Page 108 of Empire of Dark

My love. My breath. My air.

Lying there, suffering the most horrific torture because of me.

Me.

First it had been the jackals, tearing him apart with their teeth. Ferocious at first, then munching on him like he was a midday snack. Then the knives and hooks. Now this. Yet his heart kept beating because that was how we were built. For torture. For pain.

“Halt.”

Cletus turned back to me. “You see what we have done. What we continue to do.” A sneer lifted his cheeks into plump balls I wanted to tear off with my teeth. The shackles locking me in place shook, my body trying to free itself and get to Lyle.

“Now,Tatou, it is your chance. Tell me how you make your skin so impenetrable.”

My lips parted, my tongue trying to learn how to work again. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

He stared at me for a long moment, his face blank. “Then I will need to investigate your brain again, even if it takes much longer to heal. I know it’s painful. Yet it is how it is. I know how it is myself, the end of the spinning, little hooks exploring, carving away at brain matter, making your body do things you do not control. It is the most delicious pain.”

All of my muscles froze.God, no. Not the hooks again. Please, no.

Was this the fourth time he’d done it? The fifth? More?

Tearing up my body from the inside out. Then letting me lie there, healing slowly before doing it again. Torturing Lyle theentire time. Weeks? Months? I’d lost all concept of time long ago.

“We shall do it upright this time.” He stroked his chin, his manic eyes curious on me like he was an actual scientist and not a psychopath. “Maybe that will bring me more information.”

He stepped away from me and the high-pitched whining started. The spinning of metal. Tiny hooks spinning and whirling on the end of a long silver wand, the hooks small enough to make it through my nasal passage.

If my stomach worked, if there was food inside of it, I would have retched again. Retched like I had time and again in this despicable pit of hell.

Cletus appeared in front of me, the spinning hook tool gleaming in his hand.

My stare locked onto it, watching the minute flicker of the firelight reflect off its surface as it drew closer and closer to my nose.

I couldn’t move, couldn’t even try to fight it.

Cletus shoved it up my right nostril. Savage pain instant, spreading out to every nerve in my body. I blacked out.

This time, I waited longer than the last.

Waited. Pretending to be blacked out for days. Noting I was lying on a table again. Shackled down. But nothing held my head down. I noted people coming and going from the room. Talking. Discussions about my condition. Cletus railing at people around him. An evil madman down to his last drop of blood.

I didn’t hear Lyle anymore, but I couldn’t chance opening my eyes to see where he was. Or in what condition he was—not that I would be able to stomach seeing him in whatever condition he was currently in. I couldn’t chance it.

Not until I gained strength back.

Days I waited. Waited.

Then, out of the fog, an unfamiliar voice.

“Blast it all to hell, Brother. What have you done?” An irate whisper.

My arm lifted, the cold metal clamped around my right wrist disappearing.

I cracked my eyelids.

A face I didn’t recognize. Familiar traits, almost like Cletus, but not quite.

The face disappeared.