House of Flame and Shadow: The INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER third instalment in the Crescent City series
House of Flame and Shadow: Part 1 – Chapter 4

Pain and dark and quiet. That was the entirety of Hunt Athalar’s world.

No, that wasn’t true.

Those things were the entirety of the world beyond his tortured body, his sawed-off wings, the aching hunger writhing in his stomach and thirst burning his throat, the slave brand stamped on his wrist. The halo inked anew upon his brow by Rigelus himself, its oppressive power somehow heavier and oilier than the first. All that he had achieved, regained … wiped away. His very existence belonged to the Asteri once more.

But inside him, beyond that sea of pain and despair, Bryce was the entirety of his world.

His mate. His wife. His princess.

Prince Hunt Athalar Danaan. He would have hated the last name were it not for the fact that it was a marker of her ownership over his soul, his heart.

There was Bryce, and nothing else. Not even Pollux’s barbed-wire whips could rip her face from his mind. Not even that blunt-toothed saw had severed it from him, even as it had hewn through his wings.

Bryce, who had gotten away. Gone to Hel to seek aid. He’d stay here, let Pollux rip him to shreds, cut through his wings again and again, if it meant that the Asteri’s attention stayed away from her. If it bought her time to rally the force needed to take on these fuckers.

He’d die before he told them where she was. His only consolation was that Ruhn would do the same.

Baxian, bloody and swaying on the other side of Ruhn, didn’t know where Bryce had gone, but he knew plenty about what Bryce had been up to lately. Yet the Helhound hadn’t given Pollux an inch. Hunt would have expected nothing less of a male Urd had chosen to be Danika Fendyr’s mate.

It was quiet now—the only sound the clank of their chains. Blood and piss and shit coated the floor beneath them, the smell almost as unbearable as the pain.

Pollux was creative, Hunt would give him that. Where others might have gone for stabbing in the gut and twisting, the Hammer had learned the exact points on the feet to whip and burn to cause maximum agony while keeping his victims conscious.

Or maybe it was the Hind who’d learned those tricks. She stood behind her lover and watched with dead eyes as the Hammer slowly—so slowly—took them apart.

That was the other secret he and Danaan would keep. The Hind—what and who she was.

Oblivion beckoned, a sweet release Hunt had come to crave as much as Bryce’s body entwined with his. He pretended, sometimes, that when he fell into the blackness, he was falling into her arms, into her sweet, tight heat.

Bryce. Bryce. Bryce.

Her name was a prayer, an order.

He had little hope of leaving this place alive. His only job was to make sure he held out long enough for Bryce to do what she had to do. After his series of colossal fuckups over the centuries … it was the least he could offer up.

He should have seen it coming—part of him had seen it coming a few weeks ago, when he’d tried to convince Bryce not to go down this road. He should have fought harder. Should have told her this outcome was inevitable, especially if he was involved.

He’d known not to trust Celestina with her whole new Governor, new rules bullshit. He’d let her win him over, and the Archangel had fucking betrayed them. All that talk about being a friend of Shahar’s—he’d eaten it up. Let the memory of his long-dead lover cloud his instincts, as Celestina had surely gambled it would.

What was this but another Fallen rebellion? On a smaller scale, yes, but the stakes had been so much higher this time. Then, he’d lost an army, lost his lover—had known she was dying as time had stretched and slowed around him. Had known she was dead when time had resumed its normal speed once more, and the whole world had changed.

Yet the ties that now bound him to others—not only Bryce, but to the two males in this dungeon with him—had become unbearable. Their pain was his pain. Perhaps worse than what he endured before.

Shahar had been given the easy end. To die at Sandriel’s hand, to die on the battlefield, swift and final … It had been easier.

A few feet away, Baxian groaned softly.

Hunt’s arms had gone numb, shoulders popping out of their sockets from trying to support the weight of their bodies. He mustered his energy, his focus, enough to say to Baxian, “How … how you doing?”

Baxian let out a wet cough. “Great.”

Next to Hunt, Ruhn grunted. It might have been a laugh. Their only options were screaming and sobbing, or laughing at this giant fucking disaster.

Indeed, Ruhn said, “Wanna … hear a … joke?” The prince didn’t wait for a reply before he continued, “Two angels … and a Fae Prince … walk into … a dungeon …”

Ruhn didn’t finish, and didn’t need to. A broken, rasping laugh came out of Hunt. Then Baxian. Then Ruhn.

Though every heave shrieked through his arms, his back, his broken body, Hunt couldn’t stop laughing. The sound bordered on hysteria. Soon tears were leaking down his cheeks, and he knew from the scent that the others were laughing and crying as well, like it was the funniest fucking thing in the world.

The door to the chamber banged open, echoing off the stones like a thunderclap.

“Shut the fuck up,” Pollux barked, stalking down the stairs, wings blazing in the dimness.

Hunt laughed louder. Footsteps trailed behind the Hammer—a dark-haired, brown-skinned male followed him in: the Hawk. The final member of Sandriel’s triarii. “What the Hel is wrong with them?” he sneered at Pollux.

“They’re stupid shits, that’s what,” Pollux said, strutting to the rack of torture devices and grabbing an iron poker. He thrust it into the embers of the fire, the light gilding his white wings into a mockery of a heavenly aura.

The Hawk prowled closer, peering at the three of them with a close scrutiny that echoed his namesake. Like Baxian, the Hawk hailed from two peoples: angels, who had granted him his white wings, and hawk shifters, who’d granted him his ability to transform into a bird of prey.

Those were about all the similarities between the two males. For starters, Baxian had a soul. The Hawk …

The Hawk’s gaze lingered on Hunt. Nothing of life, of joy, lay in those eyes.

“Athalar.”

Hunt nodded to the male in greeting. “Asshole.”

Ruhn snickered. The Hawk pivoted to the rack, where he pulled out a long, curving knife. The kind that was designed to yank out organs on the withdraw. Hunt remembered that one—from last time.

Ruhn laughed again, as if almost drunk. “Creative.”

“We’ll see how you laugh in a moment, princeling,” the Hawk said, earning a grin from Pollux as the Hammer waited for the poker to heat. “I heard your cousin Cormac pleaded for mercy before the end.”

“Fuck you,” Ruhn snarled.

The hawk shifter weighed the knife in his hands. “His father has disowned him. Or whatever’s left of his body.” A wink at Ruhn. “Your father has done the same.”

Hunt didn’t miss the shock that rippled over Ruhn’s face. At his father’s betrayal? Or at his cousin’s demise? Did such things even matter down here?

Baxian rasped to the Hawk, “You’re a fucking liar. Always were … always will be.”

The Hawk smiled up at Baxian. “How about we start with your tongue today, traitor?”

To Baxian’s credit, he stuck out his tongue toward the Hawk in invitation.

Hunt smirked. Yeah—they were all in this together. To the bitter end.

The Hawk cut his stare toward Hunt. “You’ll be next, Athalar.”

“Come and get it,” Hunt gasped. Ruhn extended his tongue as well.

The Hawk simmered with rage at their defiance, white wings glowing with unearthly power. But slowly, a smile lit his face—horrific in its calculation, its gradual delight as Pollux turned, the poker white-hot and rippling with heat.

“Who’s first?” the Hammer crooned. The angel stood poised, silhouetted against the blazing fire behind him.

Hunt opened his mouth, his last bit of bravado before the shitshow began, but in the shadows behind Pollux, beyond the fireplace, something dark moved. Something darker than shadow.

Not Ruhn’s shadows. The prince didn’t seem to be able to access those when constrained by the gorsian shackles. Only the prince’s mind-speaking abilities remained.

This shadow was different—darker, older. Watching them.

Watching Hunt.

Hallucinations: Bad, because it meant he had some infection that even his immortal body couldn’t fight off. Good, because it meant he might quietly slip away into death’s embrace. Bad, because it meant the Asteri might turn their attention fully to Bryce. Good, because the pain would be gone. Bad, because he still held out some stupid, fool’s hope deep in his heart of seeing her again. Good, because Bryce wouldn’t come looking for him if he was dead.

Across the room, the thing in the shadows moved. Just slightly. Like it had crooked a finger at him.

Death. That was the thing in the shadows.

And now it beckoned.

Night.

Borne on a raft of oblivion, Ruhn drifted across a sea of pain.

The last thing he remembered was the sound and sight of his small intestine splattering on the ground, pain as sharp as—well, as sharp as the curved knife the Hawk had plunged into his gut.

He wondered when the shifter would disembowel them with his talons in his hawk form, as he was fond of doing. Ruhn could imagine it easily: the Hawk perching on his torso and clawing out his organs, pecking at them with that razor-sharp beak. He’d heal, and then the Hawk would begin again. Over and over—

Ruhn had been a fool to think nothing that happened down here could be worse than the years of torture at his father’s hands. The burns, the gorsian shackles his father had put him in to keep him from fighting back, keep him from healing—then, at least, he’d developed his own ways of surviving, of recovering. But now there was only pain, then oblivion, then pain again.

Had he died? Or been a whisper away from death, as Vanir could be if the blow wasn’t truly fatal? His Fae body would regenerate the organs, even slowed by the gorsian shackles.

Night.

The female voice echoed across the starlit sea. Like a lighthouse shining in the distance.

Night.

Here, there was no escape from her voice. If he roused himself, the pain would wash over the raft and he’d drown in it. So he had no choice but to listen, to drift toward that beacon.

Gods, what did he do to you?

Anger and grief filled the question as it came from all around him, from inside him.

Ruhn managed to say, Nothing you haven’t done a thousand times yourself.

Then she stood there with him, on his raft. Lidia. Fire streamed off her body, but he could see her perfect face. The most beautiful female he’d ever seen. A flawless mask over a rotted heart.

His enemy. His lover. The soul he’d thought was—

She knelt and extended a hand toward him. I’m so sorry.

Ruhn shifted beyond her reach. As much movement as he could manage, even here. Something like agony flashed in her eyes, but she didn’t try to touch him again.

He must have been killed today. Or come close to it, if she was here. If he had no defenses left and she’d broken through that mental wall for the first time since he’d learned who she was.

What had they done to Cormac to render him irrevocably dead?

He couldn’t stop the memory from flooding him, of sitting beside Cormac in that bar before they went to the Eternal City, of that one moment he thought he’d glimpsed the person his cousin might have been. The friend Cormac might have become, if he hadn’t been systematically stripped of kindness by King Morven.

It shouldn’t have been a shock to Ruhn, that the two kings had disowned their sons. Though one king had fire in his veins and the other shadows, Einar and Morven were more alike than anyone realized.

Ruhn had always held some scrap of hope that his father saw the Asteri for what they truly were, and that if it ever came down to it, his father would make the right choice. That the orrery in his study, the years spent looking for patterns in light and space … that it had meant something larger. That it wasn’t simply the idle studying of a bored royal who needed to feel more important in the grand scheme of things than he actually was.

That hope was dead. His father was a spineless fucking coward.

Ruhn, Lidia said, and he hated the sound of his name on her lips. He hated her. He turned on his side, putting his back to her.

I understand why you’re angry, why you must hate me, she began hoarsely. Ruhn, the … the things I’ve done … I need you to understand why I did them. Why I’ll keep doing them.

Save your sob story for someone who gives a shit.

Ruhn, please.

The raft groaned, and he knew she was reaching for him again. But he couldn’t bear that touch, the pleading in her voice, the emotion that no one else in the world but him had ever heard from the Hind.

So Ruhn said, Fuck your excuses. And rolled off that mental raft to let the sea of pain drown him.