ChapterTwenty-Eight
“Wake up, pixie.”
The voice was like a nail straight into my brain. My head was already pounding, so it wasn’t doing me any favors. My eyes opened just a slit, and I expected to find the high fae standing in front of me again, but they weren’t there.
Instead, three guards were in front of me, and one of them was slapping my cheek.
I raised my head when I felt his skin connecting to mine and tried to push back as far away from them as I could, but I couldn’t get the chair to even slide back an inch.
The guards laughed. “There you are.”
I saw their faces, their huge smiles, but I didn’t recognize any of them. My chest rose and fell fast with panic.
“We got a little something to show ya,” the one in the middle said as he chewed his gum with his mouth open. “Lookie here.” And he stepped to the side to show me the table behind him where the laptop had been the last time I was awake.
How long ago was that? Maybe—
My brain became completely blank when my eyes were able to make sense of the image in front of me.
Tailsburry’s head. Without a body. Sitting atop the table with his eyes closed and his mouth open, like he’d been screaming his guts out just before his head was cut off him.
That same scream tore from my throat. The laughter of the guards reached my ears from a distance, and I squeezed my eyes shut, shaking my head, screaming so much my lungs burned.
Until someone grabbed my hair from behind and pulled my head up, pressing something cold and sharp right to the side of my neck.
“Hush now,” the same guard whispered in my ear, and my scream was cut abruptly. “There’s a good girl.” His tongue slipped inside my ear, making me jump—or try to, before the magic holding my arms back bit into my skin again, invading every bit of me with red hot pain.
“Look,” the guard ordered, and when I refused to open my eyes, he pressed the tip of what must have been a knife against my neck. My skin broke and I felt the warm blood dripping from it.
Gritting my teeth, I opened my eyes, surprised to find them dry. But I was too shocked for tears, as shocked as Tailsburry had been when they’d gotten to him.
My god, that was really his head!
“See that?” the guard whispered in my wet ear, sending ice-cold shivers down my back. “This is what happened to the last guy who didn’t want to cooperate with us. Get it?”
My entire body was shaking so badly, if it wasn’t for him holding me by the hair, and the magic around my arms, I’d have collapsed on the floor long ago.
“Sleep now, pixie. And remember.”
Another hit on the back of my head, just as strong as the first. This time, at least, I welcomed the darkness wholeheartedly.
Tailsburry’s head was gone.The table was clean, nothing on it but a laptop with the diamond shining on the side of it. When I came to this time, I didn’t move. I kept my head down and tried to see as much as I could from that position, which wasn’t much. I needed time awake, so I could focus on my magic, unleash it onto the spell holding my arms. I knew it was useless, and it beat me why I tried, but I still did. I wanted to live, damn it. I just wanted to live.
There were five guards in there with me, including the psycho who’d licked my ear and cut my neck. I didn’t feel the pain of it, but I’d felt the blood sliding on my skin. My head pounded still, and it made thinking difficult, but my magic still left my fingers in shorts bursts before it collided with the other keeping me immobile and disappeared.
Another try.
I wouldn’t stop until I was dead.
I tried to be positive about it. I tried to think about all the ways this could turn out in my favor.
So what that the diamond had actually been a flash drive? So what that they’d captured me and kept me God knows where?
It was all part of the plan, wasn’t it? My eyes squeezed shut as a beautiful face with wide eyes and the sexiest smile in the world came in front of my eyes.
Sandra, the succubus.
How nice she’d been to me. How she’d encouraged me to just be myself. Because I had never really been impersonating another person. They were all expecting me to be me because they knew I would get here.