I was done with the lies, done with pretending I was weaker than I was. I’d broken free of their command and I wouldn’t fall prey to their bullshit again.
Lionel growled, smoke spilling between his teeth as he bared them at me and acceptance finally dawned in his gaze.
“Love,” he scoffed. “So be it. Keep your love for my defiant son if it means so much to you, sweet Roxanya. But know this; I will use your love to break you, I will take it and make it mine and create a tether around your throat with it which won’t ever come loose. Today I will taste your heartbreak and you will watch as I enforce my dominance over you and the man you profess such feelings for. You will be the prize I hold above him and the threat which makes him compliant. And he shall be the same for you. I do not need your love to own you. I only need the object of your desire at my mercy.”
I lurched forward suddenly, my forehead cracking against the bridge of his nose as I jerked against my restraints and he jerked back, the full force of his fist colliding with my skull so hard that I lost my grip on reality and fell into the abyss.
I swallowed thickly against the memories, trying to ground myself in reality and the fact that I had truly escaped him this time. There was no Guardian bond tying me to him, no threat hanging over the heads of anyone I loved. Nothing at all to ever draw me back into his company, aside from the promise I had made to see him dead at my feet with my sister at my side.
I pushed my hands into the pockets of the enormous grey sweatpants I was wearing and ignored the shiver that ran down my spine from banishing my fire magic and just stood there, embracing the quiet calm of the place and focusing on the fact that we were safe. Free.
There was a hole in the left pocket of my sweatpants and I pushed a finger through it, running it over the scarred skin there as I tried not to relive the pain I’d felt as Lionel burned the tattoo from my flesh. Someone better trained than me could no doubt heal away the scars he’d left me with, but I hadn’t looked for anyone to do that yet. I was fairly certain that healing it wouldn’t fix the tattoo and I hated the idea of it being gone so much that I’d rather keep the scar and pretend it just lay beneath it.
“Is it totally conceited of me to hope you might be waiting for me?” Darius’s voice called out from the dark and my eyes fluttered open.
“Yeah,” I agreed on a breath as I drank in the sight of him standing before me in the half unbuttoned black shirt and smart trousers he’d worn to marry Mildred, my heart racing with the speed of a stallion and my throat thickening as I took in the very real man who was somehow standing a little way down the hill before me. “But I think I’ve always been waiting for you, so maybe you’re right.”
“Even when you hated me?” he murmured, stepping closer so that the light of the moon shone on his black hair. He kept coming, closing in on me and making that thrashing organ in my chest grow wings and beat them hard as it soared from nothing other than the sight of him. He closed in on me with his huge body and I had to tilt my chin up to look at him as the distance between us fell away.
“I still hate you,” I lied, and a smile touched the corner of his lips before he stepped closer again, the air between us thickening with expectation.