Page 139 of Owned

The Sage said nothing, and I tightened my hold.

“Why don’t we make him bleed— The grimoire would give us what we want, even if he doesn’t want to.” Bastian stared into the man’s frightened eyes.

The silence stretched, then broke all at once. “Wait!” the prisoner shrieked, the word a raw, panicked breath. “Wait, please, I—”

“You what?” Valen snapped.

The prisoner’s body arched as I clenched my fist.

“I don’t know...” he wheezed.

“Guess we’re killing him, then.” Bastian pulled the dagger from the sheath at his hip and spun it in his hand. “Slow or fast?”

Valen gave me a look. He wasn’t giving up yet.

We had been at it for hours and had gotten nowhere. The drug, the magic. It had all worn him to a husk.

He’d crack eventually.

He had to.

Valen dragged his fingers through the sweat that ran down the Sage’s cheek. “Who are you protecting?” he asked.

Bastian laughed, and even I could taste the cruelty in it. “What’s left to protect? Lucian won’t leave any of you fucks alive after this.”

He was right, but I also knew that my brothers and I wouldn’t stop until everyone involved had paid the price for what had been done.

Avril wasours.

Valen’s pale blue magic coiled around the Sage’s throat and crept over his face before winding into his flared nostrils.

“Make it easy on yourself,” he said. “Give us what we want and you’ll set you free— No more pain. No more fear—”

He turned away and threw his hands in the air. “You’re so boring,” Bastian groaned. He turned away and threw his hands in the air.

Valen didn’t pay attention to Bastian’s outburst. His fingers flexed in the air as his magic probed deeper into the Sage’s skull.

“I’ll get it out of you, the hard way—or the easy way.”

The Sage’s eyes rolled back in his head and a tendril of pale blue smoke from Valen’s magic curled up from the man’s tear duct.

He let out a strangled groan, a shuddering, awful sound that echoed off the stone walls.

“The... Spire,” he said, and the words broke apart in his mouth. “Let me—”

A slow grin spread across my face and I opened my hand. The tentacles of green smoke that had held him suspended in the air dissipated, and the man collapsed to the floor in a groaning heap.

“Free— Set me—”

Valen’s chin lifted. He twisted his hand in a sharp motion and let his power break what was left of the fallen Sage.

Fast and final.

We stood there, staring down at the corpse.

Valen spoke first. “We need to move.”

I looked at him, then at Bastian.

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