Page 179 of Eldritch
The prisoner hesitated at first, wincing when he said, “The girl’s. They had killed the mother.”
What he’d said didn’t absorb at first, spoken so nonchalantly, as banal an observation as a bird having flown overhead. His mother. Violated and murdered.
Dead.
Somehow, the words couldn’t touch him, as though trapped behind a veil of steel. Only a haze of bloody red penetrated his thoughts. A longing to tear skin from bones and limbs from torso. He wanted gurgling screams and pain, his body such a glutton for violence, it shook him into paralysis.
“And so you decided to indulge in the sister afterward?” Her questions were a distant sound in his mind, as if spoken underwater.
“I didn’t touch her.”
Zevander’s vision blurred with rage, the room expanding and shrinking around him.
Loyce chuckled, the sound reverberating off his skull. “And what inspired this sudden sense of conscience?”
“We ….Theywere attacked. There were…spiders. They came for them out of nowhere. Started spinning an enormous web, trapping them inside of it.”
Zevander imagined the rage it must’ve taken to rouse Branimir from his underground cell—a place he hadn’t left in the years Zevander had known him.
“And where were you?”
“Peering in through the window. Watched the spiders wrap them up like flies. Eating them with those…long fangs and the saliva that burned their skin. I jumped from the balcony. Didn’t care if I died. Landed in a row of hedges.”
“And did anyone, aside from yourself, survive?” She bent over Zevander’s stomach, pressing a kiss there at the same time as digging her nails into his thigh.
“No. There couldn’t have been any survivors. Not the way they were attacked.”
“Not even the young girl?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know if they killed her before the spiders arrived.”
“Free me,” Zevander growled, never averting his gaze from the man he silently vowed would suffer the most gruesome death of anyone he’d ever slain.
She rounded Zevander’s body, her hand gliding over his skin. “The man bound before you is her brother. My slave.”
Zevander couldn’t even bring himself to care that she’d called him slave. He’d have gladly worn the insult for a chance to wrap his hands around the prisoner’s throat.
“Tell me, who ordered this massacre?”
Before he could answer, she drew her sword so swiftly, he hardly heard the chime against the scabbard, and she hacked his head clean off.
“No!” Zevander’s rage bellowed and bounced inside the cell. Fire burned in his muscles as he pulled at the chains, shaking and gnashing his teeth.
She sauntered to Zevander’s side and dragged her nails across his chest. “How disappointing it must feel to have the very thing you want withheld from your grasp.”
His chains rattled, as a raw, seething violence snaked through his blood. “I will never bond with you.”
She chuckled and stretched her arm down the length of his body, cupping his flaccid cock. “While I may not have your essence, remember this:You still gave me your seed,” she taunted, squeezing the soft flesh between his thighs as she kissed him on the cheek. “We’ll try again tonight, my love. I’ve come to learn of an enchantment that might prove successful.”
Zevander stared at the shadowed ceiling above him. If his heart had bothered to beat in the last hour, he wouldn’t know it. He felt nothing. Not the expanding of his lungs. Not thecrescents he’d torn into his palms with his clenched fists. Not even the rage anymore.
He was a breathing corpse. An abomination of life. Empty. Hollow.
Dead inside.
What kind of monster failed to be moved by a loss so great?
He’d dreaded the moment when the pain would wash over him, when the fury would wither to calm and the weight of his reality would cut through him like a freshly sharpened blade. It didn’t happen immediately, he knew that, having suffered the loss of his father. Perhaps he’d endured too much over the years that his heart could no longer be moved, no matter how grievous the pain. Was there a limit to suffering? A point at which a man could no longer feel?
