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“What about my chains?” I ask, holding out my shackled wrists.
“You look good in them,” he says from behind his full mask and laughs wickedly as he turns and walks away.
I pace around the small room, which can’t be more than ten-by-ten feet. While I can feel the cold damp, it doesn’t seem to bother me. I don’t have any chills or feel the need to seek warmth. I’m still wearing the same clothes I was in when I killed Vince, but they’re not covered in his blood. They look pristine, as a matter of fact. My skin is clean too.
Moving to the bars, I see in the cell opposite me a man lying on his side, curled into a ball, his back to me. I grab hold of the bars and put my face up to it. “Hey… you.”
He doesn’t move or acknowledge me.
“Dude… hey, you in that cell. Wake up.”
Nothing.
“He won’t answer you,” another man’s voice says from the cell to my left.
I can’t see him, but I still turn my head that way. “Why not?”
“He stopped talking about ten years ago, give or take a few months. At least that’s what the other prisoners say.”
My jaw drops. Ten years?
I swallow hard. “How long have you been here?”
“About three, I think. Every once in a while, a guard will tell us if we ask.”
“And what do we do? Just stay in this cell until we die?”
The man laughs, and it’s not mean. More sardonic than anything. “Die? You’re already dead. You’re nothing more than a soul right now, here to serve at the pleasure of the king. What do I do? I do whatever he wants me to do.”
Images flash through my mind as to what that could mean. Maybe clean his toilets? Service him in other ways?
My stomach rolls.
I glance back at the man lying in his cell, completely mute. I wonder what he’s been made to do the last ten years, and I also wonder how long it will take me before I stop speaking as well.
CHAPTER 5
Amell
Ifind Skicruwaiting for me in my council room. I had this space created when I took over rule of the Underworld so I’d have a proper venue to meet with the noble lines of Dark Fae. In here, we discuss important topics such as trade, commerce, infrastructure, and the like. The Underworld doesn’t just exist. It needs management, especially coming off Kymaris’s rule since she didn’t give a shit about anyone but herself. Her thousands upon thousands of years of disinterest and evil intent left this realm in chaos.
I took a different approach to governance when Zora asked me to step in. The first was that this is our homeland. Before, it was a prison, and we made do with what we had. But with the change in management, Zora gave us a chance to have a good life, and I wanted to make sure we took it.
In addition to improving living conditions, I’m trying to use the nobles to help me build a solid infrastructure.
Skicru is one of my original fallen sisters—not by blood but by circumstance—cast out of Heaven right alongside me. She’s beautiful, and deadly. From her descended and later evolved the succubus and incubus fae and all their iterations that require sex to maintain their strength. If you’re in bed with Skicru—and I have been on many occasions—you’re going to get a workout. Only because I’m Dark Fae am I able to withstand the drain of life force, but lesser beings die between her legs as she sucks them dry.
While she has the strength of a hundred humans and can snap necks like no tomorrow, she comes off as willowy and delicate. Her clothing is always provocative but romantic. Today she’s wearing a flowing dress of ivory silk, and her angel-blond hair floats over her shoulders. If she had her original white wings she fell from Heaven with, no one would question she was an angel.
Skicru is lounging in a chair, talking to one of her brethren. Torak. He’s a Dark Fae but not an original fallen. He’s of noble blood, though, and has been a loyal member of Skicru’s family so long I can’t remember where he came from.
Their heads turn my way when I enter and they stand in deference, but I wave them down. I can’t stand all that bowing and bobbing shit that Kymaris always insisted on.
I take a chair across the table. “Calix said you had something urgent to discuss.”
“There are rumblings,” Skicru says, her expression taut.
“Such as?” I drawl.
