Page 58 of Reap the Night
“Oh, you’ll like it,” Loviator says. “My boys will make you feel good. They’ll fill you and pleasure you, the kind of pleasure that verges on pain.”
“I don’t want it. Please. I don’t want it.”
Loviator grabs her by the hair and twists. Arabella screams.
“You chose to follow your lover, and now you’ll pay the price for my hospitality by sampling every aspect of pain that my realm offers. It’s a gift, don’t you see?”
Anger surges through me. “Let her go, you bitch!”
“Ah, a flicker of fire remains I see. I was beginning to worry that I’d broken you.”
“Take me instead. Iwantthe pain. I need it.”
She studies me for several beats, and my heart pounds hard with hope, but then she shakes her head. “Not today, little monster, but you can watch your dear Arabella as my boys balance her on the razor’s edge of pain.”
She steps back as two huge monstrous males enter the room, naked save for bulging groin coverings.
Arabella screams and presses herself to the wall, clawing at the stone as the men approach.
Loviator makes soothing noises, a smile on her lips.
“Arabella! Arabella!” I reach for her, and the stone room melts.
I’m in a chair, wrists bound to iron by barbed wire that slices into my skin. Rivulets of blood spill from my wounds, but I don’t feel it. All I hear is the slap of flesh on flesh, the groans and moans of the spectators, and her soft cries interspersed with sobs.
“Ezekiel…Please…” Arabella moans. “You promised…”
I don’t want to look. I don’t want to see, but I know I have to. I have to ground her. I have to be there.
I lift my chin and look up. Not at the beasts violating her, or at the spectators pleasuring themselves in the shadows, but at Arabella. At her tearstained face and into her dead eyes.
I lock gazes with her, and her expression smooths out, blank and unfeeling.
I hold her there. I hold her to me.
It’ll be over soon, I want to say, but the words don’t come because it will never be over.
I can’t protect her.
I can’t save her.
Only death can do that, and Loviator will never give us that luxury.
The room melts away, and I’m standing with my back pressed to a wall. No…not a wall. A rack. I’m pinned on a rack, and fire eats at my arm.
My throat is raw from screaming.
My ears hurt from the sound.
Blood is on the air and in my mouth with every gasp and every bellow, and someone laughs and laughs and laughs.
It hurts. It hurts so badly.
I woke gasping for air and pushed back my hair from my sweat-soaked brow. My doorhandle rattled.
“Orina! Orina, are you okay?” Edwin called. “Open the door.”
I tried to call out, but my throat was on fire. Instead, I stumbled out of bed and unlocked the door.
