Page 86 of Eldritch (The Eating Woods #2)

Lines of worry wrinkled her face, as she ran her hand through her long, blonde hair. “I have sought the council of mages. The only circumstance that would prevent a bond is another mate. I will know who you bonded with, if I have to kill every fucking slave and prisoner!” she snarled.

“You are familiar with every inch of my flesh, so you know I do not bear the mark of another mancer.”

“No, and still, your body rejects me.” She stood over him, hands at either side of his body, an unbridled rage clouding her eyes.

“You are mine . If I have to draw seed from your corpse, I will have you.” Her chin quivered, her face a battle of emotions, and Zevander would’ve laughed at the indignity of it all, if he weren’t so desperate to exact his revenge.

An unsettling calm bloomed through the cracks of her anger, and she caressed his cheek where she’d slapped him.

“I will not fault you for what you cannot control, though.” She waved her hand to the other guard in the room, who quickly exited at her command.

Seconds later, he returned with a man, a blond whose face bore the swelling and cuts of a beating.

She urged him to his knees, and with little resistance, he sank to the floor. “This is the mercenary who escaped your family’s home.”

Zevander’s muscles tensed, his eyes fixated on the man with the wrath of a rabid animal. “Free me from the binds,” he growled.

“I’ve some questions for him first.” She casually circled the prisoner, dragging her fingers across his chest, and he flinched when her hand brushed his cheek. “Tell us again what happened to Lady Rydainn.” Clearly, she’d already interrogated him once, judging by the way his lip quivered.

“She …” He swallowed a gulp. “She had been violated.”

“By one. Two of you. Three of you?” the general asked, and Zevander’s blood surged with heat and adrenaline, the need to physically destroy something tingling across his palms.

When the prisoner didn’t answer, she hammered a punch to his face that kicked his head to the side, knocking a tooth loose.

Not enough punishment to satisfy Zevander.

“All of us.” He spat blood on the floor and let out a whimper. “All of us!”

“And the young girl?”

His lip trembled, and he snapped his gaze toward the empty half of the cell. “They went after her next.”

Zevander’s muscles shook, pain streaking across his wrists where the manacles bit into them. If only the gods were merciful enough to break his binds, the man would be nothing more than a pool of blood and bones.

“They?” Loyce asked.

“I…had wandered out to take a piss when…I first heard the screams.”

“Whose screams?” Loyce sauntered back toward Zevander and ran her hand over his arm, which was so rigid, he hardly registered the touch. She gave a squeeze and dragged her palm over his tightly clenched stomach.

The prisoner hesitated at first, wincing when he said, “The girl’s. They had killed the mother.”

What he’d said didn’t absorb at first, spoken so nonchalantly, as banal an observation as a bird having flown overhead. His mother. Violated and murdered.

Dead.

Somehow, the words couldn’t touch him, as though trapped behind a veil of steel. Only a haze of bloody red penetrated his thoughts. A longing to tear skin from bones and limbs from torso. He wanted gurgling screams and pain, his body such a glutton for violence, it shook him into paralysis.

“And so you decided to indulge in the sister afterward?” Her questions were a distant sound in his mind, as if spoken underwater.

“I didn’t touch her.”

Zevander’s vision blurred with rage, the room expanding and shrinking around him.

Loyce chuckled, the sound reverberating off his skull. “And what inspired this sudden sense of conscience?”

“We …. They were attacked. There were…spiders. They came for them out of nowhere. Started spinning an enormous web, trapping them inside of it.”

Zevander imagined the rage it must’ve taken to rouse Branimir from his underground cell—a place he hadn’t left in the years Zevander had known him.

“And where were you?”

“Peering in through the window. Watched the spiders wrap them up like flies. Eating them with those…long fangs and the saliva that burned their skin. I jumped from the balcony. Didn’t care if I died. Landed in a row of hedges.”

“And did anyone, aside from yourself, survive?” She bent over Zevander’s stomach, pressing a kiss there at the same time as digging her nails into his thigh.

“No. There couldn’t have been any survivors. Not the way they were attacked.”

“Not even the young girl?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know if they killed her before the spiders arrived.”

“Free me,” Zevander growled, never averting his gaze from the man he silently vowed would suffer the most gruesome death of anyone he’d ever slain.

She rounded Zevander’s body, her hand gliding over his skin. “The man bound before you is her brother. My slave.”

Zevander couldn’t even bring himself to care that she’d called him slave. He’d have gladly worn the insult for a chance to wrap his hands around the prisoner’s throat.

“Tell me, who ordered this massacre?”

Before he could answer, she drew her sword so swiftly, he hardly heard the chime against the scabbard, and she hacked his head clean off.

“No!” Zevander’s rage bellowed and bounced inside the cell. Fire burned in his muscles as he pulled at the chains, shaking and gnashing his teeth.

She sauntered to Zevander’s side and dragged her nails across his chest. “How disappointing it must feel to have the very thing you want withheld from your grasp.”

His chains rattled, as a raw, seething violence snaked through his blood. “I will never bond with you.”

She chuckled and stretched her arm down the length of his body, cupping his flaccid cock.

“While I may not have your essence, remember this: You still gave me your seed ,” she taunted, squeezing the soft flesh between his thighs as she kissed him on the cheek.

“We’ll try again tonight, my love. I’ve come to learn of an enchantment that might prove successful. ”

Z evander stared at the shadowed ceiling above him. If his heart had bothered to beat in the last hour, he wouldn’t know it. He felt nothing. Not the expanding of his lungs. Not the crescents he’d torn into his palms with his clenched fists. Not even the rage anymore.

He was a breathing corpse. An abomination of life. Empty. Hollow.

Dead inside.

What kind of monster failed to be moved by a loss so great?

He’d dreaded the moment when the pain would wash over him, when the fury would wither to calm and the weight of his reality would cut through him like a freshly sharpened blade.

It didn’t happen immediately, he knew that, having suffered the loss of his father.

Perhaps he’d endured too much over the years that his heart could no longer be moved, no matter how grievous the pain.

Was there a limit to suffering? A point at which a man could no longer feel?

It wasn’t until a face slid into his periphery that he realized the Golvyn had climbed up his body, carrying a ladle of water. Zevander turned away when he attempted to pour it down his mouth.

“You must drink something. You need your energy.”

“For what?” Zevander rasped. “To watch as she takes her pleasure?”

“She is cruel, but she will not be your demise.”

Zevander sneered. “What would it matter if she were?”

Still clutching the ladle, the Golvyn lowered his head and sighed. “I am sorry for your family. It is a spiteful god who takes what we love most.”

“I wasn’t aware Golvyns believed in the gods.”

“We don’t. But you do.”

Once again, Zevander found himself staring blankly at the dark ceiling overhead. “Not anymore. I don’t believe, or feel, anything anymore.”

“You’ve given up?”

“I suppose I have.”

The Golvyn groaned and tossed the ladle to the floor, the clank of the metal against the stone only earning a bored glance from Zevander.

“You know why Golvyn’s don’t believe in the gods?

” He didn’t bother to wait for what would’ve been a disinterested response.

“We need to see to believe. But you …. You believe nothing more than words.”

Zevander remained silent, not bothering to dispute the fact. What more could he have relied upon, if not the word of the man who’d seen it firsthand?

“They say your family is dead. What if they are mistaken?”

Had he heard news through the walls? A confession that Zevander hadn’t been privy to? “Say what you mean, Golvyn. I’m in no state for riddles.”

“No riddle. I’m only suggesting that you see with your own eyes.”

Whatever minute flicker of hope he may have felt in that moment quickly perished in disappointment. “I’ll be a rotted corpse before I’m set free from this hell.”

“So, you waste away for nothing.” He opened his small palm. In it, sat a tiny red ampoule like the ones Theron had given him before. “You see things when you sleep. Perhaps you can see your family?”

Intrigued, Zevander lifted his head. “Where did you get that?”

“From your friend’s supply. He keeps them in a small box tucked inside the wall. These walls are my home.”

If nothing else, it would steal him away from the incessant memory of her robbing him of his revenge, and the revulsion of her climbing atop his body again, determined and relentless and aroused.

Godsblood, the visual alone made him ill.

He couldn’t stand the thought of her taking pleasure while he seethed. “Give it to me.”

With the fervor of a starving hatchling, he tipped back his head, while the Golvyn broke the ampoule, and allowed him to pour it into his mouth.