Page 76 of Insolence (Eisha’s Hidden Codices #1)

Itissa

T he prioress ushered me out of the Gallery, into the Residential Quarters, and down, deep underground.

Floor after floor, we descended until we arrived at a dim dungeon that reeked of terror and twisted magic—a nauseating perversity that saturated the stone walls.

Handed off to Sister Kerrigan, I was led to a low-ceilinged chamber filled with stale air and empty tables fitted with restraints.

Heart in my throat, I resisted the urge to fight while Kerrigan took great delight in fastening me to one of the tables.

Bloodstained leather cuffs cut into my wrists and ankles.

A wide belt secured my midsection. I couldn’t move and could barely breathe when she was finished.

A malicious smile twisting her face, she bid me farewell.

Utterly alone, I desperately tried not to imagine choruses of screams from the women brought here before me: demuns and mages alike, delivered by the chassis load from wherever they’d been shackled with Altered cuffs and held until the temple closed to visitors and opened to “new initiates” for the year.

I had no idea what to expect. How that witch, the prioress, accomplishes her dark ritual is a closely guarded secret. It’s not as if the survivors can recount their experiences. Under normal circumstances, that is.

When Deirdre finally arrived, she forced a gag into my mouth and put a device to my temples. Cold metal on either side of my head sent tremors down my spine.

“Don’t forget to breathe,” she murmured from her seat at the table’s side.

The click of a switch sounded, followed by the low hum of electricity. Made of silver, the device heated uncomfortably against my skin. Every hair on my body stood up before lightning splintered my brain. Agony ripped through me, inflaming my every nerve ending.

An inhuman shriek tore my throat raw. The belt prevented my back from arching off the table, and my body’s reflex to do it anyway left my ribs sprained.

When it was over, all I could do was pant in wide-eyed shock, every muscle and ligament screaming in distress.

Somehow I also felt oddly drained , as if a fraction of my preternatural strength had been extracted in a violating way I didn’t know was possible.

That’s when she pressed something over my face. A damp cloth smothered my nose and mouth, a stomach-turning odor filling my lungs—sickly sweet, like decaying roses. My stomach revolted, and I retched against the vile thing.

“If you’d like, I can tell you it gets easier with every pass,” sighed the prioress. Brown eyes skimming me, she seemed bored as I choked on the poison crammed in my face . Clicking her tongue, Deirdre’s calculated nonchalance transformed to scrutiny keen enough to cut glass. “It doesn’t.”

I twisted my head, desperate for fresh air, but her grip was like iron. The restraints kept me pinned. Rotten flowers strangled my senses.

Another click followed by electrical humming, and I whimpered. Another jolt of electricity split my brain, forcing me to gasp air through the stinking cloth. It made the room swoop. Brought my gorge up. Made me feel as though I was crawling out of myself. Flickering in and out of reality.

Whatever this concoction was, it was dark. Foul .

That sadistic cunt zapped me over and over, cleaving my essence from my very soul, severing more of me until I was a weak shadow of myself.

She wasn’t even asking any fucking questions . She simply watched me writhe, scream, and choke while she fried me and pried me casually apart.

At one point, the world dulled around me.

My demun’s eyesight, hearing, and sense of smell leached from my body in what felt like countless droplets of pure anguish boring through my flesh.

My screams echoed in my own ears until my throat was shredded and no longer healing.

Until every fiber of my body shrieked at me to get out and feed or die in short order.

It went on, seemingly endless. Pain scorched like fire while pieces of me drifted away with every pass, dissipating like vapor.

I scrambled after them, mentally reciting things I knew about myself.

But as soon as I started shuffling the fragments back together, the bitch ran more electricity through my brain.

I gulped more poison until my eyes and nose streamed.

Gripped by bone-deep fatigue, something intuitive said my demun’s strength was gone—a violation of nature. Of Eisha herself. A betrayal I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

It went on so long my awareness came and went. My identity came and went. My consciousness came… and went…

It was a blessing when Deirdre’s name finally faded from my mind, followed by my own. Still, she didn’t relent. I blacked out at a certain point, only to come to again, aware of nothing but the never-ending anguish. The yearning to die. The stink of rotten rose petals flooding my dulled senses.

There’s no telling how much time passed before Elodie finally fully dissolved from my mind. El I held onto as long as possible, until I couldn’t anymore. At least the bond still burned brightly between us, but the love of my life was a beautiful stranger when the last wisps trickled away.

I was crying earnest tears at that point, uncertain about what was devastating me so.

When the agony finally came to an end, it was like being caught in the eye of a hurricane: blissful peace after such violent destruction. Deirdre leaned back in her seat, a sigh escaping her. Dark shadows hung beneath her eyes. For all I knew, days had passed.

I sagged boneless against the rock-hard slab at my back, a shell of a woman devoid of context.

Just before a final, deathlike unconsciousness claimed me, the prioress stood.

Nothing more than my anonymous, sadistic torturer by then, she cast a scornful look at me before reaching to twist a ring off my finger I wasn’t aware I had on.

Present Day

S omehow, I can hear Elodie’s sobs through the closed door far better than I ought to.

I can hear everything : the trill of finches far outside the dome’s reach and the rush and sigh of breezes low in the valley. Although the bonfires have dwindled to smoldering embers on the cobblestones, their crackles and hisses are radio static blaring in my ears.

Woodsmoke scuds across the courtyard. Its stench reaches me in acrid tendrils that sting my sinuses long before I notice it creeping around the base of the Observatory trail.

If my sense of smell and hearing are sharper now, then my eyesight is a rapier’s blade.

The world filters into my brain in an overload of information. I can’t tear my attention from the billions of stars winking in the inky sky—stars in quantities I haven’t perceived for far too long.

They pale in comparison to the magic threaded through the dome encasing the temple complex.

The arcane barrier stands in stark focus, rising high overhead and curving around the entire temple. The syphoned life-force it’s composed of glitters and shimmers like crushed mica.

It’s all too much of a shock, too big to comprehend alongside the memories mercilessly funneled back into my head. I don’t remember everything of my life, only what I saw in a brief moment that stretched on for what seemed an eternity.

What I did see came in jumbled fits and starts:

Myself cresting the path up the mountain. Being ushered into the Gallery of the Goddess to anxiously await the Second High Priestess.

Our first meeting in Nehel, followed by finding Asher’s Specialty Print Shop in Aronya Dar.

The whirlwind of nights I sat for El, flirting shamelessly and counting down the days before an impending marriage that felt more like a lifelong prison term.

Each meeting, each hour we spent together, pulled me deeper and more inextricably in love with him.

The night I seduced El Asher before either of us knew what I am.

Being ushered into the Divination room with Elodie.

The night our soul-tie was forged burns so brightly in my mind it blinds me. It floods me with a desirous, dire sort of love that illuminates every fiber in me. It wars with the betrayal stabbing like red-hot needles under my skin.

The night I killed Illiam is… so complicated. I don’t remember it or him directly. I know how I felt relaying what happened to Elodie, but I don’t feel that way anymore. I hardly know how to feel.

The remembered anger still courses through me like a fever, and yet I’m horrified at my callousness in confessing what I did. Saying I’d do it again and knowing, in that moment, how viciously I meant it—

Once I start down the steep trail from the Observatory, my foot goes out from under me. I slide, loose gravel bouncing toward the courtyard in the dark. I stagger to keep my balance, my thoughts swirling like a tempest.

There’s something else, too. I remember what happened in the flower greenhouse that day! Gods , I cringe at the barest thought of it. She called red and I kept going. I-I was touching myself!

A sob tumbles out of me. It’s all too much to comprehend at once, and I think of venturing to the rooftop terrace again. Hell, at this hour, nobody’s up and about to stop me.

“Fuck!” I cry into the lonely night.

Three hours ago I didn’t know what the word Succubus meant. Now, it somehow feels like I’ve undergone the agony of the ritual again. Over the course of one evening, I’ve lost who I thought I was, completely and totally against my will.

All I’ve wanted this whole time is to find answers about myself . Now that I have them, I wish I could go back in time—wish I’d never pursued Elodie like I did. And now we’re both stuck here because of me.

We’re as trapped in our bond and the never-ending push and pull of orbiting one another as we are in this shitty temple.

Stumbling again, I nearly fall head over heels to the cobblestones below. Dragging my hands and heels in the dirt, I catch myself, crouching and trying to regulate myself. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, praying for the cacophony in my head to subside.

Somehow I make it down and back to my rooms in one piece.

The water in my washbasin turns cloudy as I rinse the dirt from my hands. Amber and cedar linger on my skin, refusing to scrub off completely. The sweet, aromatic fragrance brings more tears to my eyes.

The fact that the predator inside of me is spine-chillingly calm makes everything worse.

I am the predator . I study my own reflection in the murky water. The monster is me.

This is when I realize the voice I heard after the last time Sadrie and I slept together wasn’t Eisha at all. That was a memory, too.

Elodie’s voice groping through lost time and untold years to touch me again. There’s nothing else it could possibly be. And I am not at all what she said I was.

The disappointment has no right to be so crushing and bitter.

One hand pressed to my chest, I drop onto my bed, struggling to inhale and exhale without hyperventilating. The dark, peaceful place inside of me looms impossibly far away.

Our soul-tie pulses, rooted beneath my diaphragm and glowing like a banked ember. I wish I could cut the arcane connection out of me.

Feeling dangerously unmoored, I wander to my sitting room, my gaze landing on the desk beneath my window. Among other things, it holds a stack of blank paper and a fountain pen in a wooden case.

Something’s been nagging at the back of my mind since leaving the Observatory. Something that hasn’t made sense all this time, until now. I’ve remembered enough to know the truth about this place, and Lydia… she was running .

Not just that. She tried to warn me that day. Did the ritual not work on her, either?

She’s much too alert compared to the other girls. She’s being silenced deliberately and punished for something , and I must know what.

It’s too late now to go backward; I know too much and not nearly enough. I need to speak to her as soon as possible. I’m in this far too deep now to give a damn about the consequences. After the whirlwind of a night that I’ve had, part of me welcomes them.

Deirdre can go ahead and do her worst.

Peeling off my filthy clothes, I slip beneath the covers.

My ass has long since healed from the punishment Elodie meted out, but the thought of it has me throbbing all over again.

Memories from tonight and long ago blend together: our bodies tangling and moving so perfectly, our moans echoing into the night.

I can’t shut them out.

Shame douses me, twisted through with love and rage and a desperate, deep-rooted desire for Elodie that feels all-consuming. It comes alongside the awareness that, despite everything, I’ll always long for more.

W hen I report to the kitchens the next day, Kiera’s hands are full with a seriously sulking Ghisele. The latter appears to be doing her damndest to pluck chickens without actually touching them.

Catching the handmaiden’s attention, I motion for her to follow me up the spiral staircase. I turn to face her once we’re at the top. “I have a favor to ask.”

She glances skeptically around the aux kitchen and the empty refectory beyond. “Why are we whispering? We’re the only ones here.”

“Are you familiar with that betrothed girl, Lydia? Her mouth is sewn up.”

She gives me a strange look, her mass of ebony hair bobbing as she nods.

“This is going to sound strange, but I need you to do something for me. You can’t breathe a word of it to anybody else.”