Page 141 of Alchemised
He didn’t paralyse her this time. He simply pressed his palm against her forehead. She couldn’t hold back her gasp.
Her eyes rolled back so violently, she could feel the strain down her optic nerves.
Despite knowing what was coming, her mind baulked, panicking, instantly swerving her focus onto things she didn’t want to focus on.
Crowther’s office. His shadowed face.
She forced her attention away.
Luc.
Crowther had cleared her to use the last Eternal Flame meeting she’d attended as a distraction.
They’d been discussing the new method for taking out the liches and Undying, and what they should do with the talismans they’d retrieved. Luc’s unit had brought several back.
The resonance through her mind abruptly stopped, and she stood swaying, trying to force her eyes back into focus, her thoughts swirling.
“Better than I expected,” she dimly heard Ferron saying. “Unfortunately, it won’t only happen once.”
His resonance sliced through her again.
It was worse the second time, like having a wound reopened, ripped larger. It was harder to think.
When Ferron finally let go, Helena felt as though her skull were about to split in two.
Her eyes were welling up with tears, and she bit down savagely on her lip, her chest stuttering as she fought to breathe.
The room swam, threatening to disappear. She swayed, feeling blindly for the wall.
“Drink this.” A vial of something was shoved into her hand. “Otherwise you may black out.”
She placed it in her mouth, doubting that Ferron would poison her, but if he did, she wasn’t sure she’d mind. Her skull throbbed as though there were a drum inside it.
Mouth-numbingly bitter pain relief washed across her tongue. She nearly spat it back into the vial as she realised that he’d given her laudanum for a headache. Did he have any idea how limited opium supplies were in the North?
But it was already in her mouth, so she swallowed.
When she reopened her eyes, the room had a soft luminous quality. She blinked at the way it softened the edges of everything, including Ferron.
“Did this happen to you?” she asked, her tongue sluggish. He was Undying; she didn’t know if they got headaches. Or even slept.
“More than once,” he said. “My training was rigorous.”
She nodded. It was strange how untouched by the war he looked. Yet when she forced herself to look past his appearance, there was an eerie, dangerous stillness about him.
“Why?” she asked.
He stared down his nose at her, eyes growing hard. “To see if I’d be better than my father, or if I’d break under interrogation, too.”
She had never thought about what had been done to Atreus Ferron after his arrest. Everyone knew that he’d confessed; she’d always assumed it had been voluntary.
“Was that—before you killed Principate Apollo?”
Ferron stared at her, his mouth twisting. “Are you wanting a confession? Shall I tell you everything I’ve done?”
She stared into his mocking eyes. “Do you want to?”
There was a flash of surprise that softened his features for an instant. He was lonely.
