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“I have something I want you to do.”
My heart started thudding out of control. “Damen, you’re scaring me.”
“Don’t be scared.”
“Well, tell me some fucking information and I won’t be scared.” I tried to keep my voice calm for how manic my heart was beating. I failed.
“Ada. Don’t be scared. I just need you to go down into the undercrofts, and then tell me when you’re down on that level.”
“You’re telling me not to be scared, but this is a mind-fuck if there ever was one. Tell me this instant what is going on.”
“Not until you get down to the undercrofts.”
“You are such an asshole.”
“I know. Just go.”
My knuckles white on the railing, I peeled my fingers free and walked toward the main staircase, then made my way along the main level to the staircase on the opposite end of the castle that led down into the undercrofts.
The whole of this creepy, making my gaze flicker back and forth, waiting for someone to pop out of a room or a corridor and scare the shit out of me.
Nothing. Not another soul breathing in the place. Just my footfalls a lonely echo along the walls as I made my way downward.
The pungent dank smell of the undercrofts hit me hard after I curled around the first bend in the circular stone stairwell that led downward.
I stepped onto the flat irregular stones that made up the floor of the undercrofts, the stone blocks curving up over my head in vault after vault. I wasn’t even sure my phone worked down here.
“I’m here.”
“Good. Thank you for trusting me this far.” He sounded genuinely sincere and my annoyance lessened. Slightly.
“You are scraping the bottom of the barrel in trust right now, you realize.”
“I do.” He said the words without levity. Whatever this was, it was important to him. “Go to the cell three doors down on the right, but stop outside the door. Don’t open it.”
I flicked on the lights that ran the length of the main corridor down the middle of the undercrofts and started walking. “Are you going to jump out at me? I don’t have the fucking hiccups, you know.”
He chuckled. “No. This is a different sort of surprise.”
I walked toward the cell three doors down. In front of the closed door, my skin prickled. A malefic was down here. I’d gotten used to the malefics that Damen employed here at the castle. I was even accustomed to being around Leo after our time spent at his compound in Athens. But this was a new malefic to me. A dangerous one.
What in the fucking hell was Damen doing?
My stance widened into defensive positioning, just in case. I heaved a breath. “I’m standing here, staring at the door. And I can feel a fucking malefic on the other side of it. You’re stretching the limits of our trust down to a tiny fucking hair right now, you realize.”
“I’m aware. I need to tell you what’s behind the door.”
I stilled, my head dropping. “I’m listening.”
“The man—the malefic inside that cell.” Damen paused, and in that pause, I could hear him inhale through his nostrils. He was about to talk through pain he didn’t want to share. A tell of his.
“A week ago, that malefic killed my daughter, Inez, in St. Vincent. He’s been trying to take over the shipping at the main ports in South America, something Inez is—was in charge of. She’d blocked him at every step because he’s a fucking madman that thinks he has more power than he does. He’s an ill-born nobody with dreams of grandeur who thought if he took out a Folotto that would make him a fucking god to his crew. He and his men followed her on holiday—on fucking vacation of all things—with her child. And they took out her guards and they went into her house and he cornered her in her bedroom in the middle of the night when she was asleep. Fucking asleep. And they tortured her for a little while before he killed her.”
I gasped, my chest cracking at the pain in his voice.
“And then…” His voice trailed off, cracking.
My eyes closed. “I’m here. I’m here. Tell me.”
