Deadly Lovers (The Prussia Series) (6 page)

“You laugh now but when Josephine gets you…” the Duke’s voice trailed off and I could hear the faintest traces of a laugh, deep in his chest yet not reaching his lips, “When she finds you…that’s what I’ve been thinking about. What will sweet little Josephine do to you, do you think?”

My hands balled into fists as I listened. I felt a chill across the back of my neck with every hint of laughter. Somehow he was still enjoying this. My hands were covered in his blood, his eyes were smashed somewhere in the dirt into tiny mushy pieces, and he still laughed at me.

His laugh was too much. I came around to the front of him and slashed at him with all of my strength, my arm swinging so fast and wild that I thought my shoulder might dislocate. The hand sickle was small but sharp. It sliced through the layers of the Duke’s blood soaked suit and on the third pass, hit flesh. His jaw clenched tightly, his arms tensed, his hands balled into fists ready to fight, and his face turned up. His entire body fought to pull away from the slicing of the sickle into his skin.

My eyes were wide with anticipation as I watched the sickle just barely breach through the skin of his stomach. I didn’t know how it compared to what he had done to me but I had to believe that he still deserved it. As the blood began to pour in a sheet down the front of his pants, innards still tucked inside his abdomen, I stopped swinging the sickle and leaned down to take a closer look.

His moaning had already begun to quiet. The Duke tried very hard not to voice his pain. He must have realized I enjoyed it. But I wasn’t done with him. And I still wanted to hear his screams. I looked at the gashes across his stomach and could see the glisten of what looked like sausage.

I set a finger against the gash and poked, just a little. Instantly the Duke burst to life with horrified screams as I had never heard come from his lips. The corners of my lips turned up slightly as I looked up at his howling face.

But his howls stopped as soon as I had stopped poking. So, I poked again…and again…until finally, his skin gave way and I watched in horror as his internal organs bulged forward, threatening to hit me in the face. I retreated quickly, thinking they would spill into his lap and bounce right into my face but they didn’t. They were caught among themselves, still held somewhat firmly by the Duke’s skin. I looked at the Duke’s face. He had broken out into a sweat, his mouth gaping open with his missing teeth on full display. Still, I saw no fangs but the pain was there. No screams came out of his mouth as he gasped up at the ceiling in petrified terror.

Perhaps he had reached his limit. Or I had gone too far. I leaned back down towards his abdomen and hooked my index finger around the sausage like organ, what I knew to be his intestines though I didn’t know if they were small or large, and gave a little
tug
. The Duke screamed what I imagined would be comparable to a final cry of death.

Every part of his body rocked the chair with muscles straining against the restraints, a bucket of blood exploding from the cavity of his abdomen in a rush down his lap and onto the floor, all over my feet. His face went completely pale and contorted, his scream sinking into my bones and shocking me into awe at the raw emotion in it. And I felt accomplished even as I stood with my hands slapped around my ears to protect them from the horror of his scream.

“Mercy,” he whispered, repeated, over and over, “Mercy…mercy…mercy, I beg you…mercy,”

The Duke’s face stayed strained upwards toward the ceiling. I looked at the damage I had done, the justice I had served, and felt that I had accomplished something. But in my heart, I felt a small hole, black and cold for what I had done. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was that had done it, which part had been the cause, but I knew it had cost me something. I looked at the Duke’s entrails leading out of his stomach and onto the dirt floor, straw sticking to the slimy, slick organ, and my eyes followed it all the way to my hand that was still slapped around my ears. I gasped as I realized that my index finger had remained hooked around his intestines even as I had put my hands up to protect my ears from his earth shattering screams.

“For the love of God,” I heard someone mutter in disbelief.

I looked up to see John Campbell at the door of the dungeon looking at the Duke, strapped to the metal chair, eyes gouged out, shoulders carved down to the bone and disemboweled. It didn’t dawn on me the depth of what I had been capable of until John Campbell was shoved aside and Sebastian stepped into the light, his face falling on my handiwork first and his eyes following the Duke’s intestine to my index finger. As soon as his eyes found me, standing covered in layer after layer of blood and finger wrapped around the entrails of the Duke, I uncoiled my finger from the Duke’s intestine and took a step back, hands behind my back.

The Duke made a murmur of a cry at having his intestines dropped on the floor. He was barely conscious. And as I stood there in the silence of the moment, the only voice was the slow and steady murmur of the Duke asking for mercy. It dawned on me that he hadn’t been begging me for mercy. His face turned up, eyes vacant from his bloodied skull, he was praying. He was praying for mercy.

“Prussia…” said Sebastian as he took a step forward and hesitated, his hands outstretched and then pulled back. He looked so confused. He took a step towards the Duke and hesitated again, turning back towards me, “Are you…okay?”

Sebastian gazed at me for a long moment, taking in the scene, the blood, the damage. I wanted to think he was asking if I had been hurt and some part of that question, I’m sure that’s what he was asking. But it wasn’t just one question. He wasn’t just asking if I had been hurt. I stood before him, clearly having disemboweled a high ranking politician of the court after being left alone for what I started to think might have only been twenty minutes, though it had felt like a lifetime. He was asking if I was okay, if I was mentally alright, if it was really me standing in front of him.

I could feel the blood still trickling from the wounds in my arms. I could feel the muscles with every twitch of the injury to my shoulder, skin, and chunks of tissue missing. Blood streamed in sheets down my back and my chest. Every inch of my body had a shock wave of pain shooting in every direction. But all my attention had me focused on those eyes, looking at me in a type of horror that made me sick to my stomach. Sebastian’s eyes didn’t see his beautiful new wife. Those eyes were looking at a monster. And I knew as soon as I thought it that I had made him feel this same way on more than one occasion and instantly regretted having looked at him with that same look in the past.

“When you said you didn’t want to leave her alone with him for too long…I thought you were worried about her, not…about what she was going to do,” I could hear John Campbell whisper, his eyes flitting in disbelief between the Duke and I.

I stood, embarrassed, as if I stood in judgment. My feet shifted back and forth as I waited for them to say something, to do something.

“Wait, what?” I asked, anger shooting from toes to fingertips as I had time to process John Campbell’s whisper, “You were worried about leaving me alone with him and you still just left me alone with him?” I asked.

I watched as John’s eyebrows went up, his face went completely pale and his mouth clamped shut. He might have regretted the words but he couldn’t take them back. Sebastian held up his hands, his mouth falling open without an answer to fall out, grasping for words and gapping at the air.

“Water,” snapped Sebastian at John Campbell.

“Huh?” said John, looking dazed and confused at Sebastian, as though he had never heard the word before in his life, “Get a doctor?”

“No, get the biggest pitcher of water you can find from the kitchen. Go. Now. Hurry!” snapped Sebastian.

“No, I want to hear more about this,” I said, pointing a blood soaked finger at John Campbell.

I stood there a moment, my eyebrows knitted together in anger and my teeth gritted, ready for a fight. But John didn’t wait. He took one look at me, one look at Sebastian and walked out, his footsteps sprinting down the passageway towards the castle.

That power I had felt before as I had been taking pieces of the Duke at my leisure, for my pleasure, dissipated in that moment. Watching John race down the passageway after I had told him not to leave, it was a reminder that I wasn’t the one in power in this room anymore. I was just…just
Prussia
. Not a vampire, not quite human, not strong or fast but able to suffer for eternity given the opportunity.

“Prussia, what happened here?” asked Sebastian, his arms out in front of him now and taking slow steps towards me as if I were a rabid animal lose from the cage and he was going to catch me, “What did you do?”

“What did
I
do?” I repeated the question, the insult of his question piercing me in the heart, offending me at my core, “You should be asking what
he
did,” I insisted, pointing at the Duke, still muttering quietly for mercy but his face now facing us. I glared at him. I wouldn’t be surprised if he were listening, biding his time. I could see that his shoulder had started to heal, along with his mouth as his pronunciation was getting better. The still vacant eye sockets made me smile though.

Smiling at the image of the maimed Duke probably wasn’t helping my case. I looked back at Sebastian to find he had inched much closer than I had thought and quickly, too.

“We have to turn him over to the other court,” said Sebastian, “Robert insists that the Duke is one of theirs-”

“Robert,” I spit his name out and then spit on the ground, “He’s a monster. They’re all monsters. You left me alone with him and he got loose!”

“I tied him myself,” insisted Sebastian, pointing down at the ropes that held the Duke’s legs and hesitating, “I didn’t tie those knots,” I heard him mutter.

“See,” I said, a high pitched note I hadn’t hit in a while slipping from between my lips, “He broke almost every bone in my body,” I whined quietly, wrapping my arms around myself and looking down at the ground.

Sebastian walked over and placed a hesitant arm around me, pulling me close, slowly.

“Then how did you fight back if you were so very hurt?” Sebastian whispered, argued, “How are you standing,”

“I don’t know,” I whispered back, looking up into his eyes and wishing he could make me clean with his kisses, “I don’t know. I just know it hurt. It still hurts,”

Sebastian wrapped both of his arms around me and pulled me close, placing his chin on the top of my head. I melted into his embrace, happy that his eyes had lost sight of the monster he had seen come out of me. I closed my eyes and swore I would never say the word monster again. At least not to Sebastian.

“We have to release him,” said Sebastian, “I don’t know how we’re going to explain this,”

The dungeon door slammed open and John Campbell came bounding in through the door, out of breath but carrying a sloshing pitcher of water. I wiggled out of Sebastian’s embrace immediately and took the pitcher from John Campbell without a word. John didn’t argue but recoiled away to avoid coming into contact with me. I ignored his fear of me and put the pitcher to my lips, letting the cool water cascade down the back of my throat in waves. I didn’t sip. I didn’t gulp. I opened my throat and consumed the water as quickly as I could without so much as a breath. In a matter of seconds I had emptied half the pitcher and then came up for air. I wiped my mouth with the back of my sleeve and smiled at Sebastian and John, both standing together at a safe distance, warily.

The dim dungeon became bright as every flicker of light expanded. Everything I saw became brighter, lighter, and sparkled. In a rush, the pain of my broken body became a more bearable dull ache. I crossed the dirt floor dungeon, kicking straw happily with my feet as I walked to the table. I set the half-full pitcher on the table among the tools I hadn’t had a chance to use and next to the pile of bloody tools I had used on the Duke.

“No,” I said, firmly to Sebastian with a smile.

“What?” asked John Campbell, looking at Sebastian for an answer as I took several paces towards the Duke and looked back at Sebastian.

The fear in Sebastian’s eyes was instantaneous as he watched me reach out to touch the Duke. I didn’t have a weapon. I didn’t even ball up my fist. But just seeing me reach out to touch the Duke filled Sebastian with fear and knowing that, watching that reality cross his face, hurt. I watched John lean over and whisper something to Sebastian whose face only became longer with sadness as he stood watching me. I frowned at Sebastian and turned my attention back to the Duke.