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It’s Slade.
He’s not a good guy.
“It takes centuries to form a link strong enough to kill harem members,” Slade says dismissively.
“And you know for certain none of them have been linked?” Dice asks around a growl, taking this entire situation personal, as we follow Slade through the winding stone tunnels, passing one empty room after another.
Slade turns, his pupils dilating and almost turning into reptilian slits against his silver eyes, and levels me with a glare.
“You were ready to give in after just an hour of being imprisoned here,” he bites out angrily, taking a step toward me.
Dice casts me a confused look, and I swallow thickly before meeting Slade’s gaze again. He’s wrong. Somehow, he’s misconstruing me turning numb intentionally as being ready to give in.
I don’t correct him, because for one, he wouldn’t believe me if I told him about my very unique plan. No one ever listens to my plans.
“Imagine centuries of feeling that helpless. That broken. That devastatingly pointless,” Slade goes on, his eyes getting brighter as his ire stews. “Tell me you’d want him to live so that you could live in that torment.”
“It wasn’t your choice to make,” are the only hushed words I can form, and they come out on a shaky, uncertain breath.
He turns without saying another word, and Dice narrows his eyes at me before following Slade.
“You’ll be discussing all this—” Dice gestures at Slade’s back then to me again. “—with your favorite uncle later, niece,” Dice tells me.
“I don’t think Deke wants to hear about all this,” I answer tightly, trying to use his normal humor to deflect.
He scoffs without turning around, and I try to wrestle with the sinking feeling in my stomach. Did Slade kill Jeremiah because he thought that incubus had made me suicidal? The numbing of my emotions was helping me break the hold.
Just as we near another room, Slade stops, his lips tensing, and he turns and steps inside the room.
Dice chokes on air, and his eyes turn wet as he looks away and gags before moving past the room, shaking his head as he leans up against the wall with his back turned to me.
Taking a deep breath, I turn inside the room and freeze.
Fifty-ish women are sitting in a circle. All of them are holding hands. All of them are sitting with blood oozing from their eyes.
All of them are dead.
“It’s a suicide circle. They used their magic to help kill each other all at once,” Slade tells me quietly. “I’ve seen this on more than one occasion, though not on such a broad scale before.”
I turn away, my own eyes turning wet. They hurried to do this before we could come save them?
“It’s what they did the second they had freedom,” Slade goes on. “But it looks like at least ten others escaped recently, given the missing presences I sense. So ten survived,” he adds coldly. “The rest killed themselves because they’ve endured hell for so long, but not long enough to die by a link that didn’t have time to form.”
He walks by me, completely unaffected, and starts moving back toward the way we came.
“Come on,” he calls out. “We need to get out of these damn woods before true nightfall. Night is the worst time.”
Dice’s eyes catch mine when I walk out, and he clears his throat. “How bad is night time?” Dice asks in a whisper.
Unable to bounce back from the sight of a suicide circle as fast as he can, I absently answer, “Not bad as long as you’re completely silent. Too much noise stirs the dormant magic in the forest at night.”
“Well, I’m fucking dead then,” he says on an exasperated breath.
Chapter 8
ELLA
Slade is moving so silently, that I wouldn’t believe he was really here if not for the fact my eyes are glued to his back.
