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Just gone. Ripping herself out of my life and taking my daughter with her.
So yes, I wanted her to suffer.
Suffer for every single one of those seconds I raged like a rabid madman, tearing through the rubble, looking for Venetia. Looking for her.
Suffer for every one of those silent moments in the dark when I awoke before dawn and I didn’t quite remember she was gone…and then I did.
Suffer for making me want her more than anything.
That was the line I drew once I had her secured in the undercrofts.
She needed to suffer.
It had been too easy to send her head into pain by merely mentioning Cletus’s nickname for her. The one thing she was terrified of. My brother.
Something I had no problem utilizing to make her suffer. I was a malefic, after all. Pain was my purpose.
That line I had drawn, it was never just a line. It was an imaginary wall I had to erect between us so I wouldn’t break—not too soon, not too easily.
She needed to suffer.
But I’d watched her.
Obsessed, really.
The one modification I had made in the rebuilding of the castle during the last four years was to have every chamber in the undercrofts wired with tiny cameras one would never notice in the cracks of the mortar between the blocks of stones.
A weakness I’d given myself without even intending to.
For now, every five minutes, I was checking the feed into the undercroft, no matter what business I was attempting to attend to. The whole fucking world of the malefics was balancing by a splintering thread I was attempting to keep tight, and all I could do was stare at that damn video feed.
I couldn’t eat. Couldn’t work. Couldn’t sleep for how damn consumed I was with watching her. My stomach churning every single time her body flat on the floor came into my sightline.
I’d watch her body twitch as the pain rolled brutally through her. Watch her arms and legs shiver with the cold. Watch her head tilt back, grinding into the damp stone beneath her, her mouth ajar in silent screams she couldn’t give voice to.
Yet she didn’t move.
She lay supine on her back, her arms and legs splayed out, just as I had left her.
True, she had iron clamps on her wrists and ankles, but the chains were long and she could move toward the food and water I’d had delivered to the cell every day.
But she never moved toward the food. Never moved toward the water.
Just stayed flat on her back, not shifting from the exact spot I left her in, letting the pain ravage her body. Not fighting against it.
Not like she used to.
She suffered the pain, for she knew as well as I did that if she released it, set it free, the energy of it would kill everyone within miles.
She wasn’t willing to go there. And at that, I’d had my doubts.
So here I stood outside her cell with the door ajar, wavering on that line I’d drawn days ago.
Hell, my toes were already inched over the damn thing.
I’d come down to find out why she hadn’t moved, why she was just lying there, letting the pain torture her, instead of fighting against it. Why she hadn’t made the slightest twitch toward the water or food.
But as I stood just outside the entrance to her undercroft, I was frozen in my tracks at the amount of pain radiating from inside the tiny stone cell.
