Page 17 of A Spell of Bones and Madness (Nostos #2)

Chapter Twelve

Ander

T hick, hot crimson blood. It was everywhere.

Sliding off his brow into his eyes. Running from his wrists and thighs and throat.

Seeping into the stone that lay beneath him in the dungeons.

Ander tried to squeeze his eyes shut, tried to block out the screams that filled his head, echoed in the room that confined him.

Tremors crept up his skin as fire-hot tonic was shoved once more down his throat.

It would only be moments now—until the cuts on his skin began to close, the blood drying up and crusting over bruises that peppered his arms and legs.

Then it would begin again. A damning cycle he could not fight his way out of.

The routine had repeated fifty times? One hundred?

He had lost track at this point. During the first few days, Ander used a jagged rock to mark the walls.

One slash on the left of the window for each time food came, marking the mornings and evenings.

Another slash for each time the kings came.

It was bearable at first, the welding pokers hot from the fire branding his skin, the way they peeled each nail from his body, how delicately they would take layer after layer of his skin.

An unending torment he suffered through for her.

Would have suffered through for Katrin.

But that was before she stepped through the door of his dungeon, coppery brown hair waving down her back, glaring golden eyes that brought him to his knees.

He thought she was there to rescue him—to take him home, to hold him in her arms and thank the gods that he was safe after all he’d sacrificed.

Then she spun that same golden blade Edmund had held in her hand, a crooked smile plastered on her face.

Katrin had not forgiven him, so much so that she turned on not only him, but her own people.

It appeared she had not left the isle at all—not fled from Kohl.

Had she been in on this the whole time? Waiting—letting the men ruin him first before she took her turn and ripped what little hope he had left straight from his chest?

Ander could have sworn that Khalid and Edmund had asked him where his ship went, where she went.

But had she been merely The Nostos and not the woman he loved?

So it was not an illusion of her in the corner all those days, his only saving grace.

It was actually her, reveling in his destruction. What a fool he was.

She made her first cut, the blade digging from the base of his wrist to his elbow.

The second, from his ankles to his knees.

The third, across his throat, licking the blade clean of his blood.

She celebrated each cry she drew from his lips, how that crimson liquid flowed from his mouth as he choked, gasping for what little breath he might have left.

Then she poured the vial of onyx liquid down his throat to start again.

“For your lies,” she hissed through clenched teeth.

“For thinking you were worthy of my trust. When have you ever earned it? Earned affection? Now this—your blood on my tongue—I will not regret. It’s almost amusing that you thought I might rescue you—that I could ever love you.

You are broken. You are nothing.” She slid that thin knife back into his flesh, tucking it below his ribs as he sputtered out more blood.

How many times had Ander repeated those same words to himself? So many he actually began to believe them, but it hurt just the same to hear them out loud from another. To know the woman he gave everything to protect now looked at him as no more than scum at the bottom of the ocean.

Ander shouldn’t have expected any less from the daughter of Aidoneus, born of pure terror and madness in the deepest dungeons of his kingdom. Katrin was destruction, a ruiner of sanity and hearts. The harbinger, destroyer of peace and worlds and him. She was not hope.

Hope. Hope. Hope … ?λπ??.

“Get out!” Ander rasped, choking on his own blood. “Get out! Get out! Get out!” A flare of silver light burst from his wrists where the golden shackles bound him to the table. Fog began circling on the floor.

“My, my, my…aren’t you strong. I should have known it would be harder than that to break you.” A deep, haunting laughter ec hoed off the decaying walls. A man’s voice, not that of the woman who had just stood before him, knife in hand.

Not Katrin.

Edmund.

Ander blinked his eyes and the blood was gone.

He lay on the damp stone floor of the dungeon, gasping for breath as he knelt before the king.

Sweat clung to every inch of his body and vomit lay by his knees.

His eyes were so heavy he could barely keep them open, but that was indeed the king standing before him.

The curvature of Katrin’s face and lips, the furrow of her brows, the lilting voice that seemed happy to see him in pain. It felt so real. But it always did. And lately the fine line between reality and magic blurred even further.

The churning of his stomach started once more. A swirl of not enough food or water mixed with bile and blood. Vomit rose in his throat, burning the inside until it spilled from his mouth. An unfortunate side effect of the mind compulsion.

Normally he could block it out. Was actually very adept at shielding against others, given who his father was, but the golden shackles made him weak, stripped him of any semblance of control.

There was barely any of Ander left. A broken rag doll.

A play thing for the kings. That was all he was anymore.

“We really should have someone come clean this cell.” Edmund crept around the excrements that lay scattered about.

It had gotten worse the last few days since he began playing with compulsion once more.

Before there was blood, and some dead mice, and the smell of burnt flesh, but now all that lined Ander’s nose was death and bile.

He barely slept anymore for fear that his dreams were not his own.

There was no peace to be found in this chamber.

There was no peace left for him in this world.

He was dying, whether it took another day or a week.

His people wouldn’t make it back to rescue him.

Even if they could, he wouldn’t want them to.

Katrin, Thalia, Leighton—even the tiny white daimon —he wanted as far away from Edmund and Khalid and Alentus as possible.

Tucked away somewhere safe, behind the veil of Skiatha.

If the veil even still held. If it had not been broken once more.

It had taken time to come to terms with the fact that he was ok with dying if it meant they all lived.

There was only one thing he regretted not doing before he met Aidon at Aidesian’s gates.

Perhaps the God of Death would grant him one wish, one moment to return to the ruler’s daughter, to tell her that he loved her more than life itself.

A spindly, wrinkled finger grazed under Ander’s chin, lifting it so his gaze would meet Edmund’s. “Are you thinking about Katrin, boy?”

Ander’s eyes flared silver for a moment and he spit in the king’s face. The fluid leaving his mouth a disturbing mix of substances. “You have no right to speak her name.”

Edmund rose, wiping the spit from his face with his sleeve. “Don’t you worry,” the king chuckled, “eventually I will make you forget.”

Ander bared his teeth and held Edmund’s stare with wide eyes. “I will never forget her.”

He would not. Could not. Her beautiful soul was the only reason he pushed through this at all. The only thing he had left to live for.