Page 15 of Elven Lies

“I didn’t,” she whispered back. “Just a lucky guess.”

Worst of all, that was the absolute truth.

Walking into this manufactured meeting, Rebecca could count on nothing but blind luck to steer them both down the right path. Whether Maxwell suspected it, she didn’t want to confirm for him that blind luck wasn’t usually how she operated.

Today, though, it was her only option. Even with all her previous knowledge of Kordus Harkennr and how he operated.

Maxwell couldn’t know about any of that, either. Not just yet.

Every move she made from here on out would, by necessity, be a lucky guess if they wanted any chance of surviving a face-to-face with the sadistic psychopath running this horrifying operation.

Rebecca just hoped her luck would hold until she and Maxwell were free of this place—with Nyx—and even that still wasn’t certain.

5

The dwarf led them down the labyrinthine hallways of the Old Joliet Prison as if giving a public tour of a brand-new hospital wing or a real human prison housing real human prisoners.

Rebecca couldn’t have imagined a more heart-rending scenario if she’d tried.

By comparison, the worn hallways illuminated by intermittent bursts of flickering lights hanging from the ceiling—obviously augmented to run power through the building but not at any stable rate of modern electricity—were quiet and peaceful compared to the horrid sounds spilling toward them from behind every closed door on either side of the hall.

Shrieks and bellows in hundreds of different voices rose in a horrendously macabre chorus, each piling on top of the next before others were instantly snuffed out or died into choking groans. Wordless pleas for mercy. Mindless screams of denial. Terrorized shrieks rejecting what would be done to these poorabducted souls captured and used and spent for Harkennr’s dark aims.

The crackle of augmented machinery powered by both electricity and magic filled the air with a constant hum of static, the odor of hot metal and blood, and the stink of terror. Different-colored lights flickered across the hall from beneath every closed door they passed, adding to the mind-numbing surrealism of the entire experience.

All while Rebecca and Maxwell followed their willing guide as the dwarf led them ever forward through the maze of the old prison’s ground floor, as if everything was as it should be.

All at Kordus Harkennr’s behest.

Rebecca and Maxwell were forced to suffer the horrors of it in silence, powerless to do anything about it.

She hadn’t felt this helpless in ages, and even then, she’d only experienced the sensation a handful of times before swearing she would never allow the feeling to return.

Back then, though, she hadn’t figured a surprise invitation into Harkennr’s experimental base of operations into her own personal promises centuries ago. Now here they were.

After the first few minutes, their footsteps barely registered beneath the constant screaming and the buzz of magic and machinery causing so much visceral agony and despair.

To make matters worse, Rebecca also felt Maxwell’s horror, outrage, and growing misery growing by the second. His jaw clenched so tightly, she imagined more than once that she could feel the pain of it in her own jaw as they walked, his steps so rigid and unyielding that she almost turned toward him multiple times to remind him of their end game here.

To remind him not to break down beneath the heart-rending horror of all the atrocities carried out around them with no concern for the magicals imprisoned within these walls.

But the shifter held true to his word.

She had to keep reminding herself of that. If he’d lost control of himself, she would have known it by now. She would have felt him breaking beside her, as surely as she would have felt herself breaking, were she made of weaker stuff.

Maxwell’s silver eyes pulsed frantically as he walked at Rebecca’s side, his hands clasped so tightly behind his back, she thought she saw them trembling from the corner of her eye. Just like she felt his outrage and desire to rain hell on this entire vulgar operation before attempting to put these poor prisoners out of their misery.

If his control faltered, Rebecca was sure she would feel that change—if he gave in to the pressure of hearing so much excruciating agony, smelling so much fear and hopelessness, and damn near tasting the horrid deaths that awaited every victim after the rest of their pitiful lives were spent here in this place.

So many people reduced to nothing more than numbers and data and results.

Despite how much it affected her, Rebecca could only imagine how much worse it was for Maxwell and his shifter’s senses picking up every minute detail with a hundred times more clarity.

With no privacy and no opportunity to speak without being overheard, she relied solely on the sensations oozing off her Head of Security and nearly bowling her over with their veracity.

Months ago—even a little over a week ago—she would have called herself an idiot for thinking she could rely onfeelingswith any measure of accuracy. Especially when those unignorable emotions and urges seeping into her weren’t even hers in the first place.

But after everything she and Maxwell had already been through together in the last few weeks, Rebecca had stopped questioning the possibility or the reality of it. She didn’t knowhow the Blue Hells it was possible, though understanding the cause didn’t change the fact that it was very real. Nor would knowing have been an advantage in helping Maxwell through this.

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