“I am only here because I thought I would be able to rescue you from this terrible place,” Grigor explained. “My aunt Olga seems to have betrayed our family.”
Karine’s gaze leapt to Grigor’s face. For the first time, she looked as if she had hope. “Grigor? Is that really you? You came to this awful place to rescue me?”
“It wasn’t one of my better ideas,” he conceded. He looked around him. “They’re watching us and recording everything we say and do.”
“What do they want?”
“I don’t know yet. But something from my family. I think my older brother is here as well. I didn’t see him, but I swore I heard him at one point. If they have him, they have a tiger by the tail and don’t yet know it.”
“Is there a way out of here?” Karine asked.
“If there is, we’ll find it,” Grigor assured her.
Afanasiv was watching his face. His expression said he didn’t believe that for a moment. He moved away from the two cells and hurried past several unoccupied cages. Rounding a corner, he came to a long cage that had a few more amenities in it than the one Karine was in. This one had a chair and what looked like a mattress rather than a cot. There was a privacy curtain around the bucket where one relieved themselves—far more than what Karine had.
Although the cell looked as if it were housing an important prisoner who was treated like a princess, the woman lying on the bedlooked to be in far worse condition than Karine had. She moaned continuously. The moaning wasn’t an affectation, either. She was clearly in a great deal of pain. Outside her cell, a very worried demon with cloven hooves and even a set of horns paced with another demon.
“Lilith will kill us if she dies,” the one with the horns announced. “You have to do something. Can you get Gaia here? Maybe she can save her.”
“She was really mad at us the last time. She said if we ever hurt anyone like that again, she would let Lilith skin us alive,” the other demon whispered, looking around her.
Afanasiv gave his lifemate the information as quietly as possible, just by thinking of it.Gaia was a Carpathian child stolen from her family when she was about ten. Already she was showing promise of speaking with animals and taming beasts. Xavier traded her to Lilith in exchange for parasites he needed in his experiments to cause our women to miscarry. Gaia was taken to the underworld and raised by Lilith.
Although Vasilisa didn’t make a sound, he felt her question. Why would Lilith need a small child to talk to beasts for her?
Behind the four gates—each positioned north, south, east and west—is caged the biggest beast of all. He was a Carpathian male who had lived too long in the world. He had served his people with honor but had not gone quietly into the next realm when it was his time, nor had he succumbed to the temptation of losing his honor. Like me, he remained in the world for centuries, and the scars began to develop, marking him a beast. A demon. He became too experienced in battle to ever have hunters take him down. He is a legend in the Carpathian world, but he does exist. Should he ever escape, he would wreak havoc such as the world has never seen. Lilith hoped Gaia could control him. Through Gaia, Lilith would control him. His name is Justice and he is very real.
Afanasiv detested the fact that Justice had lived such an honorable life and that his ending had come to this—existing in the underworld. Kept behind four gates made of safeguarded wood. Even his last act asa Carpathian had been to sacrifice for his family. He fought the demons back, giving Sandu, his parents and sister the time to run out of the underworld and close the portal behind them. Justice had always been a man of honor. Now he was a raving beast who, by all accounts, had moments of clarity, but they were few and far between.
Gaia is grown now, and although she’d had an opportunity to escape the underworld, she refused, choosing to stay with Justice to try to keep him as sane as possible. She isn’t his lifemate, but they formed a friendship of sorts, and she fears if she leaves her post, he will be completely lost. Her brother recently went to see her in order to try to persuade her to leave, but she still refused.
Afanasiv felt a little sorry for Gaia’s brother, Tiberiu. He knew Tiberiu had searched for his little sister for centuries. It had to have been painful to finally find her only to lose her again to the underworld. On the other hand, Tiberiu was an ancient Carpathian male and didn’t have emotions. He had a sense of duty. Leaving his sister went against that sense of duty more than anything else.
“We’ve got to do something,” the demon with horns snapped. “Gaia can heal her. Otherwise, we’re both dead. And Lilith won’t let us die easily.”
The smaller demon threw her hands into the air and then hurried off. The demon with horns unlocked the cell with a giant key that was on a chain around her neck.
“Lada. We have a healer coming to look at you,” she crooned. Only her voice was very low-pitched, and it came out more like growls instead of the reassuring way she was trying to speak. “She’ll fix you right up, and you won’t hurt anymore.”
Lada didn’t answer or acknowledge her. She turned her head away and gave a piteous cry just at that small movement. Afanasiv didn’t want to risk getting too close to the demon with horns. He had no idea how sensitive she was, but he needed to see how bad Lada’s injuries were.
Afanasiv also wanted to know where Andros was. Grigor had been put in a cell directly across from Karine, which made sense if Lilithwanted to spy on them and listen in on their conversations. Why wouldn’t she do the same with Andros and Lada? Did she already know about Lada’s condition?
Afanasiv drifted closer to the woman, taking the long way around the cell to avoid the demon altogether. He positioned himself first at Lada’s head. He was used to inspecting from the inside out, and he did so, slipping into her body to see what damage they’d done to her. The lacerations with the knives weren’t the worst of her injuries. Her internal organs had taken a beating. Someone had systematically struck her repeatedly. She was leaking blood from her liver and spleen. Afanasiv returned to the surface to look down at Lada’s swollen face. He didn’t quite understand why they would do such a thing to her if their intent was to show Andros visible wounds—unless they beat her in front of him or somehow coerced him do it.
Very agitated, the demon with the horns paced up and down in Lada’s cell. “You shouldn’t resist and taunt me so much. I get angry and can’t stop myself. The mistress knows this, and yet she keeps sending me to you. I think you’re a test to see if I can hold my temper, but you won’t cooperate. I get terrible punishments if you don’t do as mistress wants.”
She kept muttering, her tone between guttural and growling. At times it was difficult to decipher. The demon wasn’t remorseful for hurting Lada so much as fearful that she’d gone too far, and Lada might be too injured and might not be able to do the things her mistress demanded. In that case, the demon was going to be punished.
Where was Andros in all this? Had he witnessed Lada being beaten by this demon? Did they subject him to such a torture? For a man like Andros, that would be far worse than if they had flayed the skin from his back. He’d finally found a woman he believed he was in love with, and she was lured to the underworld by his aunt because of her ties to him.
Afanasiv found it was far easier to carry on his work without emotion. Feelings got in the way and threatened to shake his centuries-olddiscipline. He found himself fighting down a berserker’s rage. The demon in him was rising to take these women from the ones that had harmed them so cruelly. He hastily reverted back to the way of the Carpathian hunter, shutting out all emotion so he could process everything and make the best decisions based on logic.
The other, smaller demon returned with a young woman in tow. Clearly, the woman was Carpathian. This was Tiberiu’s sister. She was tall with long dark hair. She walked with easy strides, going straight to the bed where Lada lay so restless in her pain.
“Why would you do this to a prisoner and then call me to heal her?” She hissed as she laid one hand gently on Lada’s abdomen. “Do you think I’ll be a part of your insanity? Hurting a victim and then making them well so you can hurt them all over again?”
Afanasiv could see that Gaia hurt just looking at Lada. She had to have seen a great deal of terrible things having grown up in the underworld, but it hadn’t destroyed her natural empathy. In spite of what she’d said to the demon, her palm was lightly skimming over Lada’s body, assessing the damage.