*Adrik*
Armando’s eyes got wider as he took in the sight before him. Stephen was intimidating in his own right when his bloodlust took over. Then you add in me and I’m surprised Armando didn’t piss himself. I had been keeping him restrained, mostly just because I still had moments where I couldn’t get the image of Sephie with her wrists tied behind her out of my head and I wanted him to know that discomfort as long as possible.
I would give him periodic breaks from it. Just when he got used to not being restrained, that’s when I’d have him tied to the chair again for days on end. His memory had never been the best. I wanted to make sure he could easily remember the feeling.
Now, however, he was on a break. He was free to move away from us, but his fear kept him firmly in place. He was frozen in the chair, his eyes shifting nervously from me to Stephen and back again. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
Stephen was staying remarkably calm, despite struggling with everything Sephie had just given him. He walked closer to Armando. “Do you want to know what’s about to happen?” he asked. Anytime Stephen would use psychology as a weapon, his voice got a certain tone to it. Almost like he was mocking the person, but in the most sinister way possible.
Armando kept looking between me and Stephen, which caused Stephen to glance back at me. “Oh, I know what you want to know first. You want to know why his eyes are black. Allow me to explain. You see, you made a deal with a demon. There’s a very slight chance you might not have known you did, as intelligence was never your strongest attribute, but it was ultimately because you’re so weak that you couldn’t fight off the evil. Either way, you have a demon that’s been riding you for years.” Armando kept looking at me while Stephen was talking. His eyes were pleading with me to save him as some part of him realized what was about to happen.
Stephen continued, “now you shouldn’t feel too bad about being such weak sauce that a demon got in. Happens to lots of people. Happened to Boss, as a matter of fact. The only difference is, Boss made his demon work for him. Which makes him infinitely more powerful than you’ll ever be.” Stephen paused to let Armando comprehend what he’d just said. “See, your soul tried to take the easy way out of life. It tried to skip ahead quite a few levels, but it did so in the most evil way possible. It meant that innocent people had to die, which can’t go unpunished. That’s where I come in. My job is to make sure your soul spends the rest of your very long life learning to never, ever do that again. I’m going to make sure neither one of you leave that body until that body dies from very, very old age.”
As Stephen was talking, I was watching Armando watching me. I couldn’t see his demon, but I knew it was there. I could feel it. I could feel when it took over and stepped forward. Armando’s eyes went black as well. If it caught Stephen off-guard, he didn’t show it. Armando laughed. He looked at Stephen, his expression dripping with hatred. “You’re not strong enough to do that,” he said. “You don’t have enough power to do that to me. You have no idea who I am.”
Stephen was quiet for a minute, like he was having second thoughts. He crossed his arms across his chest, looking at Armando. He walked right in front of him, bending down so he was eye-level to him, saying, “why do you think I brought him too, dumbass?”
When Armando realized the full meaning of what Stephen had just said, he tried to quickly get away from Stephen. Stephen anticipated it and caught Armando by the throat, throwing him back down in the chair. “Did I say you could leave?” he asked, his anger now clearly visible. Armando coughed a few times, trying to weigh his options.
Stephen stepped back from Armando. He glanced quickly at me, then looked back at Armando. “Just as a courtesy, I’m going to give you something to keep you in your seat before we get started,” he said. I knew he was asking for my anger. I was more than happy to provide it.
Sephie had explained how she pushed her anger to Andrei and Misha when they fought Vitaliy’s guys. She was right. It was more difficult to send to anyone other than her. My anger was a complete raging inferno but I saw Stephen’s sly grin turn up one side of his mouth when he felt it.
I watched as Armando’s eyes changed back to normal and a look of horror came over his face. He was seeing something I couldn’t see. I wasn’t sure if Stephen could see it or not, but much like Stephen’s sisters, Armando was frozen in place. His hands gripped the arms of the chair he was in, like he was on the edge of a cliff trying to save himself. His knuckles turned white. Every muscle in his body tensed as he was trying to not see what was being shown to him.
Stephen took a deep breath, looking back to me once more. “That was just the warm-up. Keep it coming. It’s clearly working,” he said.
I cranked up the inferno as high as it would go and concentrated on pushing it all to Stephen. I always wondered if there was a limit to my anger. Would I ever hit the end of it? Would it run out? Judging by what I was feeling at the moment, that answer was very clearly no. The more I concentrated on keeping my anger as high as possible, the more it responded and the hotter it burned.
Stephen turned back to Armando. One last time, we saw his eyes go black as his demon tried to think of a way out, but his body wasn’t responding to its demands. There was already a clear disconnect between Armando’s soul and his body. The demon was powerless. Stephen hit him with more memories from Sephie and Armando let out a blood-curdling scream. It was the last sound he made.
As Stephen gave everything back to Armando that he’d done to Sephie, I could clearly see the light behind his eyes go out. There was nobody home any longer.
Stephen turned back to me after a few moments. “It’s done,” he said, almost like he was surprised it had worked.
Surprisingly, my anger dissipated easily. Almost instantly, even. Stephen caught my look of surprise and laughed. “I’m as surprised as you that all that went away so quickly,” he said. “You’ve never been so angry before. I could’ve broken ten Armando’s and you still would’ve had plenty leftover.”
“Yeah, that was different,” I said. “What about you? You good? You gave it all to him? Nothing leftover?”
He looked at me, with wide eyes. He stepped closer so he could talk quietly. Before he spoke he tapped his temple, like he was asking if anyone else was listening in. “Just us,” I said.
“Boss, I don’t know how she’s been walking around with all of that. She gave me everything from the attack on her and Misha, to the ball, to the first kidnapping attempt, and then everything from the second. Just the pain alone from when she was hurt was enough to break him, not to mention everything she felt on top of that. Much like your anger, I could’ve broken ten Armando’s and still had leftover. He’s never getting away from all of that for the rest of his days,” he said, somewhat satisfied.
I put my hand on his shoulder, pushing him toward the door. “You did good, kid. I’m proud of you.”
As he opened the door, he said, “you know, I’m proud of me too. I can finally use my hatred for people to do some good in this world.”
Sephie, who still had her face hidden in Ivan’s chest heard him and giggled. She didn’t turn around immediately and now that my anger had dissipated, I could feel her emotional turmoil. Ivan kept his arms around her, lightly rubbing her back with his thumbs.
“How did it go?” Andrei asked.
“Not as violently as I was expecting. His demon underestimated me, so there wasn’t as much fighting back as I was hoping for, which is slightly disappointing,” Stephen said.
Sephie sighed and went to turn around, which made Ivan loosen his grip on her. She still looked troubled, but she was curious. “It worked to use Adrik?” she asked.
“Yeah, he’s all the battery I would ever need. Dude’s got fire for days,” he said. As he answered her, I was hit with her warmth. Her smile stretched across her face and she walked quickly to me.
“It was harder to send it to him versus you at first, but it worked. It got easier the longer I did it,” I said, kissing her temple.
“He also turned it off immediately when we were done. Not gonna lie, I was worried about that in the moment. I’ve never seen him so angry and be able to turn it off like that,” Stephen said.
Sephie wrapped her arms around my waist. “You’re finally learning how useful of a tool it is,” she said as she hid her face in my shoulder.
I looked at Ivan, asking, “she didn’t hear anything?” He shook his head no at the same time that she did. “Come. Let us be gone from this place,” I said, pulling Sephie with me.