Zodiac Academy Fated Throne - Caroline Peckham Page 0,116

Tory until she couldn't even scream any more. He'd revelled in it.

Hidden deep within the memories of her pain there had been more than enough visions of his eyes gleaming with excitement while he made her scream and cry out for mercy. He'd just forced her to think of Darius time and again until she believed those memories were of his eyes. That it had been him doing that to her.

It had taken me the better part of the day to realise that he'd been using a Cyclops to assist him with a lot of his cruelty. He'd taken every dark and pain filled memory she held of Darius from when she'd first arrived at the academy and twisted the knife in the pain she felt over them until she was bleeding from the inside out. And then he'd found all of her good memories too, beating her down over and over again until she couldn't protect them anymore, though I was surprised to find there were a few things hidden within her mind still.

She was still resisting my attempts to get her to unlock them, but each time I guided her thoughts and feelings towards them, she seemed a little closer to looking at them than the last time, so I wasn't giving up.

We'd moved into my bedroom within King's Hollow after the first time she'd blacked out with the memory of the torture she'd endured, and I'd barely caught her before she cracked her head against the hard floorboards.

I'd carried her in here and laid her down on the bed beside the fireplace where I was carefully rebuilding the fire every time it went out. Using my gifts on her like this drained her magic as I fed on it, and she needed to keep replenishing her stores to keep up with how much I was taking while we worked. I was heady on the richness of her power and had had to take breaks several times to empty myself out by throwing a gale of wind into the forest outside or casting a river of water just so that I could continue to draw more from her.

She was curled in my arms, her head resting on my chest as her limbs trembled with the memory of pain that had crashed through her over and over again.

I couldn't help but feel like the monster who had done this to her in the first place as I kept using my gifts to draw this pain out of her and force her to give me every single piece of it. But I knew it was the only way. She needed to release herself from it, needed to look at it clearly and without the taint of Lionel's lies shading it in falsehoods if she was ever going to be able to move on from it.

I wasn't even going to let myself think about what it was doing to me. I was using the fullest extent of my gifts with her and she was opening herself up to them, letting me fully immerse myself in her memories so that I could actually watch them play out like I was there myself. I rarely pushed so deep into anyone’s mind like this, but if I wanted any chance at all of fixing what had been done to her then I had to.

I closed my eyes as I pushed my power into her again and her cold fingers fisted in my shirt as a gasp of pain escaped her and I grunted as I felt the sharp kick of electricity slam into my own chest as if I'd been there too. I could taste blood in my mouth as she bit her tongue while she jerked and spasmed from the pain of the strike. And the hard bite of the leather straps which held her arms and wrists in place on the wooden chair she'd been strapped to in her underwear set panic racing through my limbs.

"Who do you love?" Lionel asked coldly while Clara hung off of his arm, smiling as she bared her fangs.

"You," I gasped, my voice Tory's as I relived her memory.

"What about my son?" Lionel asked, moving aside as the Cyclops stepped forward and I shook my head desperately. He had thick black hair which hung long over his shoulders and a wizened face with a jagged old scar running through his left eye which had left the white stained red with blood even though the wound was