Chapter 137 Close Enough
The thirst was no longer a dull ache; it was a physical texture in my throat. It felt like swallowing crushed glass and dry sand.
I lay curled on my side against the stiff velvet cushion in the center of the gilded cage. The heavy iron shackles binding my wrists rested on the floor, the short, rusted chain digging into my collarbone. The jaundiced light of the Throne Room remained unchanged, a perpetual, sickly twilight that made it impossible to tell if it was day or night. The air smelled of stale dust, rotting orchids, and my own dried blood.
I didn't move. Moving wasted energy, and I had none left to spare.
I kept my eyes closed, focusing all my remaining strength inward, pressing my mental hands against the invisible tether in my chest.
For hours, the blood-bond had been a terrifying, muddy fog. Klaus was starving. The Emperor’s decree of no blood and no water in the Abyssal Dungeon was dragging him down into a feral abyss. I could feel the violent, chaotic hunger clawing at the edges of his mind, a dark, churning storm that threatened to swallow his humanity whole.
Then, the fog shattered.
It didn't clear; it was violently ripped apart by a blinding, white-hot spike of pure agony.
My spine arched off the velvet cushion. A harsh, breathless gasp tore through my cracked lips. I slammed my chained hands over my mouth, biting down hard on my own knuckles to keep from screaming.
The pain didn't belong to me. It bled through the tether, flooding my nervous system with catastrophic force.
It felt like a line of liquid fire unzipping across my back. The phantom sensation was so vivid, so brutally real, that I actually felt the wet tear of flesh parting.
Klaus, I screamed in my mind, the thought fracturing under the weight of his pain.
A second strike hit.
My body convulsed against the floor of the cage. The heavy iron chain connecting my wrists clattered loudly against the gold bars. I tasted fresh copper as my teeth broke the skin of my knuckles.
It was silver. They were using silver.
I could feel the sickening, corrosive burn of the metal reacting with his immortal blood. The Emperor had made good on his threat. He had sent Commander Thorne’s replacement down into the dark, and the interrogation had begun.
Another strike. This one deeper, tearing through the muscle of his left shoulder.
I curled into a tight, trembling ball, sobbing into my hands. The physical pain was unbearable, but Klaus’s reaction was what truly broke me.
He didn't scream. Through the bond, I felt the massive, iron-clad walls of his discipline slamming down. He was burying the agony deep in his core, locking his jaw so tightly I felt the phantom pressure in my own teeth. He was trying to shield me. Even while a torturer flayed the skin from his back, his only conscious effort was to dampen the tether, trying to spare me the echo of his suffering.
Stop, I pushed back, forcing a wave of desperate, stubborn warmth down the connection. Don't shut me out. Share it. Give it to me, Klaus.
He fought me. A dark, heavy wave of refusal washed back up the line. He wanted to carry it alone.
I said give it to me! I demanded, throwing the full weight of the Siren’s authority into the thought.
The resistance cracked. The floodgates opened, and the raw, unfiltered agony crashed into me. I writhed on the floor of the cage, panting, sweating, riding out the brutal, rhythmic strikes of the silver-laced whip. I divided the pain, taking half of the burden onto my own shoulders.
I don't know how long it lasted. In the dark, time is measured only in heartbeats and blood drops.
Eventually, the striking stopped.
The bond settled into a deep, throbbing ache. I felt the freezing, damp air of the dungeon hitting his open wounds. I felt the heavy drag of the iron chains as he slumped forward, hanging completely suspended by his wrists from the weeping stone wall. He was barely conscious.
I lay on the velvet cushion, my chest heaving, my entire body slick with cold sweat. My black silk dress clung to me, heavy and suffocating.
The heavy obsidian doors of the Throne Room groaned.
The sound dragged me back to my immediate reality. I forced my eyes open, blinking through the stinging sweat. I grabbed the cold gold bars and hauled myself up to a sitting position, my arms trembling violently under the weight of the shackles.
The Emperor walked down the center aisle.
His midnight-green robes whispered against the polished black marble. He walked with that slow, arrogant glide, his blind, milky eyes staring straight ahead.
Beside him walked a vampire I had never seen before.