Page 309 of Scarlet Wars
I woke up to my worst nightmare.
It wasn’t the chains, cold and biting against my wrists, holding me like a caged animal in some rust-stained corner of hell.
It wasn’t the burning ache in my side, where a blade had sunk deep and left me bleeding slow. Not too slow to kill, and fast enough to remind me I was dying by inches.
It wasn’t even the suffocating stench of blood and unwashed bodies, or the three Chiefs standing across the room, watching me like they were bored of the game already.
No.
It washer.
Emma.
Held upright by two of them—no,propped, like her body had already given up and the only thing keeping her from collapsing was the strength of the monsters who broke her.
Her head lolled slightly to the side, chin streaked in blood, her skin paper-pale beneath all the bruises. Her nose was shattered. Blood leaked from both nostrils, from her ears, trailing down the side of her neck. One of her eyes was swollenshut, skin around it already black, so dark it barely looked human.
Both her legs were bent wrong.
And her right arm hung uselessly, twisted at the elbow, bone pushing against the skin like it was trying to escape.
I looked once.
Just once.
And everything inside mesnapped.
A sound tore out of my throat, low, ragged, animalistic. Not a scream. Not a word. But a brokenroarthat scraped my lungs raw on the way out.
The kind of sound that made the Chiefs pause.
The kind of sound that promised none of them were leaving this room alive.
“Look who’s up,” one of the Chiefs sneered, stepping forward. He sounded too casual, too light, like this was a joke only he found funny. “Right in time for the second show. Too bad he missed our first round of punishment, but let’s make up for it.”
His boots squelched through dried blood as he walked, stopping a few feet from me, the corner of his mouth twitching upward.
“Too bad you can’t translate under a bubble to save her,” he added, head cocked. “And that knife through your ribs must really hurt to move.”
He was smiling.
I didn’t blink, too busy memorizing his face, every line of it, every scar and angle. I wasn’t going to forget it. Iwantedto remember.
So when I killed him, I’d know exactly where to aim.
The pain in my side was molten now, creeping through my chest with every breath like fire made of glass. But it was distant. Manageable.Secondary.
Emma whimpered, a soft, broken sound from the corner of the room, so faint I almost missed it.
The Chief’s smile widened.
“You like the way she looks?” he murmured, tilting his head like he was admiring a painting. “We took our time.”
My wrists strained against the chains hard enough to bite into skin.
“I’m going to kill you,” I said, my voice low, icy. Not a threat but a truth, scraped from somewhere so deep inside me it barely sounded human. “And when I do, I will make sure you rememberevery secondof what you did to her before I end you.”
He laughed.
