Sin. Oh, shit. Sin. My partner. My lover. My angel.
“You are safest here. Promise me you will stay.”
I broke that promise. Broke it for a friend. My first friend. My only friend. Dion. Where is she? Her eyes…they were so calm. Serene. Regina forced her to help trap me. And then the Fae took us both.
A tear escapes my shuttered lids and trails across the bridge of my nose. Regina’s voice…she spoke to me and stole me away without batting an eye. I couldn’t fight her. I wanted to. I tried. But I couldn’t.
“The easiest way to get to me would be to go after you.”
Do they know? That I’m with Sin? Am I with Sin?
The lump in my throat answers the question. Yes. I am absolutely with Sin. I care for him. So much. I think…I think I might even love him. Whatever I am, this other-ness inside me knows he’s mine as much as it knows I’m his.
Footsteps echo on stone, and I try to prepare myself for what’s coming. Pain. Regina stealing my free will. Thorn invading my mind and searching out my greatest fears.
Don’t think. Anything. Picture a void. Your mind is nothing but a void.
Behind my lids, I conjure a black hole in space, twisting, consuming all light, all life, everything. Nothing but an endless dark cloud swirling without emotion. Without fear.
A woman screams from far away. Not Dion, but someone else. I can feel the woman’s desperation. How close she is to breaking completely. The sound echoes around corners and curves, and she begs for her life to end. “Please. Let me die.”
Her plea stirs something buried deep inside me. A long-ago memory. Another woman, another scream, another time. Trapped in a prison deep underground in the cisterns of Florence, knowing I was sent there to die, to take Thorn with me, but failing. All because of a man whose blue eyes held pain and sorrow and need I couldn’t ignore.
If I could move, if I could make any noise at all, I’d let out a wail so loud, so mournful, no one in a hundred miles would be able to ignore it. I remember now. I know why my shoulder and hip ache. Why I smell rust and damp stone. I’m lying on iron bars. Locked in a cage so small, even if Regina’s drugs wear off, I won’t be able to do more than raise my head.
I can feel the metal clamped around my wrists. The chains binding my ankles. And the weight of millennia of knowledge. Of brief moments of bliss. And endless centuries of pain.
We need you, daughter of seraphim. You failed once. You have another chance. Stop the incubus who calls himself Thorn and his companion and we will release you from your torment.
Tears cascade down my cheeks as everything comes flooding back to me. “How dare you ask me this! The only being I have ever truly loved was consigned to Hell with Thorn and Regina, and you—who claim to be right and just and kind—decided that a fitting punishment for my failure was binding me in the celestial realm, body, mind, and soul, without a single memory of him to comfort me!”
Seraphiel looms over me, glowing with light and power. He does not speak in words, but directly to my mind.
We do not ask, daughter of seraphim. The demon bastard has been returned to the mortal realm to serve the remainder of his sentence. You will do this. We will allow you to see him again, but you will not know him, nor will he know you. Be grateful for this boon. But make no mistake. Your fate does not lie with him. You were made a thousand years ago to put an end to this evil. Created for this one purpose. Until you succeed, you are bound by this duty.
Every cell in my body mourns for what I can never have. I look human. I feel human. But I’m not. I was created to destroy Thorn, and that’s all the seraphim will allow me to do. To be.
Sin…I’m so very sorry. I should have fought harder to remember.
The cage door rattles, and a fist wraps around a chunk of my hair. The rough stone leaves deep cuts in my thighs and arms, and I’d cry out if I could.
“Welcome to your worst nightmare.” The raspy voice sends a wave of fear to drown me, and still trapped by Regina’s tranquilizer, I can barely force my eyes open to slits. Thorn's pale face swims in and out of focus a few feet away. “Sinclair cares for you. During the long years he toiled for me, through all of my forays into his thoughts and fears, he managed to hide his angelic parentage. But for you…he exposed it without a second thought.”
My tongue is thick and unwieldy, but I slur, “He…just wanted…to get me…into bed.”
Thorn's laugh sends me back centuries to the caverns under Florence. To the endless days when he toyed with my body and forced his way into my thoughts to find my deepest fears and prey on them.
He doesn’t waste a single second. His influence slithers up my spine like a thick fog, blinding my eyes, filling my ears, probing, invading, and searching for ways to break me.
Black void. Nothing but a void.
“A strong one, I see. You are not a shifter. Nor a witch. But you are definitely not human. I wonder. What secrets do you hide? And what will it take for me to discover them?”
The man holding me—one of his human victims—throws me against a wall, and my very human, very fragile body is consumed with pain. I’m descended from angels, yes. Created by them. But they gave me a human body. Human thoughts. Human emotions. All so I would fall into Thorn's trap.
I know who I am now.
My bones will shatter. My skin will tear. Thorn will destroy every human part of me. I can only hope that in the centuries since I was last his prisoner, my mind, the part of me designed to kill him, has strengthened. I just have to remember how I’m supposed to end him.
He stalks towards me, and I manage to curl myself into a ball. My ankles and wrists are still bound, so even if the drugs wear off, I won’t be able to fight him. But I have to try. Otherwise, I’ll fail once more, and Sin…he’ll die along with me.
I can’t lift my head. There’s blood in my eyes, dripping onto the stone floor beneath me. Within minutes of pulling me from the small, iron cage, Thorn had Gregory and another man remove the chains and shackles, but any illusion of freedom was short lived. Too weak to do more than bat helplessly at them, I couldn’t stop Gregory from binding my wrists with a thick, plastic zip tie, or the other man from lowering a hook from the ceiling and sliding it between my hands.
The balls of my feet barely scrape the ground, and they cut off my skirt, leaving me in just my skimpy red top and panties. And that’s when they started in on me.
The skin of my back burns, that fucking metal-studded whip leaving me bloody from my shoulders all the way down to my thighs. The pain steals my focus so Thorn can delve deep into my mind. Or try to, at least. So far, I’ve managed to fight him. To at least keep the knowledge of who and what I am hidden away in that dark, swirling void.
I can’t scream anymore. My voice is gone. And Thorn is getting frustrated. I have to give him something soon, or I’m afraid he’ll push me so hard, so long, that I’ll end up giving him everything. But I need a break. A few minutes to conjure fears not my own and find a way to trick him. He has Dion, and I can’t let her die down here—or let Thorn find a way to use me against Sin.
The incubus bastard grabs a chunk of my hair and pulls my head up so I’m forced to look into his glowing red eyes. “You belong to me now, Zoe Dawes. Tell me about your partner. Tell me how to get to him.”