The door closest to us opens. A demon walks in, dressed in black and gold, his huge horns decorated with rings and chains. His yellow eyes are cold as he takes me in, then he moves on to Zaki. I turn to follow his gaze.
Zaki’s face is pure horror.
“Did you find yourself an escaped soul, Son?” the man asks, his lips curling into a smirk. “Don’t worry. I’ll take her from your hands.”
My heart skips, and all hell breaks loose. People pour into the room from both doors, demons with horns of all sizes, dark clothes, weapons in their hands. My heart drops to my stomach as I whirl around, my back hitting the windows. Oh, shit. Oh, fucking shitty shit, what the hell? They keep coming, and I dart my gaze around, but there’s no place to run. No place, but the windows behind me.
I swivel and go for the locks, except there are none. There’s no place to open the windows. I stretch my arm to reach for a chair, but a demon catches up to me, fingers curling around my wrist. A second and a third grip my arms, and a fourth kicks behind my knees. I cry out, falling on my knees. Even if I have no body, it still hurts. And my heart hurts more than anything.
My mind has trouble keeping up with what’s going on. There’s only thick fog as I keep asking myself what happened. Where did we fail? They couldn’t have been following us. No one knew where we were going. Not even I did. Zaki was the only one who...
Zaki. Did Zaki do this? Did he send his father a message, letting him know what was going on? Oh, gods. No, there’s no way he created such a convoluted plan to get me. But he told me demons love politics, and maybe that’s exactly what they’re doing. Maybe he pretended to take me far so his father could rescue me. Maybe it was a plan to give his father a reputation, a reason to brag.
I’m shoved to my feet, stumbling a couple of steps before another demon catches me. Several pairs of eyes watch me. They grin, laugh, victorious in capturing me... But they’re demons. This is not their job, but reapers’. Tears sting the back of my eyes, betrayal clogging my throat. I feel like I’m closer to the truth than I expected. Zaki did sell me out for some reputation boost to his father.
I was nothing more than a tool.
Pivoting, I try to lock eyes with him. I want to spit on his face. I would bite his dick off if I could. Zaki’s near the door, exchanging heated words with his father. Are they congratulating each other? Are they arguing? Was the plan to take me farther into the Abyss before capturing me? Maybe Zaki’s upset he never got the chance to fuck me. He’s a sex demon, after all, and it must be the one reason he’s upset at my capture.
At my capture. Yet another capture, yet another time I’m taken away... But this time, it’s different. There’s no way out. Zaki’s father will exchange me with the reapers, or plain give me back. Anyway, they’ll either arrest me or take me to my parents’ place. And after sneaking out of the Underworld? They for sure are not letting me leave the house ever again. I couldn’t even call Oreo, because they’d put him down.
Disappointment and frustration and fear all mix until it clenches my throat. Zaki walks past the door, throwing a last glance in my direction, his brows pressed together. An expression I can’t read, just like almost all of his expressions. Even the ones I thought I learned to comprehend were possibly fake. He probably let me think I could so I put my guard down for him.
His father, the King of Demons, stands by the threshold, eyes glinting with amusement. “You’re quite an interesting specimen, aren’t you?” he says as if I were an animal. I’m thrown back into a memory of the Collector and being caged up, glanced at like I was in a zoo. “Escaped from reapers. Seen with a hellhound.” He chuckles as if it’s amusing. As if my freaking life serves as a mere joke to him. “I heard that, back on earth, there’s a vampire lord so interested in your powers he’s looking for a necromancer. Wouldn’t that be lovely to watch? I adore the chaos necromancers leave in their wake.” And he closes the door.
A necromancer? What does that mean? The vampire lord has to be Kayn, but what would a necromancer do to get my powers? I shake my head, and even dead I feel the beginnings of a headache bloom between my temples. The demons drag me out of the room, the sound of their sneers haunting me with every step.
My only way out and I screwed everything up by trusting a demon. I can’t even blame him, not when that’s his nature. And now, it’s all doomed—my escape, my mates’ rescue, possibly the fate of the Light Realm. All because I let myself love someone I shouldn’t.
CHAPTER21
DONATELLO
In the darkness, pain is the only thing that exists. Within me. Outside. Encasing me in a tight embrace I don’t try to break free. I swim in an ocean of acid, its burning surface spilling onto my eyes, running down my throat. Every tear I shed is a new torture, liquid fire shredding a path into the skin of my face.
Life is a living nightmare. Every time I wake from my painful dreams, I’m greeted by the ugly reality. Today, I don’t want to wake up. I don’t want to leave the pain of my dreams for something worse. At least when I’m lucky, amid the nightmares there’s a glimpse of the past, a shred of memory. Amid the blackening hurt, I still see her face.
“Donnie?” a male voice calls, and I struggle against it. I don’t want to leave. The darkness inside me is dreadful but already familiar. I get used to it, and I learn to live with it. Soon, it’ll be the one thing I feel.
“Is he even alive?” another voice drifts into my subconscious.
Here, in this place of shadows, I don’t need to face the consequences of my mistakes. I can almost forget they exist. While I hope for the end, I can run after the memory of Cassandra, and pretend reality hasn’t broken every single dream of mine.
“Come on, Donnie,” the first voice calls, raspy with emotion. “You can make it. I know you can.”
Against my better judgment, I leave the realm of dreams behind, drifting back to my body. Pain increases tenfold. Even my supernatural healing abilities can’t keep up with Kayn’s creativity, with how cruel he gets when he’s feeling vengeful. Kayn’s old enough to have found the best ways to break bodies. To make them suffer until death is the only thing you think about.
My body lies heavy on the cold ground. Everything weighs a ton, every toe, every muscle. I can’t move, can’t turn. A sharp pain to the side of my torso tells of several broken ribs, or ruptured organs, of blood seeping into the wrong cavities. My mind whirls, then grows muddled, then whirls again. It feels like forever until my brain pieces back together, until I can tell the voice still calling for me comes from Ren.
Ren is alive. Kayn didn’t bring him into his library, and he didn’t torture the wolf shifter the way he did Tristan and Apollo. I feared what not seeing him meant. I feared Kayn didn’t see any usefulness for him and killed him off. The sound of his voice is a balm to my heart, relief washing over me, making my eyes water. The wetness of new tears burn like lava, and I grind my teeth together to stop the pain.
“His eyeballs are moving,” says Tristan. “That means he’s alive, right?”
“He has to be,” Ren replies with relief in his voice. “But why is he here? Why did Kayn bring him here?”
I force my eyelids open, but they’re stuck together, a veiled redness the one thing I see. More of that acidic burn makes me cringe, so I stop moving. I open my mouth, parched lips breaking, ripping. My tongue has almost forgotten how to work. I’ve been stuck in a nightmare for too long.
“He’s left,” I mouth, my voice weak, not even a murmur. The others stop shuffling, the silence of a tomb draping over us. I can almost picture Ren and Apollo facing each other, and Apollo’s brows dropping in a deep glare.