AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“And then you’ll kill us both.”
“Serve us well, and you may just have a place in our family.”
“I’d rather die,” I spat.
“The decision, as they say, is yours.”
I wanted to tell him exactly where he could shove my aunt Persephone’s amulet, but I bit my tongue. A moment later, he released me. I watched him walk over to the stairs, turn around, and glance over in my direction.
“Take her,” he said to his men. “We’re going home, and she’s coming with us.”
Diaboli’s men closed in on me. I didn’t have much of a choice but to comply, to do as I was told, to allow them to cart me out of my own house and throw me into the trunk of the car the family had come in on.
The last thing I saw as the trunk closed was the mask of the man who had thrown me in there.
When the trunk door closed, the tears came.
Chapter
Nine
Ihad spent a great deal of my life resenting my parents for locking me up in our home… now they were both gone.
And it was my fault.
Never in my life had I experienced pain like this before. The tears, the shaking, the utter lack of control of my limbs, of my breathing. I tried keeping my voice down because I didn’t want anyone in the car to be able to hear me, but there, in my silent little corner of the world, I wept, and I mourned, and I grieved.
I had failed them.
I had gotten them killed.
What I had done was unforgivable, irredeemable. I didn’t know what to do with myself, what to think, or how to feel. One minute, I was crying my eyes out. The next, I was numb. At one point, I tried to convince myself that what had happened, hadn’t actually happened. That it had all been an act, some kind of phantom show put together by demonic puppets.
Maybe my parents were still alive, somewhere. Maybe Mason Diaboli had already captured me, and I was in some kind of mental prison, playing this whole thing out purely so he could figure out how to get into my family’s vault.
That lie was full of holes, though, and it didn’t protect my feelings for long. The image of my dead mother’s face haunted me. The sound of my father’s desperate voice, begging Max and I to run. The look on Max’s face as I cut him loose and sent him hurtling into the Ether.
No.
They were dead, but I didn’t have the luxury of falling apart over that fact. That was the truth of it. I had to pick myself up, shield myself from the pain, and go forward. Max was out there, somewhere, and he needed my help now, more than ever.
The car ride away from my mansion gave me time to think, because there was no way I could get out. There were magic suppression runes etched into the trunk, each one of them potent enough to stop me from summoning my power. I had tried to force my way out of the trunk, but it was sealed shut, and there were no tools around me I could use.
They had planned to take a prisoner tonight.
Probably as a plan B.
If Max had any sense, he would stay as far away from the house as possible. Sure, the house was protected by magic, and it probably seemed like a good place to be, but Diaboli had very likely left some of his men behind.
If he went back to the house, they would be waiting, ready to ambush him and capture him just like they had captured me. If that happened, Mason would have Max and the amulet, and I would have to use it to get in to the vault.
If I didn’t, my brother would also be killed, because what use did the Diaboli have for him? He didn’t know how to use the amulet—I did. They would use him to get me to do what they wanted me to do, and it would work. I knew I wouldn’t be strong enough to resist them if they had Max and threatened to kill him in front of me.
Besides me, he was the last living Ethera.
When the car did eventually stop, my entire body tightened and stiffened. I took in a deep breath of air and held it in my lungs. It was impossible to see anything in the darkness of the trunk, save maybe for the red glow of the brake lights. Still, I tried to look for something I could use as a weapon; a tire iron, a fire extinguisher, even a road-side kit.
Nothing.
