Page 56 of Broken Souls

The pain in my belly.

My belly...

Sucking in a sharp breath, I press a hand to my stomach, checking it over, trying to see if my baby is alive. If it’s even real.

Or, at least, that’s what I tried to do.

But my hand won’t move. Something is stopping it – a band cutting into my wrist. More smaller threads cutting into my fingers.

I open my eyes and find I’m sitting upright in my room, in my desk chair with my hands strapped to its arms – leather belts around my wrists, shoelaces around my fingers. Someone is in front of me, but my attention is on my belly, on the baby that’s supposedly inside. I lean down –tryto, but a strong hand wraps around my throat and shoves me back, pinning me to the chair.

My eyes widen as panic starts to set in.

Because I’ve finally clocked who’s in front of me.

It’s Varius, but it also isn’t.

This isn’t the man I know.

The one I’ve fallen in love with.

The one who held my hands as I screamed, whose eyes whispered words of encouragement, of heartfelt pleas for me to be okay.

This man’s eyes are utterly blank. Empty. All emotion in them is gone.

And in his place is the monster that even monsters fear.

Varius.

Fucking.

Shadow.

Twenty-one

HER

“I would have given you everything, Micha,” he says as his fingers tighten around my throat. “I would have risked more than you will ever fucking know just to beyours. For you to bemine.” He leans in, his breath fanning my ear and sending shivers down my spine. “But you lied to me. Youbetrayedme. So now I will give you what you deserve.”

My fingers dig into the wood, shoving splinters under my nails. I can’t breathe.Can’t tell him that he has it wrong, that whatever his mother fucking told him are nothing but lies. My mouth just moves up and down, a useless hinge that just keeps trying to suck in air even though it knows it can’t.

“I will kill you in this chair, Micha. You are not surviving this, but you can make it easy on yourself. You can stop the pain before it even starts.” He pulls back a little, looks me in the eye.

His are still so flat, so cold. A monster that’s stepped out of the dark, and I am of no illusion that I’m the prey.

Moving back, he releases my neck, and I instantly lean forward, hacking up my lungs even as I’m trying to suck in air. Two actions working so strongly against each other that for a moment, I can’t do either. My nails dig deeper into the wood as I try to get control of myself. My shoulders shake. My eyes water.

But then I manage it.

One breath in.

Two.

The fuzziness that’s poured into my brain starts to lift, making way for a killer headache that’s begging me to fall asleep. To bypass the pain in my dreams, but Varius isn’t making empty promises. If I can’t convince him that I didn’t let the wolves in, then I’m dead.

So I lift my head and try to focus my thoughts. Varius is standing by my bed, his back to me, his gaze on the items he’s spread out there. My grab bag sits empty beside his feet, and my heart kicks up into my throat. There was cash in there and new identities I never told him about. Cards to offshore accounts. Keys to safe houses all across the USA. Magical cuffs, even a witch’s snare, and various tools and weapons, alongside my favorite mementos.

My pulse hammering inside my skull, I jerk against my binds. I know how it looks – like I was always planning on betraying him, having my bag packed and ready to go. “I wasn’t…” I cut off as the syllables burn across my throat.