He stirred, and she scooted back against the wall.
His body was chained to the wall encased in serpentine metal. It wrapped around his neck, shoulders, arms, torso, hips, and legs supporting him upright against the gray iron walls of the cage.
Brutal, sharply hewed muscles delineated every inch of his body, and the play of those muscles across his chest and shoulder had a strange, darting heat piercing low in her stomach. Even with death looming, the dangerous beauty of the man before her couldn’t be denied. He could only move his head, and it hung limply on his chest with strands of midnight black hair hiding his features. She could feel him rising from the layers of false memories she had buried him under, and she dreaded the instant he would fully awaken. The witch’s symbols had melted away, and she sensed the burning rage fanning through him. Horrifying aura leaked from him, an unfathomable supremacy she knew she would be unable to control lurked within him.
Her body trembled violently, nearly shaking apart. How he would kill her remained unclear. Would he use his teeth, claws, or bare hands? Being in the same cage was slow torture.
A scream strangled in her throat as the chains rattled with greater intensity. She stopped breathing when his muscles bunched, and the manacles shook with ease. What had lain dormant had been disturbed by her. She’d violated his mind and stirred a sleeping predator of the most merciless kind. And to think she had believed breaking his shield was her best chance for saving herself from him.
Would he remember their brief, passionate encounter? Would he recall the way he’d touched and caressed her skin, brought her to pleasure? And Shilah admitted even if he did, it would not sway him, for he had been resolute in his determination to kill her despite their sensual play. Duty was very important to this man. And sadly, she understood, for she was honor bound to do everything possible to save her sister and their people from Crown Prince Quan. His taunting promise to unite the three kingdoms of Serange and concentrate all the wealth and power within his ruling family must not come to fruition.
Her only hope was to keep Lachlan Ravenswood trapped in the illusions until she found a way to defeat or rein him in. The illusion he slumbered in was weak because she hadn’t understood the viciousness that her mind had brushed against. The eyes that had opened and ensnared her had been pitiless, empty with cold cruelty. She had pushed peace, love, warmth, trying to trap him in a world that must seem anathema to him.
Could she defeat him? Order him to stop breathing? She hadn’t trained on how to wield her Imperial abilities. She sensed the vast untapped strength inside herself and knew in theory how her abilities should work. So, she would try. No, I must succeed.
The emperor wanted her to control him, but perhaps she should attempt killing him. Except she didn’t believe Lachlan Ravenswood wished to know the monster within him, and the man and the beast were not the same. Remember he wanted to kill me. And now he had more incentive to rip open her throat. The beast buried inside him was a creature of blood and rage, and Shilha doubted it would understand mercy if she begged for it.
Tears flowed in torrents down her face, and ugly broken sobs filled the cage and wracked her body. It was all too much, to avenge her family she hadn’t even gotten a chance to mourn, to protect her sister the only family she had left, to save her people. It all sat on her shoulders like a mountain. Failure was not an option, and not even for a moment could she allow herself to think of what would happen to her sister if she did not succeed.
She pulled her scattered thoughts into order, pressed the tips of her fingers together and tried to center her aura. She would reinforce the illusions while seeking the mental threads that would possibly put him under her dominion. Or the ones she could snap to take his life.
The chains rattled again.
The harsh pounding of Shilah’s heart drowned out her thoughts. She flinched as the thundering became like a drum in her ear, her eyes widened, and the hands that she clenched together to stop their trembling strained to stay clasped.
The chains shook more fiercely, and the hiss that filled the cavernous dungeons seemed to surround her. The scream trapped in her throat as the head that hung limply on his chest slowly rose and eyes that were no longer tawny gold captured her gaze.
* * *
Darkness burned away at the images that held Lachlan’s mind. They did not belong inside of him. The warmth felt unnatural, the loving wife that rubbed his shoulders while the children played was discordant with the feelings that pelted inside. The images in his mind slowly washed with blood, the laughing wife’s eyes glazed with fear as bloodthirstiness and rage wiped away the false warmth that tried to hold him cocooned.
He felt different. His senses appeared to be stretching and sharpening. Lachlan tried to sift through the murky darkness that pervaded every cell in his body and soul. The smell of fear and despair wrapped around Lachlan’s senses, intoxicating him with the pleasurable rush of dark energy. His lips curled back, a rumble brewing in his chest. The snarl that filled his mind was so cruel, and unlike him, he stilled.
Evil roiled through him as he tried to sift through his mind to locate his barriers. Memories did not rush in to aid him, there were only fragments—the feel of brutality punching through his mind, the malevolent potency of his beast rushing in and filling every crevice of his being, melding the two essences as one.
A hiss of rage burned from his lips as the need to kill burned hotter inside.
The monster inside gnashed its teeth and clawed for freedom. The need to taste pain and agony was dark and exciting. If not for the ironclad control that he had gained over the past four hundred years he would probably be rampaging now instead of sifting through the needs that pelted inside. His command of the unrelenting hunger to kill was tenuous as Lachlan realized that he could not locate the psychic wall.
Impossible.
The snarl of rage seemed to feed the darkness inside of him. The surge of violent emotions battered at him, consuming his wi
llpower. His bones felt as if they were trying to break out of his skin, so every tendon and sinew stretched with the effort it took for him to rein in the monster.
Yes. He stilled once more as the hiss welled from deep inside of him. He knew his beast, his darkness, his bane for all of his existence. Yet this was different. These were his thoughts. It did not feel as if the thoughts of another brushed against his mind. That was how it had been before when he pulled on the chakra of the darkness buried inside. He had always been able to separate its essence from his, always able to leash the violence of his beast imprisoning it behind psychic shields. His creature had its own unique voice pushing and inciting him to further darkness, urging him to use its powers. The monster that he felt rushing through him now slowly shaping itself on his essence belonged to him.
The smell of fear acrid and pungent filled his nostrils, he looked toward its source at the opposite end. He hissed, inhaling, loving it, and feeding himself. The need to slaughter burned through his veins and Lachlan fought down the terrible hunger tearing at his gut and roaring through his body. His skin rippled, shifting and he looked down. The tattoo of his beast stretched painting his body. He was bonded?
Impossible. There had been no fight for dominance. Lachlan delved deep inside his mind, his essence, trying to separate his beast from himself and could not. That should have been impossible. He had a psychic wall embedded to separate the wash of evil from his essence, preventing the two chakras from melding as one permanently. Even bonded Darkans, the ones who had dominance over their beast, had a psychic wall with which they could leash their beast and the destructive power of its chakra behind whenever they choose. He had absolutely no psychic barrier. The essence was now entirely his. He distantly realized that his body was more muscular, his canines felt jagged and sharper, and claws curled from his fingers. He vaguely remembered the force that invaded his mind, the shattering of his walls and darkness rushing in filling his pores.
Madness howled inside. A cross between a hiss and a snarl echoed from him as more darkness spread through his being. The iciness of the night whistled as it rode the wind. Where was he? It was cold and dank, and he was chained. His muscles surged, and the chains dropped harmlessly to the floor. He should not have broken them so easily. He tried to reason around the rage riding him. Power pulsed through his body, the darkness, the malevolence.
Lachlan held himself still as he studied his surroundings, he was in the dungeon, and he was not alone. It was a beautifully constructed prison with complex locks to hold them confined inside the cage. The width and depth of the bars were at least ten inches thick and made from pure valnetium iron. The size of the enclosure itself about twelve by twelve feet. The cage was also suspended hundreds of thousands of feet in the air, with several lengths of chains stretching from their cage to the cavern rocks it was embedded in. The cage was suspended hundreds of miles from the ground, and as he looked down, he could see hundreds of other cages that hung suspended in a straight line one below the other.
He tried to think logically around the savage feelings that seemed as if they were slowly killing the humanity he’d let the human priest living in his castle convinced him he had. You have a soul, and you are not eternally damned.
A foolish lie he had allowed himself to believe. He could no longer hide behind that strange comfort the human priest’s words had provided. There was no division between man and demon.