TW descriptions of torture

Karhi Emelyn

All that he saw were flashes.

The SUV that ploughed into the side of the car.

The arm that pulled off Karhi’s crumpled door even though it should have been practically welded to his car.

The flash of green eyes that came level with his.

The hiss. “Why are you always doing something for her when I find you?”

The pain as she jerked him out of the car. Searing pain zigzagging down to his hand as her claws tore through his arm.

The feeling of the asphalt grinding into his back as she dragged him out of the car and towards her damaged Lexus.

The smell of her. Intoxicating and nauseating. Parchment and roses and death.

The fear as he realized the game he was playing—the one where Ilona wasn’t in charge of him—was finally over.

She had him.

He opened his eyes to almost complete darkness. The only light into the room was a thin strip at the bottom of what he presumed was a door.

He stood up. “Fuck.”

“You’re awake.”

He spun around but he couldn’t make out anything in the darkness. The strip of light was useless.

He clipped something as he turned, and he heard a hiss of pain.

“Lunette?”

“Yes, you clumsy fuck. She got me, too.”

“When you went to get blood?” he asked.

“Yes,” she growled. “She got me at the fucking hotel.”

“Did she hurt you?”

“No, but that fucking remains to be seen.”

“Do you know if the other three . . . ?” he trailed off, unable to say what he was thinking. Were Carry, Onyx, and Zeren also in trouble?

“No, I don’t. I mean, those three haven’t been sneaking around, getting into shit she doesn’t want them in.” She let out a high-pitched muffled scream of frustration. “I shouldn’t have fucking helped. I should have never gotten involved with your fledgling. I knew this is how it would end.”

She continued with a stream of regrets and expletives, but Karhi didn’t reply. She was right. And Karhi shouldn’t have asked her for help. Ilona already despised Luna. Karhi honestly didn’t know if he or she had been tortured more by Ilona, or who had had it worse over the years, but either way, he knew it was bad. He knew how afraid of Ilona she was.

“This is all my fault,” he murmured.

Lunette suddenly stopped talking. Karhi couldn’t see her, but he heard when she moved and felt when she fumbled for his arms, hitting his shoulders, before grabbing his biceps in a tight grip. “No,” she said. “No, this is not your fault. This is her fault. Ilona. She is the one who put us in here. She is the one who makes us afraid to exist. She is the one who tortures us if she doesn’t like something we do.” Her voice wobbled but it didn’t break. “This is not your fault. It’s not my fault. And as much as I’m loathe to say it—it’s not Sloane’s fault either. This is all Ilona. Do you understand?”

Karhi couldn’t see her face, but he knew she was looking up at him, glaring at him, demanding with her eyes that he agree with her. He could feel it.

His shoulders fell. “Yes.”

She let go of him. “Good.” He heard fabric against concrete, and he knew she had sat down against a wall.

He held his hand out in front of him until he felt the coarse wall she had reached. He felt around before pushing himself to sit against the wall. He was maybe a few inches from Luna. He could touch her if he put out his left hand.

“I had one of the interns look into things while I was running around with you. Including the information Zero gave me.”

“How did you justify it being relevant to their research for the courts?”

“I didn’t. The interns are always jumping all over themselves to please me, so they do what I ask. I have a particularly tech-savvy one that I’ve actually taught to hack. She does a lot of good work for me. I don’t think she’ll wind up being a researcher for the courts.”

Lunette had a few doctorates in arcane information. He could never remember what her actual PhDs were in—maybe History and English? Definitely some subsets of that. But she was the foremost expert in a lot of niche fields, especially ones that mages were interested in. She had an agreement with the mage courts that was basically an internship program. They would send young mages, who had academic interests in old histories and magical theories, to work with her. They often stayed in her mansion in California and lived with her and worked on her research projects.

“I had her look into some of this, and I was able to get the information from her right before Ilona took me. I’ve figured out what the fuck is going on.”

“Okay,” he said hesitantly.

“The building where Mikko was held is currently owned by a shell company owned by the vampire courts. It is commonly used to hold highly dangerous, magically volatile prisoners. My intern looked up some of those glyphs. They are used is heavy duty containment spells.”

“That’s why Corvine struggled with it. Why the glyphs were all burned out.”

“Yeah. And then, the house that you were taken to? It’s a safehouse for the vampire courts.”

“Okay . . .” Things were starting to click into place for Karhi.

“Do you know the name Amelia Swift?”

It sounded familiar but he couldn’t place it. “Maybe?”

“It tugged at my memory, too. That was the name of the buyer that Zero’s cousin gave her. She works for the vampire courts. And she’s one of Ilona’s children. Ilona turned her in the fifties.”

Karhi remembered then. “That annoying little fucking empath.”

“Yup. I think Ilona’s behind all of this. Amelia bought that dead man’s blood for Ilona. Tipped her off to the safehouse and that warehouse so Ilona could use it.”

“She’s always been a suck-up.”

“Exactly.”

“What about the shifters that came after me?”

“I checked the names on their credit cards. Goons for hire.”

“And it was hemlock that killed the one shifter.”

“It was Ilona’s method of disposal, yes. For their failure to keep you in that safehouse or recover you from the brothel, I’m sure. Terrible way to do business—killing people for failure—and yet people still work with her.”

He shook his head in disgust.

“And I also did some digging into the other things that happened to Sloane’s friends. I couldn’t get anything on the shifter, so I don’t think Ilona targeted her. Seems like something else. But those kids—their parents were killed.”

Karhi nodded but then realized Lunette couldn’t see him in the dark. “Yeah.”

“They were tortured before they were ripped apart. No dead man’s blood that could be found, though I don’t think that would be necessary for a human. But the mother was missing her uterus. Just like the woman you were framed for. Just like Sloane.”

Karhi swallowed. This was making him more and more uncomfortable.

“And I remembered something. Amelia was one of three triplets that Ilona turned.”

Karhi didn’t remember that.

“The other two being Ava and Angus Swift.”

Karhi’s blood went cold, numbness seeping through his shoulders like ice. The butcher twins. “Ava and Angus like to torture and kill.”

“Yeah. And something I learned is that Angus has a certain proclivity for removing women’s reproductive organs.”

“How do you know?” His stomach was slowly bottoming out in his abdomen. It couldn’t sink any further.

“I had to work with them on something a decade or so ago. And Angus is so vicious, I knew he wouldn’t have been tame as a human. So, I looked into him. I linked him to the murders of eight women in Scotland and Wales in the 1950s. Torture, occasional dismemberment, and missing reproductive organs.”

Karhi pressed his hands into his face, pushing against his closed eyes until white flashed behind his lids. “That’s who went after Sloane.”

“I think so. Ava just likes to goad him—she doesn’t actually like to get her hands dirty. But what I don’t understand is why they didn’t absolutely tear Sloane apart.”

Something like a gate slammed behind the door to their room, a deep, clanging sound that reverberated through Karhi’s body. A moment later the lights went on. Karhi had removed his hands from his face, but he threw them back up to shield his eyes. He hissed at the sudden light.

He felt the slow, pulsing desire inside of his abdomen that signified Ilona was around. It was like a presence in his head, fogging up his senses.

Ilona’s voice was like diamonds. Beautiful and hard. “You scared them away before they could get into the dismemberment.”

Karhi and Lunette barely had time to stand up before the door to their prison opened.

Ilona wore a dress of the deepest burgundy with a train that disappeared through the door. The front of the skirt arced up to the middle of her thighs, revealing pale skin that made Karhi think of poachers hunting elephants.

Her hair, pale blood, cascaded down her back, acting like a cape as she walked. Her movements were stilted and tense. She was furious.

“I took you,” she said, looking at Karhi. She had a curious smile on her face that didn’t reach her eyes. “I put you up in that safehouse until I could do something with you. And you escaped. But I thought, here is an opportunity to learn more. To understand more about what was happening between you and Sloane.”

Her smile turned into snarl. “And then you interrupted every single plan I had with your stupid investigation.” She surged forward until she stood inches from them. “You saved the boy. You broke out of the house I held you in. You resired Sloane.” She grabbed Karhi’s face, pulling him down to her height. “You should have left her to die,” she hissed. “That was the first time she wasn’t with one of those humans protected by Hazel.” She spat. “I wanted her dead, and you didn’t let her die.”

He couldn’t argue with anything she said because if he did, he would be worse than dead.

She pulled him forward until her mouth was next to his ear. “You’re already going to be worse than dead,” she whispered. “I will make you beg.”

Agony, like he was being flayed across every inch of his skin, tore through him. Fire ravaged his body and he screamed. A red miasma covered his sight, blocking out anything past the agony.

“Stop it.” He barely heard Lunette through the roar of all of his pain receptors.

“And you—why would you work with him? Why make it so much worse for yourself? Make it so much worse for him?”

Lunette shrieked and the sound of bone on concrete told him Lunette had slammed her head into the wall.

Ilona’s powers were that she could copy anyone else’s power and she was using cruciopathy on them.

The pain faded and along with it, his and Luna’s screams. The red miasma disappeared from his sight. He breathed hard, laying on his side. He didn’t remember falling over.

“Why would you two—of all people—go against me?” Ilona demanded. “You know how I feel about Sloane.”

“How could we know what you wanted?” Lunette croaked. Karhi heard the tears in her voice even though he couldn’t see her. “You never fucking told us not to go after her.”

Ilona’s shriek of fury made Karhi slam his hands uselessly against his ears. His eyes shut reflexively and when they opened again, Lunette was on the ground, blood pooling around her head. Her wild russet eyes were filled with tears.

“Why did you kidnap me?” Karhi choked out. “Why frame me for killing that girl?”

Ilona let out a harsh, high-pitched laugh. “You, my pet, were to stay there until I could prepare a room for you. Because I knew you weren’t looking nearly as hard as you could for Sloane. I found her that night you came to me, claiming you couldn’t find her.

“And that girl—Angus was the one who injected you and Ava brought you to me. But Angus took a liking to the girl. Not my fault he couldn’t hold back. She was asking for it anyway.”

“She was just a young—”

A hard blow to his left ear sent Karhi’s head into the concrete. He shouted in pain before he felt claws at his throat. His vision had gone white from the blow.

Ilona’s voice was hardly recognizable with the fury colouring it as she spoke in his ear. It didn’t help that she had ruptured that ear drum when she hit him.

“Do not contradict me, pet,” she hissed.

Karhi stayed quiet.

“You brought her into my life, my pet. I will teach you and I will teach her. Together.”

His blood went cold, and his vision finally cleared from the blow to his ear.

Her eyes glowed green, her fury like a storm in his head. Focusing on anything except the raw power behind the tempest was impossible.

“I won’t let this blatant disregard for me continue, Karhi. You will answer to me.”

He flinched. She had screamed that last word.

“It’s been so long since you respected me, my pet. I’m glad to see you’ve finally regained enough sense to fear me.”

“Ilona—”

He choked as her grip on his throat tightened.

“You will refer to me as Mistress,” she hissed.

Images flooded his mind. His body strung up by chains. Strips of skin missing from his torso and thighs. A vice between his legs. His fingers at odd angles from his hands.

And next to him, Sloane. Sloane strung up by chains. Sloane . . .

“No,” he whimpered, cringing away from Ilona.

She let go of him. His ears rung, and he couldn’t hear what she said to Lunette. But he heard when Lunette moaned. “No, please no—”

“You should have thought of that before you crossed me.”

The door to the room had slammed shut before he realized Ilona was even gone. She had left the lights on. And looking around, he could see the chains in the walls. The tables with wrist and ankle clamps. The implements that sat on racks along one wall.

She wanted them to see what was coming.

Karhi understood now why Ilona had wanted him. Why she had gone through so much trouble to take him. From the very moment he had come to Phoenix, her intention was for this to be the end result. His imprisonment.

Karhi knew what this meant. He knew what was in store for him.

It had been centuries since she had last “taught” him a lesson. But those lessons had seared themselves into his mind like brands to his psyche. They would be a hundred times worse than anything he had experienced in the past few days.

No. He couldn’t do this again. He wouldn’t get through the torture. He wasn’t as young as he had been. His mind couldn’t tolerate it.

She would suspend him. She would lift him off the ground. The flaying he had felt under Lunette’s cruciopathy? That would very much be a reality. And it wouldn’t just be his reality.

It would be Sloane’s, too.

Now he understood why Ilona hadn’t taken Sloane sooner. She couldn’t because Sloane had almost exclusively been with people that were under Hazel’s protection. And then, when it had been Lunette, Karhi, and Sloane alone together, she had left it. She wanted to give them just enough rope to hang themselves.

Ilona would make them all witness it. The torture. The things she would do to each of them.

He couldn’t survive the torture she would put him through. Not this time. Not if Sloane and Lunette were there, too.

He wouldn’t be able to handle their screams.

“No,” he heard Lunette whimper.

He struggled to roll over. The aftershock of Ilona using Lunette’s powers had left him dizzy and unable to stand. He crawled, dragging himself with his arms to her side

“Luna,” he groaned.

“No, no, no,” she cried, tears rolling down her face. “Please, no. He didn’t do anything.” Her voice was high-pitched.

“Lunette.” He reached over to put a hand on her shoulder, and she shuddered. Her eyes opened to see Karhi. They were so red—red-brown irises and blood shot sclera.

“Zeren didn’t do anything,” she whimpered, shuddering where she lay on the ground. Flaking blood surrounded her head.

She had seen the same things he had. Ilona liked to give them previews of what was to come.

He pulled her to him, and she hiccupped, grabbing onto him desperately. He wrapped her small form in his arms, pulling her in tight.

They sobbed together.