Chapter 133 CHAPTER 133
I don't know how many days passed in that room.
Time stopped existing when the lights never changed and the cold never let up and the pain came in waves that had no rhythm or mercy.
Vera was the worst of the three. She had a method to her madness, always starting from the same place on my body and working outward like she was painting a canvas with my suffering.
Jon was brute force, mechanical and unfeeling, which made sense because he literally had no feelings.
Ehis was the one who watched. Catalogued my responses. Adjusted the next round based on what made me scream the loudest.
Baldwin had designed them to learn from me. With every painful session, they got better at making it hurt.
But I didn't break.
Not because I was brave or strong or any of the things Florian and the Academy tried to train into me. I didn't break because I'd decided in that chair on the first encounter that Baldwin would get nothing from me and the only thing I had left in this world was my word.
So I kept it.
Through everything they did, I kept it.
I was barely conscious when the door opened again and Baldwin walked in, that familiar click of locks behind him.
"You're quite impressive," he said and I could hear in his voice that he meant it. "Truly. My father's notes said you had an unusually high pain tolerance but this is beyond anything he documented."
I didn't respond. My jaw was swollen anyway and talking felt like chewing glass.
"But I've been thinking," he continued, pulling his chair across the floor, the screech of it sending needles into my skull, "maybe I've been approaching this wrong. Pain clearly doesn't motivate you. You've had a lifetime of practice absorbing it. So let's try something different."
He clicked his fingers and the door opened again.
Two robots walked past me to the side, I heard some confusion sounds, then chains and soon, I saw them drag Zade towards me by his arms and dropped him on the floor in front of me like a sack of meat.
My heart stopped.
He was worse than I'd imagined through the bond. His scales were almost grey, no gold anywhere. His hair was matted with blood and sweat. His clothes were torn and underneath, I could see bruises that hadn't healed because there was no magic here to heal them.
And his tail.
They'd broken it. Not severed, not cleanly, but hacked at the midpoint so it hung at a wrong angle, connected by what looked like threads of muscle and scale. The wound was open, raw, weeping something that wasn't quite blood.
A sound escaped me that I didn't recognise. Not a scream, not a word. Something animalistic that came from the same place my Chi was flickering in.
Baldwin smiled. "There she is."
"Don't touch him," I choked out, my voice wrecked from days of screaming. "Please, Baldwin, whatever you want, don't—"
"The book. How does it work?"
“I don't know, damnit!”
“Alright then.”
I hated the smirk that came with that response with passion.
He nodded to a robot and it reached down and grabbed Zade's tail at the severed point and squeezed.
The sound that came out of Zade wasn't human or dragon kin-like. It was guttural, torn from somewhere deeper than his throat, a howl that vibrated through the floor and into my chair and into my bones. I screamed with him, the bond carrying his agony directly into my body, my eyes seeing worse than he was letting on.
The robot released and Zade collapsed forward, forehead on the cold tile, his body shaking so violently the chains left on him rattled.
Baldwin nodded again and it grabbed the same point and twisted.
Again.
The robot squeezed and Zade howled, actual tears streaming down his face as he begged in the local Drakkonin language, words I understood because they were the same in any language.
Please. Stop. Please.
Again.
The man I am in love with, who swallowed a dragon's soul and fought wars for centuries was sobbing on a tile floor and I was chained to a chair watching it happen and I couldn't take it anymore.
That was my breaking point.
"STOP! I'll tell you whatever you want, just stop, PLEASE!"
Baldwin raised a finger and the robot paused.
"The book," he said simply.
"It's a portal," I gasped, tears and snot mixing on my face. "You touch it with Zhar blood and it opens a gateway between this world and Drakkonia. That's where the dragons are, that's where I went, that's everything I know, please just stop hurting him."
"How do you control where it sends you?"
"I don't know! I landed in the ocean once and then in some palace the other time. There's no way to decide…”
"And the power. The scales, the claws, whatever you did during the fight. How does that work?"
"I don't control it either, it just happens when I'm scared or angry, I can't summon it on command, I swear I'm telling you the truth!"
"Hmm." Baldwin leaned back and looked at me the way his father used to look at his notes. Calculating. "I believe you actually. Which is unfortunate because it means you're less useful than I hoped."
He nodded again.
The robot grabbed Zade's tail at that same point and twisted.
"NO! I TOLD YOU WHAT YOU WANTED TO KNOW!"
“I know,” he muttered simply but his eyes took a new turn of dark, and he kept pressing those damned buttons, pushing his robots into action.
Zade screamed again, louder, his hands clawing at the tile leaving gouges in the concrete.
The robot twisted and Zade made a sound that I will hear for the rest of my life, however long or short that turns out to be. It wasn't a scream anymore. It was a surrender. The sound of a man whose body had decided to stop fighting.
And Baldwin didn't stop.
Something inside me snapped.
Like a wire pulled too tight that finally gave in, releasing everything it was holding back.
I opened my mouth and what came out wasn't a scream, it was a command powered by the old gods.
"STOP!"
The word left my mouth and my mind at the same time and the room went silent.
Not quiet. Silent. Every machine froze. Every robot locked in place. The fluorescent lights stuttered and buzzed.
Baldwin, hand stopped mid-air.
And Zade stopped moving.
His eyes were open but empty. His chest was still. His hands flat on the tile, no longer clawing, no longer anything.
I'd frozen everyone in the building.
Including him.
"No," I whispered, the horror of what I'd just done flooding in faster than the relief. "No, no, ZADE!”