Page 45 of Soul Redeemed

“Where. The fuck. Is the female?”

Subtle as it was, Zayne caught the quick slide of Ivan’s right eyeball toward the room off to the side and back.

Xander obviously caught it, too, as he shot up from his seat beside Zayne, knocking the chair ass over applecart.

As Xander strode toward the room, with Ivan stumbling after him, the brute lurched toward them, set into motion like a statue come to life.

Zayne thrust up from the chair, allowing the red to take over his eyes, and crossed his arms in a no bullshit stance. “I wouldn’t.”

The brute took a step back, gaze locked on Zayne’s, his jaw shifting with irritation.

“Ivan, Ivan, Ivan. You sick and sorry bastard. What the fuck do we have here?” Xander’s voice held a tinge of amusement, piquing Zayne’s curiosity. The angel had seen some pretty nasty shit in the underground scene, so sick and sorry could’ve been stomach turning and horrific, for all Zayne knew.

Backing himself toward the room, Zayne kept Brute in his sights until he reached the door’s threshold and peeked inside. A morbid scent hit him first, like the stench of rotting flesh over the heady aroma of sex, that crinkled Zayne’s nose. The lights had been flipped on, illuminating a macabre scene of human females hanging from cables like puppets, suspension hooks lodged into their backs. Whether they were dead, or drugged, Zayne couldn’t tell, but the coppery scent of blood hung on the air with a toxic cloud of sins that made him want to gag. On the bed, the three-breasted kitten female batted around a demon’s severed head as if playing with a ball of yarn, and seemed completely oblivious to their presence.

In the corner of the room sat a cage, and inside, a naked woman crouched, curled into herself. Zayne strode toward it, eyeing the bruises and cuts at either side of her spine that indicated she’d been tortured.

In a slow and easy drop to his knees, he reached for the lock on the cage, noticing one of those combo varieties. “What’s the combination?” Zayne said over his shoulder.

“I … um. I can’t remember. Truly, that’s why she’s stuck there. I’m … I’m not lying.”

Jolting up from the floor, Zayne crossed the room, and before the demon could so much as squeal, he pinned him to the wall. Staring into his eyes brought forth a flood of sins that Zayne couldn’t stand to watch—twisted scenes of the male luring women, strangling them, dressing them up in lingerie, finding a female in the basement, strapping her to a bed, while he, the Brute and the cat cut her, had their way with her, and threw her into the cage. They taunted her, poking at her through the metal. Zayne saw the demon punching in the code of the lock. Seven sevens.

He dropped the demon and, at Ivan’s sharp intake of air, realized he’d nearly snapped his gullet while throttling his throat. Slumping to the floor, the dwarf clutched his neck and sputtered a dry cough.

“You ever touch a female again,” Zayne gritted, the anger claiming his voice, “and I’ll hunt you down and sever your dick every night until your body can’t regenerate.”

“I think it’s lesson time again, Ivan.” Slipping out of his leather coat, Xander draped it on a chair and set his hand on the hilt of his blade at his side. “I thought we’d already established how much it pisses me off when you don’t cooperate.”

Zayne quickly returned to the cage and knelt down beside it, punching in the seven’s until the lock popped, swinging the door open.

The female juddered with the clang of metal, but didn’t dart for her freedom for some reason.

“Are you okay?” he asked, tipping his head to catch a glimpse of her face as he broke the chains that bound her hands behind her back.

Nothing but a whimper came from behind a curtain of curls. He backed away, giving her ample room to crawl out, and when she finally emerged, he could see her entire body trembling. As her hair fell away from her face, the silver flicker drew his attention toward her mouth where tape had been applied. She ripped it away, revealing a long, stringy object that she tugged, producing a small white mouse whose head had undoubtedly been crushed by her teeth.

Fuck. That was gross. Zayne had watched demons eat mice before, without so much as flinching, but that must’ve been a hell all it’s own for the female.

Lips peeled back, she leaped onto the adjacent bed, startling the demon cat, and wrapped her hands around the other female’s throat. “You fucking cunt! You demented fucking cunt!” The rasp of her voice told Zayne she’d had her mouth taped for a while. Drawing her fist back, she slammed it into the female’s face.

Cat girl bounced and bucked beneath her, but couldn’t throw the female off.

“Caterina! Caterina!” Ivan’s screams bounced off the walls from the other side of the room, where Xander had tied both him and the brute.

Zayne didn’t bother to intervene. What’d been done to her deserved far more wrath than she was doling out.

The captive’s steel grip kept to cat girl’s throat, until at last, the freakish feline stilled beneath her.

As the Fallen female growled and scrambled across the bed toward the other two, Zayne gripped her shoulder to stop her.

“They’ll be dealt with. Thais?”

“Who’s asking?”

“I’m Zayne. This is Xander.”

Her brows creased as she swept her gaze toward Xander. “Fallen?”