Page 24 of Monsters Carve Thrones (Crowned Monsters Duet #2)

(TW: Brief sexual assault)

Waylon’s hand was like steel around my arm as he dragged me back down the corridor.

I had only been in solitary for a couple of hours, yet it felt like forever.

I didn’t speak. Not because I was afraid, but because I refused to give him my voice.

He fed on fear like a fucking vulture, and I wouldn’t be one of his carcasses.

The door slammed behind us.

His grip loosened, but only because he needed to relock it. A heavy click echoed behind me. Then silence.

He turned, slowly. His eyes were voids of simmering rage and ego. “You embarrassed me,” he said, as if that was a crime worth blood.

I lifted my chin, jaw tight. “You humiliated yourself. Your ego is exhausting.”

That did it.

He struck me hard across the face, open palm. I stumbled at the sharpness of it and caught myself against the edge of the dresser.

“Do it again,” I snapped. “And I swear to God I’ll bite through your fucking throat.”

He lunged. In a blur, I was thrown onto the bed. His weight crushed down on me, one hand wrapped around both my wrists, pressing them into the sheets. His other hand gripped my jaw, forcing my face toward him.

“You think I’m afraid of you?” he hissed.

“No,” I whispered, smiling through the blood at the corner of my lip. “But you should be afraid of us .”

That made him pause. Just for a second. Just long enough for me to slam my knee into his side.

He grunted, reeled back, and I scrambled off the bed.

But he was faster. He grabbed my hair, yanked me backward, and flung me into the wall.

My vision sparked, breath whooshed from my lungs, but I didn’t fall. I stood there, bleeding.

“Hurt me if you want,” I said with a hoarse laugh. “It won’t save you when he comes.”

Waylon stalked toward me, slower now. A smile curved across his face, twisted and self-satisfied. “I don’t need to save myself,” he murmured, trailing a finger down the line of my throat. “I just need to make you forget who you are. Turn that fire into ash.”

I looked him dead in the eyes. “Good luck.”

“Challenge accepted, baby,” he whispered, spinning me and bending me over the bed in a swift movement.

I closed my eyes when he ripped my shorts off and slammed into me. I kept them closed, breathing through it all.

The room was still and stifling, thick with a silence that pressed against my ears until I could hear my blood moving. I lay on my side, my hands cuffed to the iron bed frame. A tank top clung to my sweat-slicked skin. My thighs ached. My cheek throbbed.

I should’ve been crying. But there were no tears left...just heat. From rage and exhaustion.

I stared into the dark, the only light a thin slice of moon cutting through the high, barred window. I followed it with my eyes like a lifeline, pretending it was something more than a taunt from the outside world.

Footsteps echoed down the hall.

I froze.

The heavy door creaked open. I didn’t move. I watched Waylon from under my lashes, my breath deepening just slightly, faking sleep. After he had raped me, he left me alone for a while, likely eating dinner. My body was too worn to fight, and he knew it.

He set something down.

He undressed slowly. I could feel him watching me, waiting for me to stir. Waiting to see if I’d challenge him again. But I didn’t move. I kept my breathing soft and even, my lashes lowered, my body limp. Inside, though, I was coiled.

The mattress dipped beside me.

The warmth of his body hit me like a second wave of suffocation. I could smell the soap from his shower, the musk of wine and sweat on his skin. It took everything I had not to recoil.

His hand slid across the bed, reaching for me, testing the space between us.

Not again. Please.

But he exhaled deeply and rolled onto his back. A few minutes later, I heard the steady rhythm of his breathing. Thank fuck.

***

TWO WEEKS LATER

Time stopped moving like it used to. I had no clock. Just the slow crawl of days that bled into one another, marked only by meals, pain, and the bruises that changed color.

I was thinner now. Hollow in the face. My stomach no longer growled–just twisted in on itself like it had given up.

My arms were sore from being restrained for hours at a time.

My thighs were littered with bite marks, crescent bruises, old scars starting to fade, only to be replaced again.

Some part of me had gotten used to the ache. That frightened me.

He hurt me nearly every day. Sometimes twice. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. It was almost impressive how much he had in him. Like violence was the only way he knew how to breathe.

And still, I had not broken.

But I was tired. My body screamed with every movement. My heart beat slow and heavy behind my ribs, like it was too bruised to be fast anymore. So… I began to think.

What if I gave him what he wanted?

Not really. Not fully. Not me. Just... the illusion.

What if I stopped fighting, stopped spitting, stopped glaring like I still had teeth to bite him with? What if I let him think he’d won? Would he grow bored of a broken toy? Would he finally relax enough for me to get my hands around his fucking throat?

The thought simmered.

So the next time he came into the room, I didn’t scream. I didn’t curse him or twist away from his hands. I looked up at him, calm, quiet, blank.

Waylon paused, clearly surprised.

I knelt where I was told. I opened my mouth when commanded and let him push and prod me like I was his favorite possession.

He used me, his mind elsewhere while his dick was in my mouth.

Rafe must have been closing in or at least causing him stress.

I could see it. I could feel it whenever he’d be extra rough with me.

The fucker was scared.

This time, he seemed distant. Like his use of me was merely robotic, even when he spilled down my throat.

As I adjusted to a more comfortable position than my knees on the floor, chest rising and falling in sharp bursts, he crouched beside me with a grin so smug I could’ve carved it from his face.

“See?” he murmured, brushing hair from my cheek like a lover. “I told you I’d break you. That fire you had… it’s gone. You belong to me. Every inch. Every breath. I’ve stolen your pretty, perfect little soul.”

I didn’t flinch. I let him think it. Let him feel it. But inside? I smiled. Because he hadn’t broken me. He’d just handed me the only weapon I had left–his confidence.

And I’d use it to destroy him.

***

RAFE

Warsaw, Poland

Three weeks since Adela’s abduction

The city was gray with winter, the sky overcast and smeared with clouds that matched the worn stone of Warsaw’s buildings.

The streets buzzed with traffic, and pedestrians wrapped in heavy coats.

I stood beneath the awning of a modest hotel on the edge of the city center, my hood up and eyes shielded by sunglasses.

I scanned the area with predator stillness.

“Hotel’s clean,” Kieran murmured, stepping beside me. “Cameras only in the lobby. No one asked for passports. We’re ghosts here.”

“Good,” I said. My voice was rough from the cold, and everything else.

Last week, I realized that we were being tracked.

Thankfully, I haven’t seen anyone trailing us in about a week.

The fuckers were pretty easy to lose, which was comical.

I imagined it stressed Waylon out. I just hoped he wasn’t taking it out on my wife.

Laura came out of the cab behind us, wheeling a single suitcase, her dark coat pulled tightly around her. Nico followed, his gaze darting over nearby buildings before he murmured, “We’re booked under the name Sieradzki. Paid in cash. Nothing links back.”

I nodded once and stepped through the glass doors.

Our suite wasn’t lavish, but it was big enough.

Two bedrooms, a kitchenette, and a sitting area with a large table already littered with maps, burner phones, syringes of epinephrine, laptops, and dossiers stained with old coffee and dried blood.

A faint scent of gunpowder still clung to my hoodie. I hadn’t washed it since being home.

I sat hunched over one of the maps, dead eyes locked onto a grainy satellite image of a rural estate just outside Warsaw–a place Waylon had once funneled women through years ago. He might have returned to old patterns. Sadists always did.

“We’ve got at least six of Moreau’s old Warsaw contacts still alive,” Laura said, leaning over the table. “Witek, Rafalski, Tomek, Stepan, a few others. One of them either sold him out or helped him set up shop again.”

“And we bleed every single one until they start to talk,” I muttered, jaw clenching so tight it throbbed.

“Jesus,” Kieran said, half under his breath. “You’ve already killed four men this week.”

“Not enough,” I snapped, brushing my hand over a cigarette pack before deciding I didn’t want a cigarette. I wanted something stronger.

I reached into my coat pocket and fished out a crushed baggie of fine white powder wrapped in tissue paper. Oxy. Chewed, snorted, swallowed–I didn’t care. It was the only way I could keep my hands from shaking when I saw her face in the backs of my eyelids.

“Rafe,” Laura said, her voice low but firm. “You need to pace yourself. You’re going to burn out before we find her.”

I gave her a dead look. “Better I burn out than come up empty.”

She frowned and turned back to the map, but I felt her eyes linger on me. They all knew I wasn’t sleeping. Not unless I was high. Not unless my limbs went numb and my thoughts blurred enough to dull the edge of losing her.

***