Page 65 of Nocte

“It better.”

“But…” The woman sucks in a breath, and I feel her hands on my skull. “It’s going to hurt.”

And it does.

Whatever she does to me it hurts.

It hurts.

CHAPTER23

Caspian

Stay back. Stay back. Stay back!

The fae will die if I kill the mortal. I could hear the truth in the woman’s voice.

But then she reaches toward the fae with grasping hands. Fingers full of tainted, dirty, black magic. Wrong magic.

It seeps into the fae’s pale skin and she screams. Throat rasping, limbs jerking, she screams and screams.

But I can’t help her. To do so will be to let her die—or so the mortal claims. So she says.

Regardless, I take a step. Another. The screaming is too loud. This alone is killing her.

“Stay back!” the blond mortal hisses, her brows furrowed in concentration, hands moving, sowing her twisted magic.

So, she isn’t a mundane. She isn’t vamryre. She is something else. Some kind of defective being. Her kind of magic shouldn’t exist. It isn’t clean. Isn’t nice and neat like the spells of the fae.

It is messy and painful and it…

Repairs. I can hear it. Her magic rips the fae apart piece by broken piece and puts her back together. Painfully. Slowly.

But it mends. She can breathe again. Move again without wincing. She can open her eyes and gape at the ceiling. She can work that throat and say my name.

“Caspian?” Afraid.

“Caspian.” Worried.

No one has ever said my name so damn worried. Except for, maybe…

Cassiopeia. She said it that way once, when we both went too far against our master. We wanted to kill him. Tried to kill him.

Together, we almost killed him. Something went wrong, ruining our plan. I was meant to do something. Something important. Find…

“Colleen?” The fat mortal raps on the door. I can hear her jowls jiggling and stubby fingers thumping. “What the hell is all this ruckus? I’m gonna lose business if people think this is some kind of torture house!”

The mortal woman winces, still spewing her dark magic. A few more seconds. Then she lets her hands fall and nearly collapses onto the floor completely. Sweat drips down her pale forehead, pungent and sweet.

“I… I’m sorry, Mo,” she says in between pants. “I’ll keep it down from here on out.”

“Good,” the fat woman replies. “Oh no, Mr. Morris, don’t you worry. We assure discretion here for any sort of kink. Come downstairs, and we can discuss a discount on your next stay, eh?”

This place is a den of debauchery. A haven for sin, mortal and immortal alike.

Cassius has never come here, but he knew of it. He used me as his mule to lure victims here for him. To drink. To puppet. To play with.

It was never my choice. I can see them clearly again. Remember some of their faces. So many frightened, desperate, greedy faces. Happy in the beginning…