was and free her by myself. Then we’d ship her off to Earth once and for all.
Taking a step back, I nodded to the prince. “You’re right,” I said. “But thanks anyway. Now, if you’ll excuse me…” I bowed my head in respect and started to turn away, only for the ring of soldiers to march a step forward, closing in on me some more.
Not allowing me to leave.
I glanced toward the prince, my head going quiet with alarm. “Erick?”
He shook his head sadly. “I can’t just let you go, Indigo. My father would have my head on a platter if I did.”
“But why would you detain me?” I demanded. “What have I done wrong?”
“Colluding with a Graykey,” he answered immediately. “You can’t tell me you’re not going to follow your mark straight back to her and try to free her? Because that’s exactly what I’d do for my mate.”
I swallowed thickly, trying to think my way out of this one. But before I could say anything, a wave of pain blasted through my temple.
Going momentarily blind, I groaned through the agony and fell to my knees.
“Indy?” Erick stepped forward in concern.
I clutched my love mark and gritted my teeth. But Jesus. This was bad. A person wasn’t supposed to feel the emotions of their true love from this kind of distance unless it was extreme. Like life-or-death extreme.
Quilla had to be in fatal agony right now.
“What’re they doing to her? Erick, please—”
Another bolt struck me, right in the temple, and then everything went black.
Chapter 33
Quilla
I woke, bound to a stone wall, my arms stretched out on either side of me with my wrists caught in manacles and my ankles shackled together with chains. A cloth gag was tied around my face, biting into the corners of my mouth.
Panic was the first reaction. I struggled, trying to pull my hands free to no success and move my legs, but the chains were far too heavy to allow me more than a few inches of movement at a time.
Damn.
Good and truly stuck, I closed my eyes and rested my head back against the wall behind me, concentrating on breathing in through my nose—because the cloth tasted vile—and calming myself down. Exhaling out around the gag, I cleared my brain and let reasoning thoughts back in.
Think. I just needed to think.
Indigo had told me, all you have to be is smarter than them. You can overcome anyone by outthinking them. So I could do this. I could think of a way out of here. Because size, strength, and speed definitely weren’t going to help right now. Nothing physical would, which meant I’d need to talk my way out, get inside my opponent’s head, and coax them into setting me free. Except I kind of needed my mouth available for that. I began to work my jaw, wincing at the soreness there, which reminded me of how many times my captor had hit me in the face before knocking me unconscious. Bastard. He’d done a superb job of gagging me too. The cloth was wrapped so tight around my head I couldn’t even push it out with my tongue.
My very dry, offended tongue, I might add. Seriously, the bitter flavor of the gag was straight-up disgusting.
Okay, removing that was going to be a no-go. But there had to be something else.
Reopening my eyes, I focused on the room. Dark, chilly, damp. Low ceilings, stone walls. The only source of light came from the two torches that hung from either side of the closed door on the other end of the room. No windows.
Definitely a dungeon. But a messy one. It was full of shit. The shelves and tables around me were littered with clay beakers, coils of leather, gears of all shapes and sizes, metal and wooden doohickeys that made no sense to me, along with piles of scrolls with what looked like crazy scribblings on them from where I squinted.
If I were on Earth, I’d say it looked like a mad scientist’s laboratory, like someplace where Dr. Frankenstein had created his monster. Then my gaze moved to the center of the room, and I became utterly convinced that’s exactly what this was.
Because seriously, what the fuck was that thing?
It was exactly the kind of machine Frankenstein’s monster would be born on.
Constructed entirely of wood and metal, the creepy contraption sitting in the middle of the room had to be a torture device straight from my nightmares. With a complicated mess of pulleys,