Holland looked like someone caught between two selves, the effect eerie, disconcerting.
His shoulders rested against the icy stone wall, but if he felt the cold, he didn’t let it show. Kell took in the remains of Athos Dane’s control spell, carved into the Antari’s front—and ruined by the steel bar Kell himself had driven through his chest—before noticing the web of scars that lined Holland’s skin. There was order to the mutilations, as if whoever’d done them had done them carefully. Methodically. Kell knew from experience how easily Antari healed. To leave these kinds of scars, the wounds would have to have been very, very deep.
In the end, Holland was the one to break the silence. He couldn’t see Kell, not through the blindfold, but he must have known it was him, because when the older Antari spoke, his voice was laced with disdain. “Come to get your revenge?”
Kell took a slow breath, steadying himself.
“Leave,” he said, gesturing to the guards.
They hesitated, eyes flicking between the two Antari. One retreated without hesitation, two had the decency to grow nervous, and the fourth looked loath to miss the scene.
“King’s orders,” warned Kell, and at last they withdrew, taking with them the clank of armor, the echo of boots.
“Do they know?” asked Holland, flexing his ruined fingers. His voice had none of Osaron’s echo, only that familiar, gravelly tone. “That you abandoned them? Came to my castle of your own free will?”
Kell flicked his wrist, and the chains around Holland tightened, forcing him back against the cell wall. The gesture earned him nothing—Holland’s tone remained cold, unflinching.
“I’ll take that as a no.”
Even through the blindfold, Kell could feel Holland’s gaze, the black of his left eye scraping against the black of Kell’s right.
He summoned the king’s tone as best he could.
“You will tell me everything you know about Osaron.”
A gleam of bared teeth. “And then you’ll let me go?” sneered Holland.
“What is he?”
A heavy pause, and Kell thought Holland would force him to drag the answers out. But then he answered. “An oshoc.”
Kell knew that word. It was Mahktan for demon, but what it really meant was a piece of incarnated magic. “What are his weaknesses?”
“I do not know.”
“How can he be stopped?”
“He can’t.” Holland twitched the chains. “Does this make us even?”
“Even?” snarled Kell. “If I could yet discount the atrocities you committed during the rule of the Danes, it would not change the fact that you are the one who set that oshoc free. You plotted against Red London. You lured me into your city. You bound me, tortured me, purposefully severed me from my magic, and in so doing you nearly killed my brother.”
A tilt of the chin. “If it’s worth anything—”
“It isn’t,” snapped Kell. He began to pace, torn between exhaustion and fury, his body aching but his nerves alight.
And Holland, so maddeningly calm. As if he weren’t chained to the wall. As if they were standing together in a royal chamber instead of separated by the iron bars of a prison cell.
“What do you want, Kell? An apology?”
He felt his fraying temper finally snap. “What do I want? I want to destroy the demon you’ve unleashed. I want to protect my family. I want to save my home.”
“So did I. I did what I had to—”
“No,” snarled Kell. “When the Danes ruled, they may have forced your hand, but this time, you chose. You chose to set Osaron free. You chose to be his vessel. You chose to give him—”
“Life isn’t made of choices,” said Holland. “It’s made of trades. Some are good, some are bad, but they all have a cost.”
“You traded away my world’s safety—”
Holland strained forward suddenly against his chains, and even though his voice didn’t rise, every muscle in him tightened. “What do you think your London did, when the darkness came? When Osaron’s magic consumed his world, and threatened to take ours with it? You traded away our world’s safety for your own, locked the doors and trapped us between the raging water and the rocks. How does it feel now?”
Kell wrapped his will around Holland’s skull and forced it back against the wall. The slightest clench in Holland’s jaw and the flare of his nostrils were the only signs of pain.
“Hatred is a powerful thing,” continued Holland through gritted teeth. “Hold on to it.”
And in that moment, Kell wanted to. He wanted to keep going, wanted to hear the crack of bone, wanted to see if he could break Holland the way Holland had broken him in White London.
But Kell knew he couldn’t break Holland.
Holland was already broken. It showed, not in the scars, but in the way he spoke, the way he held himself in the face of pain, too well acquainted with its shape and scale. He was a man hollowed out long before Osaron, a man with no fear and no hope and nothing to lose.
For an instant, Kell tightened his grip anyway—in anger, in spite—and felt Holland’s bones groan under the strain.
And then he forced himself to let go.
I
Alucard had been dreaming of the sea when he heard the door open. It wasn’t a loud sound, but it was so out of place, at odds with the ocean spray and the summer gulls.
He rolled over, lost for a moment in the haze of sleep, his body aching from the abuse of the tournament and his head full of silk. And then, a step, wooden boards groaning underfoot. The sudden, very real presence of another person in the room. Rhy’s room. And the prince, still unconscious, unarmed, beside him.