expression never faltered. “The how does not matter.” He took my arm and started toward the hall that housed his room. “We don’t have much time.”
I wrenched out of his grasp and stopped in the mouth of the corridor. He turned and eyed me tightly. I should have been cowering in fear, but I felt little to nothing.
“You’ve changed, Khara,” he said, circling me as he always had. His favorite way to cow me—to bend me to his will. “You no longer react to me as you once did.”
“Perhaps I see through you now,” I replied. “Perhaps I know that you cannot hurt me anymore as you once did.”
He stopped behind me, my words halting him. He lingered there for a moment, contemplating his next move.
“Or perhaps I’ve never truly unleashed myself upon you as you assume I have.” His hands landed on my shoulders and slowly slid down to my elbows. The prickle of terror that I had once known him to wield danced along my skin. What I had thought I had grown immune to was back, and I wondered if I could not absorb and use his power as I had the others. If not, it would not bode well against Phobos.
As my mind reeled with the implications, Deimos snatched my wrists and dragged me down the hall to his room. He kicked the door open and slammed it shut behind us. Then he stormed across the room and drove me face-first into the wall of shackles. I tried to calm my mind so I could escape as my brother Trey could, but fear seemed to root me in place. Whatever Deimos was doing to me was disabling my system in a way it never had before.
I tried to call my lightning forth, but Deimos spun me around, then bound and tethered me to the wall, my hands behind me. Even if I could call it, there would be no power of Zeus to use against Deimos.
But I did not need my hands to let loose the Dragon’s fire.
I tracked Deimos as he stalked across the room to a trunk of implements that had been used on me many times. I could nearly crane my head around enough to firebreathe at him, but it was as if he expected as much and remained just out of range.
“I think it’s time for you to see what I can do, vasilissa mou. What I am truly capable of…”
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as he approached my side, and I wrenched against the shackles holding me in place, sparks flying from my fingers into the stone wall at my back. I let loose my fire, but it merely shot past him, burning the sheets on his bed. A small fire smoldered as he stepped to my side and reached around behind me.
“I guess we will not be needing the bed, then,” he said as his other hand reached in front of me, careful not to get close enough to be burned. “But this seems even more necessary than I thought.” I felt cold metal against my cheek before something large and hard and cold bumped against my mouth. “Open…” he said, his voice full of lust and need. “Open or I will shove it in myself…” Instead of complying, I shot fire forth again, the flames surging around the stone gag he was trying to insert. “Now, now, Khara. You know how this ends. I will have my way…”
And he would. He always did.
As soon as I ran out of breath and was forced to inhale, he pinched my nose shut, and though I fought against the urge, survival eventually won out. My mouth shot open, and he shoved the stone gag in so deep that my jaw hurt. As he secured it behind my head, I tried to firebreathe once again. But it was weak and erratic and of little use unless Deimos was foolish enough to come within range, which, given that I had just shown him what it was, I knew he would not be. I was his prisoner—his slave—until he saw fit to set me free, or someone else forced his hand.
Either way, I was his for the time being.
He stepped directly in front of me, the safest place to be since my fire could only reach my periphery with the gag in, and inhaled deeply, a smile overtaking his countenance.
“I have missed seeing you like this.” His eyes closed slowly, as