Page 7 of The Demigod

Another scream had me looking away from the window and over toward the far side of the room.

There, cast mostly in shadow, another figure rattled their chains, their cries like that of a dying animal as three dark figures half-blocked him from view.

Clearly, they were doing something to him. Something terrible to be eliciting those sounds.

A shadow seemed to move out of nowhere, creeping closer.

And I could have sworn I heard one soft, whispered word amongst all of the screams.

“Sleep.”

Then, I shit you not, the man went from pulling against his chains and howling in pain… to dead asleep in seconds.

What the fuck was that?

Had he just hit his limit?

People could only endure so much pain. There was a real trick to torture—to inflict as much as you could while also just toying with the threshold, so they didn’t slip into the blissful peace of sleep.

But something didn’t sit right, didn’t feel right.

I hadn’t imagined that voice, damnit.

“It’s no fun now,” one of the figures declared.

“We will come back later,” another agreed.

Then as a group, they moved, their feet sliding against stone stairs before the door above groaned.

Then… nothing.

Silence, save for the chattering of my teeth from the cold and the deep breathing of the sleeping man.

That same shadow I’d seen before seemed to shift again. It crept across the wall, making its way directly across from me.

Then pausing.

Before approaching.

Not a shadow.

Shadows couldn’t move across the center of the room, couldn’t stalk toward you like a predator approaching prey.

Then it hit me.

“Sleep.”

This shadow was the source of that voice, had been the mercy that made the man pass out. Had it also been the reason I’d been so deeply unconscious?

I forced life into my feet, made them take my weight. Ignoring the way blood rushed to my arms as the strain of my body weight lifted, the pins and needles screaming through my muscles, I glared at the shadow as it moved right in front of me, stopping just a few feet away.

Then, right before my eyes, like a cloak shrugging off someone’s frame, the shadow fell away. In its place, a woman.

Not just any woman.

A fucking smokeshow of a woman.

Really, almost all human women I came across were hot as shit in their own unique ways. This one, though? She was the kind of beautiful you only saw on screen, in ads, on canvases.

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