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But it would mean taking a life. Not an innocent one. But still, a life.
“I’ll be right with you the whole time—put me on speaker.” He paused and I could hear tapping in the background. “I have the video feed pulled up and I’m watching you right now.”
“You are?”
“Yes. You’re in the undercrofts, your fingers scratching at the door, wondering if I‘ve gone completely insane.”
I turned around, searching for the camera he was watching me from. All I saw were stone bricks.
He chuckled. “A little to your left.”
There it was. A tiny little glint of light flashing off a tiny camera embedded into the mortar just beyond the open light bulb closest to me.
I stared at the glint of light and shook my head at him.
“Yeah, I know. I’m on your shit list for springing this on you. Now put me on speaker and go inside. I have a camera inside all the cells. I’ll be right there with you the whole time.”
I stared at the camera for a good long minute, deciding.
He let me stare at him, silent. Waiting.
I knew this was his way of helping me—unconventional to say the least. But nothing else I’d tried in my life to somehow gain control of this power that had tortured me for a good century had worked. So maybe I had to take this chance he was giving me.
I nodded at the camera, then turned toward the door and pulled it open.
Inside, a single bulb hung down in the middle of the vault and was already turned on.
A pretty typical torture chamber, as far as I’d seen them in my life. A row of metal tools and knives in all sorts of angles and curves were displayed in a straight line across the opposite wall—the first thing one saw when stepping into the room. Not shiny and silver like Cletus was partial to. Old metal. Worn with time and darkened, blackened by the blood they’d seen.
In this room, there was no cleaning away of the blood. It sat pooled in puddles on the floor, splattered thick on the walls to soak into the stone. The stench of it turned my stomach and made me almost puke.
I swallowed down the bile.
This demon killed one of Damen’s children. That was the only thought I needed to keep in my head.
An empty metal chair sat in the middle of the room with bolts holding it to the floor, shackles for wrists and ankles dangling from the chair’s legs and arms.
The malefic Damen had left here for me was against the right wall, his right arm in a shackle hanging from a chain attached to the curved stone ceiling above. The shackle on the other hanging chain was empty—empty because the left arm of the malefic had already been removed.
I surveyed the damage done on his naked body.
Missing left arm. The skin of his chest flayed in even arcs that mimicked his ribcage, some of the rib bones appeared to be missing.
Left ear cut off.
Unrecognizable face, the bloodied swelling morphing his face into comic proportions. One eye probably missing for the weird concave swelling over the spot where an eye should have jutted the skin out.
His other eye had been left untouched, I imagined so the man could still see what was coming for him—that was the torture of it.
No toes on any of his feet. Veins pulled, hanging ragged and empty of blood from his thighs.
The malefic jerked when he realized someone had walked into the room, his mouth opening and closing when he recognized I wasn’t Damen, but a woman. His mouth opened and closed like he was begging, but he couldn’t. No tongue.
The asshole already lotting me in with what he thought was the weaker sex. The benevolent ones.
He was about to learn differently.
There was a beaten-up metal counter underneath the long row of tools. I walked over to it, pulling the phone from my ear, and I touched on the speaker button. I set the phone down.
