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et him free.
“You’ll starve down here,” Barrons goaded.
“I’ll slaughter up there.”
“The years will bring madness.”
“I’ll deal with it.”
“You’ll still feel it all.”
Again Ryodan said nothing. There was nothing to say. It was true. He would. But he wouldn’t kill again.
“You could get trapped in the beast’s skin. Be unable to change back.” Barrons pushed, his eyes sparking crimson as he recalled another day, another time.
“Unlike you, I prefer my human skin. I’ll find my way back.”
“It’s dark. Underground.”
Barrons knew his past. “That was a very long time ago,” Ryodan parried with soft menace.
“It’ll be hell.”
“I know what hell is, Barrons. It’s not this.” A small slice of hell, however, was taking a man’s life merely because Dani had taken him to her bed. A larger slice of hell was knowing he’d do it again and again. The fairest portion of hell would be the contempt in her eyes. “Do it,” he told Barrons. “You owe me.” Before he started to lose control again and decided he was fine killing them all. Before he convinced himself the active caring and concern for the well-being of another person’s body and soul, as she’d once informed him love was, scorn and fire flashing in her eyes, justified eliminating all intimacy but his.
After a long silence, Barrons murmured, “When we first transcribed that spell, we knew the mere placing of it would call a high price. It’s not your fault. You gift her with the greatest protection you can give—the willingness to abandon everything, to turn into the killing machine she needs, any time she needs it. You accept sacrificing your sanity and life each time she summons you. You grant her immense control over you and open yourself to a bond that can be pure poison for us. And the mere placement of that mark loosens the restraints on your beast. It’s an unavoidable side effect.”
Again Ryodan said nothing. Civilized for eons, disciplined, iron-willed, he’d believed he could handle it. Nothing rattled him.
But that woman.
“We suffer incarceration no better than the Fae. It’ll hurt. Worse than being burned alive,” Barrons snapped.
“Pain is relative.”
“What if five years isn’t long enough?”
“It had better be—she’s mortal.” Five years wasted. Five years of her life Ryodan would never get to see. And it would be the second five years of her life he’d lost. A decade, total. He inhaled sharply, going rigid as curved black talons exploded from his fingertips. He slammed his hands into the floor, gouging deep gashes in the stone. His skeleton was suddenly too large for his body, his muscles shifting and elongating.
She was on fire inside, angry about something, and he felt it. He felt everything she felt, that was the problem. He wanted her to taste all the world had to offer. Gorge on it.
Then choose him.
Because he was the best the world had to offer.
To the most lawless of men, choice was golden: it didn’t matter what you were, it mattered what you did with it.
“Do. It. Now.”
Barrons sighed, acknowledging this was one of those exceedingly rare arguments he wasn’t going to win. “Our cuffs connect us. You have but to demand I release you should you change your mind.”
And because of their cuffs, Barrons would feel his pain, bear it in silence and never speak of it. Ryodan dropped back on powerful black-skinned haunches with a low guttural growl.
“Ah, brother.” Barrons muttered a string of curses in a language long dead, but inclined his head and closed his eyes. When he opened them again they were bloodred pools. Intricate tattoos slithered and moved beneath his skin as he chanted the words of an ancient spell.
Ryodan began to scream.
But the day came when the only sound that filled that hellish place was the tortured baying of a half-mad, starved beast in endless pain.
