Whispers of Evil by E. M. Knight

Author:E. M. Knight
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2017-01-14T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

Riyu

Beatrice’s torture cell

It takes hours for me to get the strength needed to push myself up.

My whole body is shaking. At first it was from rage, and anger—how dare Beatrice betray me! But that lasted only as long as it took for her to turn that horrid light on.

With a shudder, I look up. I see the lamp, high above the silver bars. Much too far to reach. Too far to affect things, too far for me to save myself…

Is this what she’s been doing to her so-called children down here all this time?

I shudder, and then I curl up into a little ball. I huddle into myself, feeling the worst kind of misery—the worst kind of hopelessness.

I had thought the lashes I’d received on Dagan’s orders were bad. But they were nothing, nothing compared to the torture here.

My mind goes back, to many years ago, and all those awful nights I spent in the Red Keep.

Back then I was still a human. Now, as a vampire, I should be better equipped to handle such pain…

But I am not.

No, right now, I feel none of my gifts at all. My sense of the Elemental Forces is cut off by the obsidian in the silver bars. My vampire strengths are all useless to me because of the silver. I do not have the physical strength to simply bend the bars out of shape and escape—but even if I did, I could not do it, because they are silver.

A more wretched, miserable position I could not imagine for myself.

And to think. To think! I walked straight into this trap. If I had even a modicum of my usual common sense I would have seen it coming from a mile away. But I was reeling with anger at Dagon, maybe even with anger at myself.

Of course, the other vampire would not return my affections! I’d seen him with our women multiple times. And it was a slimy, desperate, disrespectful thing for me to do, trying to see if I could coax him into intimacy with me.

Maybe that disgust was what resulted in the cognitive dissonance that allowed me to fall so far.

And Beatrice. Beatrice! That conniving, scheming, lying, manipulative hussy! All this time she’d played me like a fool. I should have known better than to trust her. Alarm bells should have gone off in my head as soon as she told me how she approached my request for help with Dagan…

But no. I can’t go too far down the rabbit hole and succumb to absolute despair. Not yet. Not so soon.

I owe it to myself and, at the very least, to my Father’s legacy, to prove I am worth more than merely being someone else’s pawn.

My resolve starts to build again. My mind, so long consumed by pain, begins to work again, to chip away, trying to find some means of getting me out of this mess.

Once more, I look round the cage. This time I look at it not through the eye of a prisoner, but of one who’d built it.

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