Page 23 of The Illuminated
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Quit being so theatrical. We’re almost there.” But he didn’t look annoyed. With the way his eyes were swimming with desire, his body relaxed, his lips turned up and slightly parted… he was in ecstasy.
The rows and rows of cells were endless, stretching out in multiple directions like a labyrinth. A guard pushed open a heavy door at the end a long stretch, and Lucius all but shoved me inside. The door slammed shut behind us, but it did little to block out the energy that was slowly making me lose my grip on sanity. I sucked in a breath, and the dark spots in my vision dissipated.
In the corner a man hugged his knees and rocked back and forth. He was mumbling words that didn’t sound like English, his tousled dirty blond hair glued to his head in a layer of grime and sweat. His face was swollen, bloody and bruised, his black clothes shredded. At the sight of us he crawled forward, and I took a quick step away, my back hitting the door.
Oh, Goddess.
Nathaniel.
“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” Lucius asked, his lips curling. “To be rid of Nathaniel? For him to pay for what he did to you?”
My face was wet with tears as I studied what the man who wanted me dead had become—the man who violated me and bragged to all the guards about how high my energy got him. It took everything I had to stay upright and not sink into the floor, not to disappear into the earth and never come back. Lucius’s face was hazy as if we were underwater, and I could’ve sworn the walls around us were creeping closer.
“Please, my Lord, I will do anything,” Nathaniel begged, and I could feel that his once powerful dark energy had been snuffed out like a candle’s flame. His ankles were chained with a metal that felt spelled, just like the handcuffs the city official had put on Seraphina. They suppressed magick.
“Don’t you want to have a go at him?” Lucius asked, his features switching from amusement to anger at the drop of the dime as he glanced back at me. “What iswrong with you?”
His distorted voice barely made it through the haze of screams and the swell of tortured energy that was drowning me, squeezing out all the light and magick from my flesh until I was empty. As empty as a shell or a husk or a human skeleton.
And I suddenly knew that there was nothing left for me in Aradia but suffering, and there was no way out. There was no hidden plan or purpose, and I was no chosen one. It was a mass delusion. We’d lost our world and it was never coming back. Its magick and splendor had been eradicated by Lucius’s darkness. He’d won.
“How’s Daelon? You filthy heretic cunt,” Nathaniel spat.
Daelon was with Renata, I remembered. He was made for her. That’s what Lucius had said. They’d be fine without me—they could go back to playing their kinky games. I doubted he ever loved me at all. I had just been something new to play with, something different from the monotony of life in the castle. We’d just been caught up in the mass hysteria, but we both knew there was no future for us.
There was no future for any of us. There was nothing but suffering. And the nothingness clawed through me like a parasite. Where there was once purpose and hope, there was now existential meaninglessness, and the truth of it was too much to bear.
I was nothing—no one—but a vessel for this dungeon’s immense pain and despair.
“May I have a knife?” I heard myself ask.
Lucius grinned, chanting something into his palm. A blade took shape from the void, curved and shiny with a black hilt.
I took it from him in one hand and raised the other, flipping it over to expose the underside of my wrist. I cut deep, watching the red spill from my skin like a grotesque river I needed to carry me away.
Lucius just stood there for a moment, watching me in a mix of shock and excitement. He licked his lips, a craze in his eyes that he seemed to wrestle with for a moment before walking slowly to me.
“Now, Áine,” he said, very calmly. “What the bloody hell are you doing?”
But his voice was underwater now too, and I wondered if this had all been a bad dream, and I would wake up in my New York City apartment where I belonged.
I couldn’t live under the weight of this never-ending emptiness any longer. I darted away from the King, and I sliced open my other wrist before he tore the blade from my grasp.
“Please,” I begged as I tried to wrestle free from his arms. “Let me go. I can’t be here anymore.”
Nathaniel began to cackle, muttering indecipherable nonsense between each guffaw.
“You bringdramaticto a whole new level,” Lucius growled. He cursed, holding onto both my wrists that were now slick with blood. “Fuck. You have no idea the restraint it will take to save you. Your pain feels the best of all.”
I wailed, begging him not to save me.Let me go, let me go, let me go.
The whole of the dungeons wailed with me, and I could hear our collective cries rip through the fabric of this hell and open it up like a deep, gaping wound.
“Make it stop,” I heard someone scream.
“Just let me die,” I cried. I couldn’t see anymore, and I wondered idly if I’d gone blind. My eyes were wet and my face was wet and my wrists were wet and we were all drowning. I cocooned in the water like it was an embryotic sac, and I closed the whole world out. This realm and all the rest.
“She’s an energy reader, Lucius!” Daelon yelled. “How could you think it was safe to bring her to a place like that?”
