Page 4 of Angel Condemned

Axton

Fucking stupid!A Roulex raked his claws across my gut. I hissed out a breath as pain laced through my abdomen. Blood splattered across the chains that bound me in place.

“Tell me where to find Knox,” the Roulex spat.

“How…the hell…should I know? He’s wherever you bastards put him in this shithole.” My ability surged forward to heal my wounds, but the bastard dragged his nails in the exact same spot, reopening the flesh.

“Dovrikx!” I cursed.

“Tell us and your torment will end.”

“I don’t…know,” I grunted out. “I’ve not seen my stupid brother-in-law…since…since the spring.” When I’d tried to escape this nightmare. It was the second anniversary of my sister’s death by these reptilian monster’s hands. I hadn’t been able to save her. Why were they asking me where Knox was? Had they lost him? I bit back a laugh.

I squeezed my eyes shut. Nor had I been fast enough to stop the Roulex from catching her and Knox. I'd even gotten myself caught up in their net in the process. I slammed my head back against the torture rack. So fucking stupid. I should’ve gone for help as soon as I’d seen the Roulex ship hovering nearby instead of running toward my sister and her husband waving my arms like a lunatic. I hadn’t known about their nets then. Had thought I had enough time to warn them and we could’ve flown back to the temple. Back to the safety of our mountain and the forcefield that protected us against our enemy.

Why had Knox agreed to take her to the beach that day? I ground my teeth. The forcefield was over our mountain home for a reason—to protect us from these bastards that had invaded our world like the swarming pests they were. They wanted the secrets of our healing so they could use it with their soldiers. To destroy us and move onto other worlds and do the same with them. I would never give them the satisfaction, no matter what they did to me. And when they killed my sister, I vowed I wouldn’t rest until each of them were dead. I’d wipe them out of existence.

“Where would Knox go?” The Roulex grasped my hair, twisting until I opened my eyes. “If he escaped, where would he hide?”

“Escape?” I shook my head, the word sounded foreign on my tongue. Was this Roulex torturing me mentally now? Knox was just as damaged as I was.

“We found this,” Roulex jerked off me, nodding to one of his assistants who thrust a makeshift set of wings at me.

The feathers blurred in my vision. “Not Knox.” My brother-in-law was many things, but not clever enough, especially after daily beatings to do something like this. Nah, had to be someone else or a mistake.

“Well, maybe if you lizards had let me see him, I could have more information for you.” Never going to happen. They could fry my balls and I’d give them shit.

Since my escape attempt, they hadn’t even had us on the same floor of this prison. My reward had been a beating so bad that I was in a coma for four days. When I woke up, I was in a new cell with no way to communicate with Knox.

And despite my curses and fighting, they refused to tell me if Knox was alive or dead. I’d thought him dead after months of not seeing or hearing shit about him. He probably thought the same about me.

He escaped. The son of a bitch had done it! I started laughing despite the pain lacing up my side.

“Stop that.” The Roulex punched me in the gut over and over, but I kept laughing. “Tell us where he is.”

A bubble of blood burst up from my mouth. I strained against the chains that held me in place to the vertical gurney. My hands itched to clamp around the bastard’s throat and squeeze until I crushed his throat. “Y-You want to know where Knox is?”

“Yes.” The Roulex panted, backing away from me. His scaled knuckles were covered in my blood.

“He’s free from you fuckers.” Shit, I loved Earth’s curse words. Discovered them in books my sister collected. Celica. I spat in the Roulex’s face.

The Roulex roared. “You will never escape.” He sliced through my flesh, tearing at my wings. “You will never be free.”

I trembled from the fire that whipped through my back. My screams echoed through the walls until I sagged against the restraints. Black feathers and blood dripped onto the stone floor.

“Stop, you can’t kill him. He’s the only one we have left,” a female Roulex snarled.

The room spun, and I closed my eyes. Pain crippled each breath.

“We’ll never get their healing secrets if you kill him.”

She was right. And with all their bought technology, they couldn’t get what the coveted most…a baby to experiment on. Sex was the only way to get one from my kind. None of their fancy gadgets could make that happen and I wasn’t about to give them anything that they wanted. All I wanted was to rip every Roulex here into pieces.

“Get him prepped. I want him ready when the donor arrives,” the Roulex snapped.

I flicked him the double middle finger, another Earth custom I’d learned. He grabbed the tray of supplies next to him, smacking me across the head and everything went black.

I awoke layingon my side in a bigger prison cell than I was used to. Moonlight drifted through the window in one corner. My fingers stretched out toward it. I could almost feel the fresh air from outside. Was I dreaming? Or dead. No, I’d have come up with something better than a dank prison cell even though it did have a window. I hadn’t seen the sky in months.

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