Lilith wasn’t coming. I felt for my fire affinity. Nothing. I tried to call darkness and found my body felt almost human in its lack of power. I had nothing, and I was about to get the shit beat out of me.
It swept down, smacking into my face with all of his god-given strength. My head rocketed backwards, wrenching on my neck, muscles and joints screaming, my eye swelling up as the world went white and pain exploded inside my head.
Fu…! I couldn’t even finish the thought. An ice pick of agony stabbed through my eye and into my head. I couldn’t scream, shout, or cry. Instead, I fought to suck a breath in, taking them in little pants as my body rioted. Nerves that had never been abused like this howled their response to this affront, my eyes streaming with tears, clogging my nose that now gushed.
Blood and snot trickled down my throat, forcing spluttering coughs that should have kept the Rutherglen back, but a disdain of mess would have kept him out of this place.
OK, so he’d smacked me around, showed me who’s boss. That was it, right?
Nope, no sooner had I opened my good eye a crack, his hand raised again and smashed into me, his ring slashing into my bottom lip, blood spurting forth from that. I felt the skin split further as my mouth pulled wide in a scream.
If you deal with chronic pain a lot, you often develop the ability to ‘go away.’ You’re still conscious, people can have conversations with you, but your awareness and sense of self kind of disappears. You just robotically go through your day because being fully present hurts so much. I hadn’t had to use them for so long, but old mechanisms locked into place at that, at the realisation of what was to come. This wasn’t a one-off thing. The pain wouldn’t stop.
Because I remembered what he was doing to Marlow when I’d found him. The memory of the patchwork of contusions and lacerations on my love’s body hit me hard on two fronts. That he’d just as likely have to suffer through that again, this time with no one to step in to save him, and the second?
I’d be going first.
My face screwed up into a soundless cry, even though it just made the pain hurt more, my body hanging drunkenly on the cables tied around me like a punch-drunk boxer.
Lilith!
You’ll need to stay down for this.
Her voice was quiet, deathly so, and with a similar finality.
What?
Smack! I howled like a child as a fist drove into the side of my head, my ear, my head exploding in agony, my boundaries down now. I grit my teeth against more cries, trying to choke them back and only being partly successful. Smack! Smack! I couldn’t even catalogue the hits now. I was pain. Gasping, screaming, crying, snotty, bleeding pain.
The only way through this is to endure.
What?
My thoughts were scrambled by the rain of blows.
No, no, NO!
I’m sorry, Kira. This is the way.
You said I’d never be forced to go through pain like this again. You said I’d be strong, always strong.
You are strong. Her words were heartbreaking, for their sorrow, for their hoarse rasp.
“Kira!”
“Fuck, Kira!”
“Kira, look at me. Stay with me, love.”
“Kira.”
They called for me, my loves. I heard my name cried out over and over, inside my head and out. The Rutherglen, he sneered something suitably Bond villain at me, but I couldn’t catch the words. Not when there was this. The hurt he’d dealt was more than my natural fae healing could deal with. I’d heard things crunch, maybe my nose wouldn’t look quite the same, but it wasn’t that which clouded my mind.
I was helpless. Completely and utterly helpless.
I tried again to raise my flames, to burn through the cords, Rutherglen’s face, maybe to burn the whole fucking estate to the ground, but I couldn’t focus for long. That fucking red stone disrupted whatever was inside me, leaving the well of power but with no way to access it. Instead, he just came back at me, belting me over and over for the sheer fucking joy of it, rearranging my face as my guys screamed.
“Beat me, you sick fucking cunt!”
“Oh, I will. It’s been quite some time since I’ve had such a rich spread before me. That pale skin always marked so well. I’ll have Foxglove and his fellows come by again, shall I? They miss you, Jake.”
“You dumb fuck.”
“No, that’d be you, Jonathon. Walking away from a multi-million-dollar contract and all the free pussy you can get, and for what? This little cum dump? She thought she was so fucking clever, coming into my territory, taking what was mine!” There was a wet wiping sound. “Your contract is null and void. The Changelings and Court Hartley are no more. I am invoking my right to dissolve an unruly and disobedient court. All of your assets and your people have become the property of Rutherglen again. Property that no fae lord will dispute, not when I tell them about your little endeavours.”
But even when he stopped, my breathing sounding hoarse as oxygen tried to force its way in and out of my destroyed face, I reached down inside me and found nothing. His stone, his brutality, the ropes, the smoke at the club, I wasn’t sure what, but I was neutered, immobilised.
“Kira…”
It was a low whisper, familiar, but I just hung on the ropes. I ignored it because I couldn’t deal with one more thing right now. Things were broken, inside and out of me. I felt the way they misaligned, thrown off kilter by the Rutherglen’s power.
“Kira…”
An insistent little murmur, I groaned in response to it, then I felt his touch.
My love, Marlow sent a little ball of healing light sailing over to me, floating behind the rows of chairs as my consorts shouted their disdain at our captor, calling him all the vile things they could think of until he started hitting them instead. His power felt like a kiss on skin that had been brutalised. I hissed, not wanting the pain that came with it, pulling back as far as my bonds would allow, but it came anyway, a little flush of the sweetest thing I could imagine right now—the removal of some of the pain.
“Mar…” I croaked out as one, then two, then multiple balls of light hit me, filling me with his golden radiance. Bones reset, nasal passages cleared. He left the bruises. It would make Rutherglen too aware of what was happening if they disappeared. I forced my head up to watch him punching into Johnno’s face over and over and over, his fucking god’s strength making him a pain inflicting machine. Liam screamed at him, then got up, throwing himself in between the two of them, still attached to the chair, trying to deflect what had to be killing blows, only to be tipped over himself, thrown to the ground, a foot on the back of the chair forcing it dangerously deep into the back of Liam’s neck.
“Luc…” he croaked, more of a wheeze. “Luc!”
I hadn’t seen Luc’s dad beat him as a kid and I was glad for that, because right now, I got a ringside look into what it would have been like. There was no crackle on his skin or in his eyes. Instead, they were wide open and staring, the frozen rabbit eyes of a child watching the adults go insane around him.
“Fuck this!” Billy snarled, getting to his feet and barrelling into Rutherglen, shouting something incomprehensible as his body slammed Rutherglen into the wall. He stood back, still tied up but panting, watching Dave as he slid down the concrete. But then he committed the first of many mistakes. He turned around, putting his back to Dave and returning to us.