Page 188 of A Soul to Embrace

Whoever informed them of what I was doing on Earth...Jabez would love to get his hands on them.I bet it was that fucking Mavka they have here.

Whoever they were, they’d given these people too much information that was working against him. They likely knew of all his cruelty, all the things he’d done to build apointlessarmy.

What else can I offer them to allow us to stay?

Before his mind could sift through options, the soundproofing dome around them disappeared.

“The council is too undecided,” Laele stated loudly. “We need time to discuss this properly.”

“That’s fine,” Jabez answered calmly, relieved they hadn’t been rejected straight away. “We are willing to be patient.”

It would also allow him time to think about other potentials he could offer to help sway the council. He could be cunning, so he was sure there was something that may interest them if he thought deeply enough.

I could tell them of my secret...He flinched in surprise at his own thoughts before he shook his head.No. I won’t give them what they sought all those years ago.

“For now, we’ll have to detain you both, as it may be a lengthy conversation,” Zerik stated, and Jabez’s ears pricked at the hint ofuneasein his quietened voice.

“Detain?” he asked, lifting his head with his eyes widening. He squinted a singular eye with suspicion. “You mean in the underground prison?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“No.” Jabez lifted his head back superiorly and let his features grow lax to hide his emotions. “I refuse.”

“It’s only temporary. It shouldn’t be longer than a few hours, but it means you both will have the freedom to move around rather than kneel before us while you wait.”

“I refuse,” he repeated, just as the choke of terror clasped around his throat. He glanced at Zylah and gritted his fangs until his jaw muscles bunched. “I would rather we sit here.”

“This is non-negotiable,” Ulric stated coldly, his eyes narrowing. “This is how it’s done. If you want us to accept you, then you will need to follow our rules and laws. Refusal is not an option, otherwise we will take you outside the walls if you prove to us that you can’t obey.”

His ears drooped as a sickening, cold, and heart-racing emotion clambered around in his chest. He jerked his head down in an attempt to hide the anguish in his features as he grated, “You will not place me in that prison, nor her.”

In that darkness.

In the place he’d suffered for years, feeling himself slowly losing his mind, thinking the world had abandoned him. He did not want to face the prison cells and how those walls could quickly close in on one’s mind. He also didn’t want Zylah to have an intimate understanding of what his past had been like. She didn’t belong in such a place when she’d never done anything wrong.

She didn’t deserve such terribleness.

Memories Jabez had crushed in the miserable pit of his mind until they were nothing but fragments began to resurface. They rose as easily as a dust fluttered into the air from a single harsh gust of wind, or a strong hand stroke against an undisturbed surface. No matter how much he tried to squash them with his will, they flickered in the back of his mind and darted in front of his rapidly blinking eyelids. He tried to disperse them, but the threat of having to go back there, knowing what lay within that darkness, quickly ate away at his mind.

Things best left forgotten came back to him: images, scents, the feel of rock and dirt abrading his soft skin when he didn’t lie on his bed. All the while, he’d been unable to feel the life offlora against his feet, his fingertips. How the interim between his own crazed yells had been so quiet that he could hear himself breathing, and his anxious heart pounding loudly in his ears.

How he’d picked at his own skin in boredom, in frustration, or he’d clawed at himself when it felt like the walls were closing in on him. The way the cold, lonely rock around him allowed his own pitiful sobs to echo in his ears as he rocked back and forth, wondering how or why the world had abandoned him. His nails had been filed down to nubs from him scratching at the walls, desperate to escape, while his fingertips bled every time he gripped the sharp edges of stone to pull pieces away, as if the outside was just beyond.

He’d never forget how he lay on his bed, feeling drool drip from the corner of his lips while he was caught in a mindless, dissociative haze just to escape the hell of his confinement. How it sometimes had been the only way to elevate the chaotic, whirling thoughts that refused to shut up.

He hated the pitiful memories of him eating pages of his books as a means to quell the ache in his being that thirsted for blood, trying anything to quench it. Or how he’d dug or bashed at the ground with a rock like a barbarian just to hear something other than his own internal organs moving and shifting in the constant quiet.

The days, weeks, months,yearsof the emotional anguish of wishing he’d never been born. How he’d hated the Demon side of himself because it was the reason he’d been locked away. How he’d tried to yank his own horns from his forehead so they’d be gone, or when he’d ripped his fangs from his mouth so he could grow normal teeth – only for them to grow back stronger than before. Looking at his own reflection had haunted him because the eyes of a Demon looked back at him, crazed and greedy for malice, as if it wanted to consume the Elvish part of him.

The self-hatred, the loathing, the longing to disappear. Yet he’d wanted tolivejust so he could one day be accepted, and tried so,sohard to not let his blood-lust get to him whenever someone visited him.

Only to fail.

The sound of their blood rushing in their veins or the scent of their flesh-covered meat turned him into a mindless animal frothing for food. They were forced to muzzle him and strap him down just so they could give him blood infusions and save him from dying from a sickness they couldn’t diagnose.

He remembered every time they opened the door to his lonely cell – to feed him, offer him toys, books, puzzles, trying everything in their might to keep him sane – he broke a little more each time it closed.

Forso long, Jabez had buried the trauma of those years.

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