Page 31 of Craving Their Venom
A large, clawed hand clamps over my mouth, stifling my scream before it can even form. An arm like a band of iron wraps around my waist, lifting me from my feet as if I weigh nothing. I struggle, my fists beating uselessly against a chest as hard as stone. I kick and twist, but it is like fighting a rockslide. My human strength is a pathetic joke against their raw, reptilian power.
The second naga brings a cloth to my face. The scent is cloying, sickly sweet. I hold my breath, my lungs burning, my vision beginning to swim with black spots. But I cannot hold it forever. My body betrays me. I gasp, a desperate, shuddering intake of air, and the sweet, cloying poison floods my senses.
My limbs go heavy, my struggles weakening. The world dissolves into a blurry, tilting mess of green and black. My last, coherent thought is of the three figures on the balcony. The Prince. The General. The Mystic. My protectors. My owners. My captors.
The darkness swallows me whole, and as I fall, I feel a single, final, agonizing pang of abandonment. The garden is silent once more. The cage is empty. And the heart of that prophecy has just been stolen.
21
VAROS
The truce is a fragile, ugly thing. A three-headed serpent, each head turned inward, ready to strike at the others. We stand on my balcony, Zahir a pillar of simmering crimson violence, Kaelen a river of silent, silver-blue sorrow, and I, the fulcrum, the cold, golden center around which they pivot. The conversation was a necessary poison, Kaelen’s words of prophecy and hidden enemies a bitter medicine we were all forced to swallow.
The enemy has a name: Tikzorcu. A house of swamp-vipers and back-alley assassins. The knowledge is a cold, hard stone in my gut. But the more immediate problem is the volatile, unwilling alliance I now find myself in. My hatred for Zahir is a clean, simple thing. This new reality, this forced interdependence, is a tangled, messy knot I have yet to unravel.
And at the center of the knot is her. Amara.
The thought of her is a constant, low-grade fever in my blood. I see her in my mind’s eye, a ghost of memory and desire. The defiant fire in her eyes. The feel of her soft skin beneath my claws. The taste of her surrender. The way she looks at Kaelen with a fragile, dawning trust. The way she looks at Zahir with aterrified, unwilling fascination. She is the heart of this, the prize, the fulcrum. And she is in my chambers, a captive bird whose cage is now besieged by two other predators.
I need to see her. I need to re-establish the order of things, to remind her, and myself, of the truth of her position. She is my property. Her safety is my responsibility. Her fate is mine to command. The thought is a familiar comfort, a return to the cold, clean lines of logic and control.
I leave them on the balcony, their simmering tensions a weight I no longer wish to bear. I walk the silent corridors to my own chambers, my mind already formulating the words I will use, the precise application of pressure and command that will bring her back into line, that will erase the softness she has begun to carve into the granite of my soul.
The two guards outside my chamber door are new. My personal elite. They are the best, loyal only to me, their faces impassive masks of lethal competence. They bow as I approach.
The door is slightly ajar.
A sliver of unease, cold and sharp, pierces the armor of my composure. I never leave my doors ajar. My servants are too well-trained, too terrified of my displeasure, to make such a careless mistake.
I push the door open. The silence that meets me is wrong. It is not the quiet of a sleeping captive. It is the hollow, ringing silence of a void. An absence.
The room is in perfect order. The furs on the pallet are smooth. The silver tray from her last meal sits untouched on the obsidian table. But she is not here.
My gaze sweeps the room, my mind a cold, calculating machine, cataloging every detail. And then I see it. On the floor, near the high, barred window that overlooks the garden, lies a single, perfect, blood-red blossom. One of the soulless flowers from the garden. It does not belong here. And beside it, almostinvisible against the dark stone, is a single, dark thread. A piece of the simple, homespun cord she wears around her neck, the one that holds the mystic’s foolish, protective stone.
It has been snapped.
The world does not explode. It does not shatter. It simply… stops. The air in my lungs freezes. The beat of my heart ceases. For a single, eternal moment, there is nothing. Only a profound, absolute stillness.
And then, the glacier inside me begins to move.
It is not the hot, brutish rage of the General. It is a cold, silent, all-consuming fury, a force of nature so vast and so absolute it has no need for sound. The temperature in the room drops. The crystal lamps flicker as if in a sudden, icy wind. My vision narrows, the edges of the world turning grey, until the only thing I can see is the broken thread on the floor.
They took her.
From my rooms. From my protection.
The insult is a physical blow, a violation so profound it bypasses rage and becomes a state of pure, lethal purpose. They did not just steal a human pet. They have stolen a piece of my soul, a piece I did not even know I possessed until this very moment, and the void it has left behind is a screaming, black hole of annihilation.
“Captain,” I say. My voice is unnervingly calm. It does not even sound like my own. It is the voice of the glacier, the voice of the abyss.
The guard captain appears in the doorway, his hand on the hilt of his sword. He sees my face, and the professional calm in his eyes shatters, replaced by a raw, primal fear.
“Seal the palace,” I command, my voice a flat, dead thing. “No one enters. No one leaves. Not a servant, not a noble, not my own father. Anyone who tries is to be cut down where they stand. Send a runner to the city gates. Seal them. Now.”
He does not question. He does not hesitate. He simply bows and vanishes, his footsteps a frantic, running beat in the sudden, terrible silence.
I do not go to Kaelen. Not yet. I do not go to my father. His political games are a child’s amusement. I go to the one place in this palace that understands the language my soul is now screaming. I go to the barracks.
