Page 212 of The Harbinger

Pebbles bit into my knees as I rolled, my hands scraped. I’d come back to square one. The moment I’d met Sacha, Ivan had treated me with the same unequivocal hate as this man did. Only this man had a good reason too.

The man picked me up from the ground and shoved me forward. Darkness swallowed my vision, and I stumbled forward until I crashed into iron bars.

Dust and earth sprinkled over my head from the roof. Bright lights flashed overhead, blinding me momentarily as I squinted to see. As the lights focused, my heart sank.

There, in front of me, was a cell. A small, cramped space that was barely big enough to stretch out in. The walls were made of cold, rough concrete, and the air was thick with the stench of mildew. The only bed was a tattered blanket that lay haphazardly on the concrete floor.

To the left was a large open space with straight and narrow stacks of human skulls. My stomach bottomed out, but before I could react, Mr. Hulk opened the iron door, and shoved me inside my new prison, my new version of Hell. My hated life came full circle, and I was once again a prisoner of a madman.

He twisted the lock, and the men chuckled as I screamed, my fingers tight around the bars. They walked up the stairs, the creaking iron gate at the top, finalizing my fate.

“Don’t leave me!” I screamed until my voice grew hoarse, and my knees gave out beneath me.

The darkness was so complete that I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face, but I still searched the area, my eyes darting from one abyssal corner to the next.

“Sacha!” I cried out, my pathetic whimpers swallowed up by the earthen walls outside my cage. The silence was absolute, broken only by the sound of my ragged breathing and my beating heart.

I fell to my knees as searing pain shot up my ankle. Frantically, I searched the darkness until my fingertips found the rough cement wall. Leaning against it, I drew my knees to my chest and wept, the walls of my prison suffocating me with their cold isolation

Chapter 57

Mia

Thedarknesswasall-encompassing,a black hole of despair that threatened to swallow me whole. My stomach growled with hunger, and my throat burned with thirst. Left alone and forgotten, I had no way of knowing what had become of Sacha.

Stale air invaded my lungs, thick with the stench of sewage.

Had Nikolai been grooming me for this very moment down in the basement? Subjecting me to torture and deprivation, all in preparation for this inevitable outcome? Or was this just the rotten luck that had plagued me since as far back as I could remember?

My feet scuffed against the floor, the heels I had abandoned for what felt like weeks ago no longer a hindrance. I had stepped in my own filth while searching for the restroom in the corner, and now the stench permeated every inch of the room.

Nikolai was a cruel man, but even he had never subjected me to this level of sensory deprivation. He had always given me a sliver of light or a glimpse of the moon, allowing me to mark the passing days. Perhaps that was his own twisted form of torture, forcing me to witness the slow crawl of time without any hope for a better tomorrow.

In this personal hell, days and nights blended. I slept when I could, which wasn’t often. My stomach gnawed at itself with hunger, but that wasn’t the worst of it. It was the dryness of my tongue, the cracks that formed each time I muttered a prayer to whoever was listening. I’d lap at the blood on my cracked lips just to calm my overbearing thirst.

He had turned me into an animal, sharpening my senses to overdrive. The slightest scuttle of tiny legs made my heart race. Once, I woke from a nap to feel something crawling across my chest, down my cleavage. I clawed at my clothes and skin, screaming as the thing retreated up the way it came.

And then there were the human skulls in the large space that made up the catacombs. I’d thanked the darkness for its blessing. For it spared me from having to look upon the petrified faces of those poor souls

Scratch.

I stiffened and cocked my ear towards the noise.

A rock scraped against metal, followed by a blade of light slicing through the air and landed against the back wall. I cried out, shielding my eyes with my arm from what I desperately craved.

Footsteps echoed from the cemented steps. Ruslan and his two burly guards. “Oh good, you’re still alive,” he said with a rumbling voice, almost foreign to my ears.

I hobbled to the bars, my sore ankle throbbing as I clung to them. “Ruslan, I had nothing to do with it.”

“The blood on your hands says otherwise.” He tossed a water bottle close to the bars. “Do you think I would believe you? You’re anobodywho seduced my son.”

I scrambled to the floor, reaching for it.

“He killed for you, and look where it’s got him.” His boot slammed down on my hand, snapping my finger back with an unmistakable crack. I screamed, my cheeks dry despite the agony.

“You don’t deserve anything I give you,” he spat, lifting his foot. “But what good would a dead sacrifice be?”

I pulled my hand away and clutched my deformed finger to my chest, begging. “You… you can’t sacrifice me.” I sucked in a ragged breath, my lips sticking to my teeth. “I’m not part of your church and don’t carry the gene.”

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