Page 108 of Reaper's Ruin
“Now you’re understanding, girl.”
“But my mother,” I pressed, needing to know. “She was innocent in all this. She never knew, did she?”
“She wasn’t part of the plan,” he said dismissively. “But she saw me, and I couldn’t take any chances. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
My hands trembled with rage, with grief, with the cosmic unfairness of it all. “You murdered her—murdered me—for a game I never even knew I was playing.” I slammed my fist against the chair, my control shattering. “You stole everything from me!”
“Don’t blame me. Blame your mother. If she’d have kept her legs shut instead of spreading them for some stranger when Aric came to your land, you wouldn’t be in this mess.” Then his gaze flicked to Rhyker, his shirt torn from our earlier interlude, and his eyebrow raised. “Though it looks like being a whore runs in the family. It seems you spread your legs just as easily.”
I recoiled as if he’d slapped me. The words hung in the air for one frozen heartbeat.
I never saw Rhyker move. One moment he was standing beside me, rigid with fury; the next, his dagger was buried in Lord Cassius’s chest.
With one sharp stab, and then a slice upward, he split his chest open.
And then, as Cassius gasped and choked on blood, Rhyker reached forward, sliding his hand into the hole, grasping the still-beating heart within.
Lord Cassius made a strangled sound, his eyes bulging with shock and agony as Rhyker leaned close to him, voice dropping to a lethal whisper.
“This is for her.”
With a sickening crunch and a wet tearing sound, Rhyker ripped out Lord Cassius’s heart. Blood sprayed across the expensive carpet, across Rhyker’s chest, a few drops spattering my dress. Lord Cassius convulsed, a gurgling noise escaping his lips as Rhyker held the organ before his eyes in the final moments of his life.
“When you arrive in the fires below where you’re going... tell them Death sent you,” Rhyker said, crushing the heart in his fist as Lord Cassius’s eyes went blank, his body slumping forward, lifeless—blood still dripping from the gaping hole in his chest.
I should have been horrified. I should have recoiled from the brutality, the savagery of what I’d just witnessed. But as I stood there, watching the life drain from the man who had murdered me and my mother, who had mocked our deaths and sullied our memories, I felt only a fierce, primal satisfaction.
But then, suddenly his soul pulled out from his lifeless corpse.
I gasped as he stood up, a mirror copy of himself now spinning around, confused. He froze when he looked down at his mangled body, eyes wide in disbelief as he took a staggering step back.
“What the—what is this?” he choked, staring at his own body like it couldn’t possibly be real. “No. No, thisisn’t—”
“Not so fun seeing your own corpse, is it?” I said coldly, my voice laced with the sharp edge of vengeance.
He turned toward me, eyes widening. “You—you can see me—”
“I can see you because I’m a ghost, thanks to you. And he can see you because he’s literally Death. And now, you’re dead too.”
He stood staring at his body, and I couldn’t help but feel a sense of joy in knowing he experienced now what he’d put me through. But then, suddenly, the ground beneath him trembled, cracked, and then ripped open with a deafening roar.
Red light surged from the chasm below. Smoke curled upward—thick and stinking of sulfur and ash—followed by clawed shadows that slithered toward the ghost of Lord Cassius like they’d been waiting for him.
“No,” he whispered. “No, this isn’t—this isn’t supposed to happen!”
“Oh, I think it is,” Rhyker growled, voice low and lethal.
The shadows struck.
They wrapped around Cassius’s ghost like chains, dragging him toward the gaping tear in the floor as he thrashed and screamed.
“HELP ME!” he shrieked, reaching out toward us. “PLEASE! HELP ME!”
But I didn’t move.
“You got exactly what you earned,” I said softly. “Enjoy your endless afterlife below.”
And with one final, earsplitting shriek, his soul was ripped downward, dragged into the chasm that snapped shut behind him with a sound like a slamming door.
