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“Why don’t you come on down here, Adrian? We can talk about this like the old friends that we are. Having to look up at you like this is going to give me a kink in my neck. Come on now.” I patted a stain on the mattress and inwardly cringed. “You know you’ve missed me and want to give me a hug.”
My skin crawled at the thought of him touching me, but if it got him close enough for me to nail him in the face with one of these chains, then I’d risk it.
Adrian was smarter than he looked, and he was having none of it.
“Now, child, I may be getting old, but I’m definitely not stupid.”
What did being old have to do with anything? And I didn’t actually think he was that old, but I never once thought of him as stupid. He was the opposite of stupid.
Shadows moved around him, more people arriving. They were dressed in black robes with their hoods pulled up. Their identities were hidden from me, probably on purpose. There were eight of them in total, and my gut told me one of them was Marcus Cole. He started this. If he didn’t stick around to watch how things played out, then he truly was the coward I now thought him to be.
“Boys,” Adrian called out while attempting to stare me down with that stupid fucking childlike smile on his face. “Bring over the hoses and lower them down like the good boys you are. Yes, that’s right, just like that. Now back up and turn the water on. Yes, very good.”
Water?
Hoses?
I watched with wide eyes and a heart that threatened to beat right out of my chest as several young boys who weren’t dressed in dark robes approached the hole all around me. Some of them were as young as nine. The oldest looked to be about sixteen.
Adrian was definitely a total motherfucker for using these young boys like this. I bet if I were to ask them, each and every single one of them would tell me they were now orphans and their families had died in a really horrible way. Then, in swooped the Council, ready to take care of them whether they liked it or not.
I didn’t want to think it because it was one more horrific act I didn’t want them to be capable of, but I was starting to believe that maybe even the Council had something to do with those families’ deaths in the first place. They were likely behind the whole thing.
If I made it out of this alive, I was going to have Rain do some digging. I was also willing to bet that at least one member of the family or coven had taken issue with the Council or the other way around before they’d been slaughtered. One child had been left alive because the Council needed soldiers, and angry young boys with no one in this world who loved them were easy to mold into whatever the Council needed them to be.
They lowered hoses down into the hole, six of them in total. They weren’t normal hoses though. They were about four times larger in width and would most certainly fill the hole up with water much faster than a normal-sized hose.
Holy fuck. I was going to drown down here in this hole, chained up just like Isobel had been in hers when it was flooded with water.
Rain was going to be so devastated.
They were all dead men, they just didn’t know it yet.
That thought didn’t bring me as much comfort as I thought it would when the water turned on and the hoses started spewing it out.
I really wanted to ask Adrian why he was doing this, but my pride won out and my mouth refused to ask him any questions. Pride was a goddamn stupid thing. I should have been asking questions. I should have been begging for Adrian to turn the water off.
It was almost like my voice had been robbed from me right along with my magic.
I wanted to kill Adrian, and I now hated Marcus Cole. The person I hated the most was myself, though, because at the end of the day, this was a situation of my own making. If I had never tangled with the Council to begin with, then I wouldn’t have found myself in this unfortunate situation.
Then Dash wouldn’t have his father back, and there was no undoing that for me. I couldn’t even think of it. Rain meant the world to me, and I’d been robbed of him for so long I hadn’t even remembered who he was when I first saw him again. Dash had also been robbed of his father. It was something we had in common even though our situations were very different.
I didn’t regret bringing Romero back into Dash’s life, and I never would.
I eyed the water level rising in my dirt hole.
Consequences be damned.
At least someone I loved got some form of happiness out of the choices I’d made.
“I’m impressed with you, child,” Adrian called down to me. “You haven’t once cried or even asked me to turn the water off. Everyone always begs. Given enough time and a few more feet of water, I’m sure you’ll be begging too. The sound will be so sweet to my ears. I can’t wait.”
Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen. I decided right then and there I wouldn’t beg that man for anything, even if my lungs were filling up with water.
Fuck that and fuck him.
I tried to stand up. My chains rattled, and I was only able to rise up to my knees. I eyed the hole I was in and knew if I were able to stand, it would still be a good four feet taller than me.
