asylum was an asylum. The entire lower level appeared to be where physical torture took place.
The first room they reached was at least twenty feet long and nearly as wide. Iron manacles, rusty and heavy, were attached to the slimy, moldy rock walls as well as the wet floors.
Joy watched her carefully.
“No,” Rune said, her horrified stare glued to the row of men and women shackled to the walls. They were standing, the fronts of their bare bodies against the bloody wall, their ankles and wrists spread and cuffed so the prisoners looked like human x’s.
They’d been whipped, beaten, tortured unmercifully. Their heads had been shaved, and every inch of their backs, buttocks, and legs looked like bloody, raw hamburger.
“No,” she repeated. “I would never do this.” She looked at Joy. “And I won’t allow your lord to do this.”
“This is not why you’re here, Princess. Come this way.”
“I’m setting them free,” she muttered, barely able to speak past the horrified lump in her throat.
She shot out her claws, shot them out so hard she cried out in pain as they exploded from her fingertips.
“Princess,” Joy begged, holding up her hands. “Nearly all of these are the witch’s people. They belong to Damascus, and they have done things you can only imagine.” She reached out to touch Rune, thought better of it, and wiped her palms on her pants instead. “Think, Princess. Think.”
Rune shuddered, realizing only when they cut into her lip that she’d dropped her fangs. “I don’t care who they belong to. I don’t care what they’ve done. Put them in a prison cell or kill them.” She lowered her voice and stared Joy down, willing her to hear the truth in her words. “There will be no more of this.”
As she spoke, other people crept into the room. People in hoods and robes. Executioners. Torturers.
Joy groaned.
“Brasque Dray is supposed to be the good guy,” Rune whispered.
Joy looked puzzled. “He is? Why?”
Why, indeed?
Then she remembered why.
“Because he fights Damascus.”
Joy only tilted her head, watching Rune as though she were an unhinged child.
And maybe she was.
She couldn’t breathe in the stuffy, smelly confines of the prison. Couldn’t breathe, or think, or figure out just what the fuck she was supposed to do.
Dizziness hit her hard.
Damn claustrophobia.
“Princess,” Joy murmured. “I may die for this. At least make it worth it.” She grabbed Rune’s upper arm, hard. “Please.”
“As soon as we leave this room, I’m going to make sure fucking Brasque Dray changes this shit. Count on it.”
Joy nodded as she pulled Rune from the room. “Yes, yes. Speak to him of the atrocities.”
The next room was as bad—worse, even—than the first one. Torture devices she didn’t recognize were strung along the walls, over the floor, and, she was sure, into the next horror of a room.
In most of the devices were dead or dying men.
And when she spotted one particular man, she understood why she was inside the dim. She understood who Joy owed and who she was risking her life to save.
“My God,” Rune whispered, her voice so hoarse it hurt her throat. “My God.”
She ran with all the speed she’d ever possessed toward him, her heart beating too fast, too hard.
“You and I aren’t finished, Rune. No matter what happens, just remember that. We’re not finished.”
She ran to save the man the berserker had killed in Wormwood.
Owen Five.
Chapter Twenty
She couldn’t have spoken right then if her life had depended upon it. She ground her teeth and hacked through the ropes that held him to a metal wheel, trying to ignore the fact that his bones had been broken, his face was a scarred, bloody mess, and he had burns and punctures over his entire body.
A metal circle of spikes had been placed around his head, and blood leaked down his skin as the spikes dug into his skull.
His eyes were gone.
His eyes were gone.
She moaned, horrified, and knew she’d have to give him a merciful death. He was…beyond pain.
“Owen,” she said. “Owen.”
Before she lowered him gently to the floor, she loosened the screw that kept the metal band digging into his skull. She lifted it carefully from his head, then flung the device against the wall.
She looked wildly around, uncertain. “Joy?”
But the lord’s deputy had repaid her debt to Owen Five, whatever debt that had been, and she fled.
Rune couldn’t blame her for trying to protect herself. Brasque Dray and his dim were horrors beyond imagining.
Owen didn’t make a sound. She doubted he ever would again.