Page 60 of Broken Shadows

The only thing you should fear in these woods is me.

I drag my tongue over my lips, my chest heaving.Perhaps you’ve lost your touch.

Wait until we’re in Hell.He bites out as he matches my pace.I’ll remind you how terrifying I can be.

My thighs clench as we walk, warmth pooling in the pit of my stomach. I hope he fucking does. Lorcan lets me play out my darker fantasies in a safe-ish way. While it’s unpredictable with him, it’s totally different from when I was being tortured at The Order.

His fingers flex at his side as if he’s contemplating the last time we were in the woods together, and I’m reminded what he used those hands for.

Rosa huffs, snapping me out of my thoughts, her voice tinkering as she whispers to Ezra, “They’re doing it again.”

“Why focus on them?” Ezra asks. “I am far more entertaining.”

I can hear Rosa’s eye roll from here and suppress a smirk.

“Is that it?” Aiden whispers, as if we might awaken the spirits haunting these narrow trees. “It’s a rusted old thing.”

Ezra strides to the brown-orange metal gate, half buried behind tall grass, the bars strangled with ivy. “Oh, this is it. Feels like home.”

Aiden grimaces. “So, if we go through that…”

“You won’t be dragged to Hell. Yet,” Gideon says before Lorcan or Ezra gets the chance to scare Aiden. “We need to go through all seven first.”

Aiden shudders. “Dragged?”

Ezra nods. “How else did you think we’d get there?”

“I don’t know,” he says, shining his phone’s flashlight around. “I thought there’d be a portal or something.”

“It makes sense,” I chime in. “A portal would be the most likely scenario for someone not well-versed in this. We used one to get to the Shadow Realm.”

Lorcan walks ahead of me, his focus on Aiden, twigs snapping under his heavy boots as he reaches him. “Yes, but this is Hell and there are few ways in. None of them are portals.”

“Mhmm,” Ezra says, his foot bouncing against the ground. “The ground opens up and swallows you whole. Or so I’ve heard.”

“Heard?” Rosa and I question in tandem.

Ezra lifts his arms in an elaborate shrug. “What? I’ve never been to Hell via a gateway before.”

Rosa lifts her brows in mock horror. “How do you normally get there?”

Lorcan walks through the gate first, then looks back at us, answering in place of Ezra. “We walk through dimensions, but that’s not an option this time, else we would land directly into Lucifer’s Court, and they’d know we were coming. We need the element of surprise. Besides…” His intense gaze finds me. “This is the only way mortals can get there. Well, this or dying.”

“Lucifer’s Court?” I repeat, imagining a weird underground hell castle upon a moat of lava.

Ezra nods and follows Lorcan through the gate. “Yeah. It’s a big castle filled with spirits and demons and balls. It takes up most of Hell.”

“Balls?” I grimace, unable to even imagine the balls that would be held in Hell.

“Oh yeah,” Ezra replies.

Lorcan’s statements shoots through our bond.They’re horrifying. You will love it, Little Witch.

The light dwindles from Aiden’s phone, and he bashes it against the side of his hand. “Batteries dead.”

Rosa’s phone flashlight fades, too, along with Gideon’s flashlight, plunging us into darkness only remedied by a silver of the moon. “Mine too.”

The atmosphere shifts. An icy chill shrouds us, the scent of sulfur permeating the usual smell of decayed leaves and damp earth. Within the tree line, a translucent woman flickers, ambling through thickets of leaves, as if she’s searching for something.

---