Page 5

Cold. Numb. Nothing.

That was all Elyria Lightbreaker felt.

Absence.

Loss.

In the depths of her heart, cracked and raw and aching. In the hollow place within her chest, where her shadows were now silent. In the phantom pain that lanced through her back—where her wings should have been.

The skin there was already long healed, nothing remaining of the vicious wounds that had been carved into Elyria when Malakar ripped her wings from her back.

Nothing but two parallel silver scars engraved in her ivory skin.

The marks would fade in time, perhaps.

But underneath, the wound still festered. As it always would.

There was no healing from this.

There was no undoing what had been done to her.

“It is time to try again, my lady.”

Elyria arched a brow at the uncharacteristically polite address of the sanguinagi cultist who came to fetch her from her bedroom—her gilded cell—but said nothing. Said nothing as the girl extended a hand to help Elyria up from her chair. Said nothing as she took the simple cotton sheath the girl had brought with her.

And in return, the girl said nothing as Elyria shimmied out of her blouse and leather pants and into the dress, which fell, shapeless and billowing, past the scars that decorated her thighs.

Elyria was already striding toward the door, ready to get another day of this mad experiment over with, when the girl did, in fact, say something.

“Are you ready?” she asked, her voice surprisingly bright.

Elyria tilted her head. This was not an exchange she was used to having. All the other cultists who had been assigned to accompany her did so in silence. There was, perhaps, the occasional barked order, but the disdain scrawled across their faces was enough to explain away the lack of conversation.

And that was how she preferred it. Malakar’s torture itself was torture enough without having to make small talk.

“You must be new here,” Elyria said coldly. “Let’s just get this over with.”

Despite the neophyte leading her, what happened next was the same as it always was.

Elyria would pad across the ice-cold floors of the tower she was being kept in, without boots or slippers. Would follow her warden to Malakar’s . . . study? Laboratory? She didn’t know what to call it.

She would wait while the cultist knocked three times on the intricately inlaid darksteel door, until it swung open to reveal the sorcerer waiting within.

And they would begin.

The specifics, of course, did vary. Sometimes.

As the person assigned to escort her to and from this mad experiment changed from day to day, so did the frequency with which she was summoned. Sometimes it was daily. Other times she would be left to her own devices for days on end.

Then, when she was finally brought to the sanguinagi leader, sometimes she was with him for hours. Others, only minutes.

Sometimes he would sit her in a wrought-iron chair along one wall. At other times he would lay her on a wooden table in the center of the room, leaving her to stare up at the circular window cut into the ceiling above her.

The first few times, back when she still felt occasionally called to fight back, he chained her to the back of the door with darksteel shackles.

Malakar would then go on to whisper pretty words, or ugly words, or words of instruction. Sometimes he said no words at all, letting his magic or his instruments do the talking instead.

He tried it all—anything he thought might work, might get Elyria to finally relent. Might get her to release the pieces of his power that still, even after all these weeks, could not be retrieved from her.