Page 66 of Caress of Fire
And Devan screamed as her broken heart shattered into a million pieces.
* * *
Marielle stood in the doorway,wringing her hands so hard her fingernails left bloody traces in her palms, on the backs of her hands, everywhere they trailed. Dr. Ylco and a young Delradon nurse worked on Devan like bees, only speaking in monosyllables, frowns on their faces as they cut through stained, stinking clothes to reveal butchered flesh and oozing pus.
Devan lay on his stomach on the steel table, his maimed back exposed to the air, the stench of his unwashed, diseased body filling the aseptic air like a cloud of death. Then, when he lay completely naked, Dr. Ylco asked the nurse for an instrument Marielle had no knowledge of. He hovered just above Devan’s body, then paused.
His crimson eyes met hers, then slid over to Fedryc’s silently forbidding form.
“This will not be pleasant.” Dr. Ylco’s eyes held a dark promise. “I need to cleanse the wounds deeply. I can’t administer a sedative in his state, it’s too dangerous. He could slip too far into darkness to come back.”
Marielle’s throat closed up at the words and a whimper escaped her lips.
“Come.” Fedryc put a hand on her shoulder but removed it when she shrugged it away. “Be reasonable! You need to leave. There is nothing you can do for him now.”
“I’m not leaving his side!” Marielle turned to see Fedryc’s eyes shining with anger. “I left him once, and look where he is now!”
“I indulged you for far too long!” Fedryc’s voice rose. “You’ve disobeyed me enough for a lifetime today!”
“Disobeyed you? You’re mistaking me for one of your subjects.” Marielle saw the signs that Fedryc was losing his grip on his temper—the way the vein at his temple pulsed with a steady beat, the way his pupils elongated to reveal the beast inside—but she didn’t care. Her heart was there, lying on the steel table, about to be ripped open again, and she wasn’t leaving. “I don’t have to obey you.”
“Don’t make me force you out of this room.” His voice had changed, more like a growl than a man’s. “I will carry you back to our apartments if I need to.”
“I obeyed you once before,” Marielle accused him, her pain flooding over, spilling like a flood, devastating everything in its wake. “If I hadn’t, my brother wouldn’t be lying there, fighting for his life. You should have let me go. This is on you.”
Fedryc’s face slackened like strings had snapped and his eyes widened. Guilt and pain mixed in Marielle as she regretted the cruelty of her words. But a small part of her knew they were true. Fedryc had cared too much to let her leave, to allow her to be in danger, and now Devan was paying the price.
And she was just a shell of the woman she had been before descending into that dark, evil hole in the ground.
“Is this really what you think?” His voice, flayed and raw, scalded her like a burning iron. “That I should have let you leave? That my love for you isn’t precious enough?”
Marielle’s ribs shrank and pierced her heart as pain shot through her. Because he was right. She wouldn’t have left, couldn’t have left a long time ago. She was as much a prisoner of her love for Fedryc as she was of the Knat-Kanassis who surrounded her life with hatred and violence.
But her love for Devan ran just as deep and so did the pain that made her cruel.
Her eyes closed as memories spilled over into her mind.
A small boy, hair red as a flame, his face twisted with tears, came running. Marielle sighed, exasperation and affection welling in her wary mind as Devan sat in front of her, his tiny knee exposed, blood running in a thin trickle down his leg.
“Oh, no!” Marielle feigned horror. “This is a serious wound. I think we’ll have to amputate.”
“No!” Devan’s mouth curved up and his gray eyes, shining with tears, filled with humor. “That’s silly. It’s just a scratch!”
“Well, you seem to be in a lot of pain.” Marielle lifted her brows and wiped the tiny cut clean with a rag, then blew on it. It had already stopped bleeding. “Better cut the whole leg off, I say!”
“Stop kidding!” But Devan jumped from his chair and his scrawny arms wrapped around her neck. A noisy kiss landed on her cheek and Marielle pushed him back, gray eyes locking with gray eyes.
“Now, you have to be more careful. I don’t want you running around with Tommen and his friend. They’re up to no good.”
Devan looked down stubbornly. “But they’ll make fun of me if I don’t.”
“Then you send him over to me.” Her voice was deadly serious, and when Devan looked up, there was heartbreaking trust on his young features.
“Okay.”
“Now, go do your homework before I go to work. Then you’ll go straight to bed, and don’t you go out before I come back.”
Devan pouted, but when he turned around and rummaged in the small desk for his meager school supplies—supplies she had bought with entire nights of extra work in the sewing factory—a smile stretched his lips.
