Page 70 of Dark Souls

Real Tears Darling

M aking my way past the grim cells, I knocked on a secret door that led to an underground passageway beneath the castle that could only be accessed by my grandpapi. The door opened with his magic and I found him sitting on a chair at the furthest end, where the darkest, most vile cell was. As I approached, he lifted his head in my direction and smiled.

The powerful glow that was radiating off the bars of Belladonna’s prison was consuming, and I had to shield my eyes to look past it to find her. Seeing her curled in the foetal position on the rank floor, trembling and pale, sent a jolt of satisfaction through me.

I glanced at Grandpapi in question, wondering what he had done to her. He raised his hands up innocently.

“Wasn’t me. She felt everything Luka did to Mitchell. The physical pain had her pass out at one point. When she woke, she felt Mitchell die, and she curled up in a ball, hugging her stomach. She hasn’t moved since. Not even when Leif went in and extracted the summoning spell from her mind.”

I clicked my tongue, glaring down at her as she stared straight ahead at nothing.

“I can take it from here, Grandpapi.” I leaned down and kissed him on the cheek.

“I’m staying until she can’t use magic anymore. I don’t trust her, even in this state. I wouldn’t even put it past her to be faking her grief.”

That was a good point. I nodded and we both stepped towards the cell. I placed my hand on the lock, and it magically clicked open, allowing us to step inside before it shut again.

She still didn’t move. I stepped closer to her, crouching down and tilting my head to look at her vacant face. Even if she had felt the agonising pain of her soulmate’s death, there wasn’t a single tear streak on her cheeks.

“Keep her still, please.”

Grandpapi clicked his fingers and her body became rigid from the paralysis spell he had cast. I grabbed one of her arms and placed it on the ground. Her eyeballs moved, darting up to my face quickly. She was still in control of her senses, just not her limbs.

“What are you doing?” she asked in panic.

I held her hand in one of mine and lifted one of my knives to her wrist with the other. Her eyes widened.

“Wait! No! Wait, please!”

“Wow. Begging already?” I smirked as I deliberately cut into her flesh. “Mitchell lasted longer than you.”

She started to scream and pant through the pain as I took my time to cut all the way down to the bone. When I could see it, I gestured for my grandpapi to pass me an axe. With one powerful whack, the axe cut through the bone and her hand fell away from her wrist. She screamed, but her body didn’t move. I whistled a cheerful tune as I manoeuvred her body so I could place her other arm in the same position. I repeated it again.

When I had finished, my grandpapi passed me a blow torch and I scorched her skin before wrapping her wrists in bandages because I wasn’t about to let her bleed out. Standing up, leaving her a blubbering mess on the floor, I picked up her two hands, and Grandpapi and I left the cell. I placed her hands on two spikes opposite her cell so she could watch them rot over time. Turning to my grandpapi, I calmly wiped the blood from my hands with a rag.

If it was any of my other family members, I might have worried about them seeing this side of me. But not Grandpapi. He had the same darkness inside him, though I had rarely seen it, as he had become much better at keeping it contained over the years. But as he looked at me with his blue and brown eyes and a small smile of pride on his face, it was there.

“You don’t mind keeping her down here for as long as I need and not telling everyone else? You know they won’t understand it.”

He breathed in deeply, cast his gaze over to Belladonna and then placed his hand on my shoulder. “I know you need this. She deserves to suffer, and you are right, the rest of the family will not like you dragging this out for years. They will worry about how it will affect you. So it will stay our little secret.”

“Thank you.” I smiled, hugging him around his waist as he squeezed me tightly.

“Anything for my princess. A word of advice, though,” he whispered as I lifted my head to look up at him. “Leave the darkness down here. Do what you need to, but don’t let it change you. And when the little voice in your head says the time has come to end this once and for all, listen to it.”

I nodded. He walked away, leaving me and Belladonna alone.

Pulling my notepad and pen out of my bag, I took a seat on the chair outside her cell and balanced one leg over my knee so I could start writing out a list.

“I have one question for you,” I asked, scribbling away ‘ways to torture Belladonna’ at the top of it. Her eyes narrowed into slits full of pure hatred as she stared at me, hugging her bloody wrists to her body. “Why Luka?”

“What?” she hissed, struggling to pull herself up to a sitting position.

“Why him? Out of all the Demonski Upirs, your coven hunted and killed. Why capture him and keep him? Why not kill him like you did Maksim and Zoran?”

She took a deep breath but looked away from me. “Because my father decided having a demon under his control was a better use–”

“Bullshit,” I said calmly, causing her to pause. “You’re lying. I know, because you didn’t look me in the eye.”

She kept her gaze cast at the floor.

I let my leg slide off my knee and leaned forward to stare at her through the bars. “Do you want to know what I think?” She said nothing. “I think you actually found yourself liking him. The monster you were sent to trick, the monster your father told you to hate and deserved to die, turned out not to be a monster at all. But an attractive, kind and loving young man. And deep down, you knew it was wrong. You didn’t want him to die. But you didn’t have the power to go up against the slayers or your father to stop it.”

She licked her lips, keeping her eyes on the ground.

“You persuaded your father to capture Luka instead of killing him, didn’t you? Because in that sick, twisted brain of yours, you thought you could still have him. You thought that you’d be able to manipulate him with your seduction even after what you did to his family. You thought that, over time, he’d come to see you as his saviour. The person who stopped her father from killing him. You thought, one day, he might want you again. Didn’t you?”

I laughed when she moved her head away from me, still refusing to look in my eyes because she knew I would hear her thoughts and know it was all true.

“And that’s why you are so angry at him, right? It is why you spent your life just trying to ruin him. Because he didn’t want you. He rejected you. And you had the audacity to call me tragic? Then your father deepened that wound by preferring to wait for a chance of a male heir than give the coven to you? And finally, you met your soulmate and found someone who wanted your sick ass enough to go along with your twisted plans. So you used him. You know, I actually felt sorry for Mitchell in the end. Being a witch, I know you wouldn’t have felt the soulmate bond as intensely as he did. But at least he’s out of his misery now. Unlike you, who I have decided deserves to wonder each day if it will be your last.”

“Fuck you!”

“No, thank you. But you can watch Luka fucking me if you like?” I smiled sweetly, and her face turned into a picture of rage. “Yeah, we made a little video for you. I thought you might like to see exactly what kind of death your mate suffered so you can understand what you felt. The stabs, the cuts, the broken bones, the beating, the dissection. And, well, things got a little heated. Luka just can’t keep his hands off me, even in the middle of a torture.”

I picked up the remote to the screens the SIA had donated and pressed play. The video of Mitchell’s torture played in the background. Belladonna tried to cover her ears when Mitchell’s screams echoed off the walls and I threw my head back and laughed when she remembered she no longer had hands.

“You think you are so special because you are a royal, but you are just as twisted as the rest of us. You are both fucking monsters!” she shouted, squeezing her eyes shut to avoid the screens, but she wasn’t able to block out the gut-wrenching sounds.

“Takes one to know one , darling ,” I mimicked her voice and went back to my notepad, drawing up a list of tortures. I started talking as I scribbled and doodled, drawing graphic cartoons of what I was planning. “Today, I cut off your hands. So, I can check that off the list. Over the next few weeks, months and years, I will take from you until there’s nothing left to even identify you. I’ll end up scraping what’s left of your corpse off my shoes. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. First, I’ll come for you whenever I feel like it. You’ll never know when exactly, but I will. You’ll fear the sound of my boots on the ground. You’ll fear the creak of that heavy door. Just like Hana spent a year fearing those exact things, because she knew that was when Wesley would come for her. But you’ll fear me because you’ll know, when I come, I won’t leave without taking something of you with me.

I’ve seen what you and your coven did to Luka through his memories. I felt the beatings. I felt the pain of each fractured bone from your father’s boot while you watched from the shadows. I felt the agony of his blood boiling from your magic. How you used to purposely infect his wounds after every beating, so they healed slower each time he denied you. The stakes that were hammered into his limbs or how you would burn the soles of his feet so he couldn’t walk. He told me about the time your father beat him to death with a shovel. The bed of wooden spikes you sometimes made him sleep on. How your coven kept him chained up in the cellars without seeing the light of day for years. How you starved him to make him weaker and unable to fight back. And then there was the time Mitchell cut out Heathen’s tongue after Luka punched Wesley. And let’s not get started on the emotional blackmail.” I sighed, tapping the end of the pen against the pad as I read the list, feeling internally sick that this woman put my mate through so much. “Am I missing anything?”

She remained silent, glaring at me with those cold eyes.

“Hmm, well, that is enough for me to get started.”

Her eyes flicked up to the screen when Luka straddled Mitchell’s body and started pounding his fists into his face. Belladonna’s jaw clenched as she watched until some part of her that had felt something for Mitchell forced her to look away.

I stood up from the chair and leaned against the cell bars so I could watch it too. Luka stormed towards me, pinning me to the wall and kissing me furiously. I smiled at how damn hot we looked together. Peering over at Belladonna, her gaze had returned to the screen and her eyes narrowed.

“See that tap over there? The one that drips out three drops of water a minute? Here’s a cup. Can’t have you dying of dehydration when there is still so much fun to be had, can we?” I placed the empty plastic cup on the ground. “I’ll be back… at some point. Enjoy the show. It’s on repeat.” I wiggled my fingers at her through the bars and strode away, only to stop dead by her next words.

“I still won.”

I turned slowly and stared at her. That vicious smile was back on her face.

“He thinks he survived me. But he didn’t. He may be living, breathing and have his demon back, but he’ll never be a whole person. You are right. I met the young man he was before I broke him. He was lovely. Sweet, kind, reserved. A true romantic.” She smirked as my nostrils flared. I was fighting every impulse in my body not to let her words affect me, but my darkness was pitch fucking black. “You’ll never get that version of him because he’s gone. He may love you but his love has limits. Boundaries set by his lack of humanity.”

I closed my eyes, focusing on counting my breaths. She was trying to provoke me to kill in a rage so she wouldn’t have to suffer my tortures. She wanted to die quickly.

“And he’ll never turn it back on. Do you know why? Because he doesn’t feel safe. He will NEVER feel safe. That must be really hard to hear, princess. You gave him your soul and still, it wasn’t enough. So, guess what? I still won.”

I zoomed back into her cell and punched her in the face, sending her flying backwards. I grabbed the back of her hair and yanked her head back violently. Her mouth fell open with a yelp and I held her tongue, pulling it out as far as I could and sliced the thing off with my knife. Blood pooled in her mouth, causing her gurgling wails to become muffled while I held my knife up to the flame of a candle to heat it. She tried to fight me, but I pinned her down and pressed the burning steel to her stump, cauterising the wound. When I was convinced the bleeding had stopped, I climbed off her and stared down as she rolled over and cried her first real tears.

“Now I can torture you in silence. Perfect.” I walked out of the dungeon, wiping my knife on the side of my dress. “See you soon, bitch.”