Page 47 of The Labyrinth

His eyes were buggy, and he gasped for air, but I didn’t want him to die. Not yet. I released him, taking a step back as he gasped and got to his feet. “You fucking traitor,” he hissed. “You’re a human lover. A disgrace to your own kind.”

I scoffed. “Maybe that isn’t the worst thing to be. Right now, I’d rather be lumped in with them than with you.”

He scrambled toward me, swinging wild punches. I dodged them easily, pushing him back with swings of my own. My foot caught on a loose tile, and as I caught myself before I fell he managed to land one solid hook right on my ribs. Somewhere, I heard something crack. All the air released out of me in one breath, and I grasped my side. He grinned. “How’d that feel? You want more?”

I thought of Rissa. I thought of leaving her alone in this place, never knowing what had happened to me, or worse, thinking I had abandoned her. I couldn’t have that. I straightened myself out and closed the distance between us. I swung, landing blow after blow in his ribs and his stomach, in his face. He wouldn’t lay another hand on her. Not ever. I would make fucking sure of it. I pulled back, kicking him directly in the stomach, and he went down with a heavy grunt.

He stared up at me, unable to catch his breath. My ribs ached, and I knew something was broken, but for whatever he had done, I had done tenfold to him. He clutched at his side, glaring at me. “Your father would be ashamed.” He spat on the floor in front of me.

I reached to my side, unsheathing my knife, the one that had so elegantly carved my initials in Rissa’s skin. “I hope he is ashamed of me. Because I never wanted to be like him. But, he did teach me one lesson that I found rather important.”

He eyed the knife, trying to get up, but he groaned when he shifted. “Fuck you.”

“You see, my father taught me one needed to be a man of their word. A promise was a promise. And I promised you I would cut off your fingers one by one and feed them to you.”

I crouched next to him, reaching for his hand, but he snatched it away. “You wouldn’t.”

I laughed, grabbing his wrist and holding it tight. “Oh, but I would. The only thing stopping me is that Rissa isn’t here to watch justice being served.” I ran the tip of my knife along his knuckles, pausing. “But I guess she has four more chances to see it happen, right?”

I sliced the sharp knife through the knuckle on his pinky. He screamed, louder than I expected him to. “Fuck you! Fuck you! You just cut off my finger!”

“I did.” I held the offending pinky in my hand, then stuffed it in his mouth. “And now you’re going to swallow it.”

His eyes widened momentarily, and then he glared at me, shaking his head.

I clapped my hand over his nose. “Listen, I have somewhere I need to be, and you have seven more fingers. So fuckingswallow.”

He shook his head wildly, but eventually the urge to breathe, to scream took over him, and he swallowed heavily. I released his nose and mouth, and he immediately started retching.

“If you were so worried about your fucking fingers, then you should’ve kept them off my fuckingwoman,” I snarled. I sliced through the next finger, ignoring his screams, and repeated the process once more. Again we did this. Slice. Scream. Cover his mouth and nose. Swallow. Again, until tears were streaming down his face, and he was retching over and over. His hands were nothing more than stubs.

I shook my head, kicking at his ribs. “If anyone here is the disgrace to our kind, it’s you and the rest of the council. The ones who refuse to change. The ones who sit by and watch violence happen. The ones who do fuckingnothing.” His eyes were drooping, closing from the pain. I shook his head, forcing him to keep looking at me. “Now listen closely. As terrible as all of that is, I was content to let you die quietly in the shadows with the rest of your generation. But because you fucking laid your dirty fingers on Rissa’s skin…” I shuddered, the thought vivid in my head. “That is why you had to suffer. You brought this on yourself. And one by one, you’ll all pay for your sins.” I brought my bloody knife to his neck, and neatly sliced through the artery. He slumped to the floor, and I pulled him back into the office he had snuck out of. It wasn’t a great hiding place, but hopefully people would be too preoccupied with the fight to care too much.

I had bigger things to deal with than worrying about hiding a body that didn’t deserve to be hidden. I wanted everyone to see what happened when you messed with me, and the people I cared about. I wanted them toknow. But now, I needed to find Rissa.

Griffin said she was in Four. I raced past the first few empty cells, my mind set on finding Rissa.One…two…three…four. There she was, sitting on the floor, her arms wrapped around her shins, and her head resting on knees. “Rissa,” I breathed. “Oh thank fuck.”

“Ten!” She stumbled to her feet, racing toward the gated door. “I was so fucking worried about you.”

“I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m more worried about you.” I looked over her face, and up and down her body but she didn’t seem to be any worse for the wear. “Are you okay?”

She nodded. “I’m fine. Except for being here. Tell me you’re here to bust me out.”

My heart broke, shattering in all the wrong place. “Rissa…I can’t. If I break you out of here, they’ll just throw you right back in.” I was horrible. Awful. I was a terrible person for bringing her to this place, and putting her in this position. I hated myself. “If you ever want to be free, you’ll have to fight for it.”

I expected her to cry. To be torn up. But somehow she looked like she already knew. She fixed her gaze past me, as if there were something on the wall I couldn’t see, and then met my eyes once more. “I’m not sure I’ve ever really been free. I’ve always been beholden to someone. Someone has always needed a piece of me. Taken parts of my soul, of what I had to offer. But freedom…what’s that even like?”

“I’ll show you, after this is over. I’ll show you how beautiful freedom can really be.” I wanted to brush her hair away from her face. I wanted to show her all the sides of freedom people never thought about. “You just have to fight, Rissa. You have to fight, and you have to win.”

She nodded, taking it all in. Her expression was resolved, strong. Griffin was right. She was tougher than she looked. “You were willing to come back here for me. To be in the Cage again instead of me. You would really do that for me?” Her voice was so incredulous, so filled with emotion it mended the gaps in my heart, filling them in stronger than ever.

“I would. And I’d do it again. I’d do it all again for you, if there was a chance I’d be in there instead of you.” I wrapped my hands around the bars, desperately trying to get as close to her as I possibly could. I wanted nothing more than to wrench these bars apart and hold her against me. This was the best I could get right now. But she needed to know. She needed to understand exactly what she meant to me. “Listen to me, Rissa. Fucking listen to the words I’m saying. I don’t care about anything else in this world. I don’t care if they take the Labyrinth away from me, and leave me stranded in the desert. I don’t care, as long as I have you. I’ll happily look death in the eye and smile at the Grim Reaper if it means I can have you by my side for a moment more. You mean everything to me. You are my sustenance, my water. I can survive a desert if I have you. You are my sun, and my air, and everything in between. You. Fuck, Rissa, I…Iove you.”

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her, staring into those green pools like they would swallow me whole. I hoped they would. Because then we’d be together forever, no Cage, no fight, just the two of us entwined forever in a way our souls already were. “I love you, Ten,” she murmured back, grabbing my hands with hers. “I love you so damn much.”

“Oh, Rissa.” I needed to touch her skin, to feel her against me, to fuck her sweet pussy, to know she was mine. I needed it all, and I needed nothing else as long as I knew she was here in front of me. “You’ve been mine since the minute I laid eyes on you, you know that? The second I saw you in that shack, staring back at me, I knew I needed to have you. I didn’t know why. I just knew. The whole way back to the Labyrinth I wondered if I was doing the right thing. If I shouldn’t have just left you where you were, because you were already taking root inside my heart. You were a poison, but one I was happily consuming. I couldn’t stop. Maybe it was a mistake, if only because look where you are now. You wouldn’t be in this position if I hadn’t been selfish and needed you for myself.”

“No.” Rissa shook her head, reaching her arm through the bars to stroke my face. “None of this is a mistake. All of this happened the way it was supposed to. If this is what I need to do to earn my place in this world, to earn the life I want, then this is what I’ll do. But don’t for a second ever think what you did was a mistake. Because this is where I was supposed to be all along. And I’m going to fight tomorrow. I’m going to fight for myself, but also foryou.”

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