Forgotten Heir: Realm Doors Book One

Chapter Eleven

A/N: Trigger warning: rape. I will put an * at the beginning and end of the section to be avoided.

Time passed slowly in the dark dungeon. The Lady had shattered Cara's nose and torn gouges out of her cheeks, wound which burn as each tear rolls over them. Ric had finally fallen silent; his voice has broken from days spent screaming in pain and begging for her life. He’d promised the Lady his life, his loyalty, his willingness to stay her plaything for all eternity, but she didn’t hear his pleas; she knew she had what she wanted in the girl who held his heart. 

The gnawing hunger in Cara's stomach, combined with her parched tongue, warned her that days had passed, even though she gleaned nothing from the little scraps of conversation she overheard from the men who guarded the door whenever the Lady wasn’t present. She felt cold too, weakened and naked as she was, her whole body exposed to be used as a twitching, spasming canvas for Ric's sire to create her artwork in blood and burns. Her throat was torn from screaming, although she didn't think she could scream anymore; even though her elahdril body tried to heal itself, attempting to stop the blood still seeping into her lung, each jolt of pain reopened her wounds. She couldn’t heal.

‘Will my body ever go numb?’ she wondered in silence. ‘Will I ever stop feeling each brand and slice, each bruise and break?’

The Lady reached up to her hand, prising her fingers from around the chains which she desperately clung to. Her cold, vampire fingers wrap delicately around the first, littlest, digit. Cara attempted to take a rasping breath for fortification, but she couldn’t prevent her groan of pain and the urge to vomit as her the other woman snapped her bones with a sickening crunch, not dissimilar to the snapping of dried wood. Her tormenter watched her, studying each expression of agony to cross her face as she moved her hand to her next finger, producing another gut-wrenching snap.

With her body shivering in shock, Cara felt dizzy. Her vision blurred and the world spun, adding to her nausea. Not a single part of her wasn’t aching, and she could barely tell where one agonising wound ended and another started. As she struggled to make sense of the swaying room, she accepted with a sense of relief that passing out had become inevitable. Part of me was concerned what the Lady would do to her while she was unconscious, but mainly her mind was preoccupied with praying never to wake up. She might've even sighed as the world went dark and she slumped in the chains.

Cara didn’t know how many hours passed when I swum, trembling, back into consciousness. She didn’t want to open her eyes and see the basement and that she-devil. As it was, the room had fallen silent, and only Ric’s voice whispered directly into her head.

“She’s not here, she’s gone to feed.”

Dragging her head slowly upright was the most Cara could manage, but she didn’t have the strength to make her body do more than hang, limp. She stared at Ric in open horror, seeing what the Lady had done him while she was passed out. Fresh blood trickled over his dirt smeared form. His cheek bone has collapsed under his sire's onslaught, and a purple and black bruise covered half of his face.

“Why did you come?” his mind wanted to know.

Communicating was much easier without needing to move desiccated tongues and cracked lips.

“Because I had to try,” she replied. “Because it was the right thing to do.”

She wince as she tried to force herself to stand, just to relieve the pain in her bound wrists. The iron shackles cut into her painfully, and her joints felt over-extended.

“Kalidir will be furious,” she sighed with a swell of longing for the barn, grumpy Luke, and watchful Anthony.

“No,” Ric’s mind answered sorrowfully. “He’ll be worried out of his mind. You should not have come.”

Resting her head back against the cold stone wall, she closed her eyes in an attempt to ease her thundering headache.

“I had to come. I could’ve potentially used more forward planning, but I had to come.” Slowly her aching eyes met his again. “Tell me honestly, Ric, how long will it take for her to get bored of this?”

His gaze dropped and he shook his head, trying to block her from his mind. It was bad, then.

“Please Ric, I need to know.”

Painfully, he raised his chin to stare back at her again.

“I’ve seen her torture humans for years. Elahdril, wolves, and vampires for decades. She promised me centuries.”

At his admission, a little more of her resolve to be strong failed. If the Lady kept Ric alive for centuries, then she’d keep her alive too, just to torment him.