Why?
She felt his lips at her ear, even though she couldn't see him in the little light.
"Feel it, flamma," he whispered, his voice seductive in the face of her turmoil. "Feel everything you're feeling. Don't shove it under a rug, don't push it aside. What do you feel?"
Rage.
Pain.
Humiliation.
Fear.
So much.
"He's right there," the voice of death cajoled. "And he can't touch you. So feel, and do what you need to take back what he took from you."
She was feeling so much, her hands fisted at her sides, her body shaking with the force of everything hitting her. Her eyes swept the room, memories flooding her mind—of her on the bed, slowly dying, one shattered piece at a time, of her in the dingy bathroom, hacking off her hair, one lock at a time, of her sitting in the corner, arms around her knees, struggling to take one breath at a time. They had driven her to it, they had shoved her into the black hole she had resisted all her life, and fuck if it didn't make her fucking angry.
A noise she didn't even recognize left her chest, and the hanging man stirred.
Lyla trembled, rooted to the spot, watching as his head lolled and his eyes searched the room, stopping on one of his pals dead in a chair, before suddenly coming to where she stood.
The bald man grinned with a mouth full of blood. "A sight for sore eyes. Just the memory of your cunt gets me hard."
Disgust, so deep, rolled through her. She wished she'd lost her memory of everything, wished she couldn't remember what he was talking about, how her body had been degraded and her insides had screamed at him to get off her. But she remembered, every single thrust, every single time.
"You're going to die," she told him, her voice shaking with her rage.
The bald man swept his eyes around the room, unable to find the man he was afraid of. "So you're his whore now. I don't blame him. You did have the most amazing cunt to rape, and oh, I've been in many."
He was provoking her, and possibly also the Shadow Man he knew was around, she knew that. And yet his words kept hitting like bullets.
'Take back what he took from you.'
Power.
He had taken away her power, bleached it from her soul until she became a shell, and she was going to take it from him.
So, she took a step into the room, the stench making her want to gag. She took another deep breath, focusing on keeping her spine straight and not on the smell.
"You think you were a man?" she laughed, tilting her head to the side, imitating how she'd seen Dainn talking to other people when he had the upper hand. "Oh, my 'cunt' has been fucked and sorry to tell you, you didn't even scratch the surface." She examined him from head to toe, and shook her head. "Not even half the surface."
The ugly twist on his face told her she'd struck a nerve, and the rush of power it sent through her body made her heady. Keeping on, she dug deeper. "You worthless piece of shit, you couldn't even break a woman you held captive for months. You're not a man. You're a spineless swine masquerading as a man."
Oh that hit him. For whatever reason, he had a weak spot about his superior masculinity.
Lyla chuckled. "What? Mommy didn't love you as a boy? Did she tell you you were worthless too?"
"Shut up," he cut through, his voice enraged.
Lyla could feel the call of the cruelty, the power it held, so tempting. She could feel herself twisting and becoming something ugly to match him, to get one over him. But it wouldn't be her. She wasn't cruel, and the months she had spent healing and finding herself, she didn't know if going down this dark hole would undo them. Cruelty always cut the hand striking the blade.
It was too precious to risk.
But she wanted her vengeance. She wanted to see him hurt.
So far, the Shadow Man had been absent, letting her do whatever she wanted, giving her the freedom to take her power.