The stiletto knife. She still had the small blade in the back of her pants, she could feel the hilt jabbing into her spine. She pinched it between her fingers.
“You’re going to torture me because you’re mad about our breakup. Do you realize what kind of psychotic, bunny-boiling asshole that makes you?” Slowly, she inched the knife from her belt, but she couldn’t get much leverage with her hands crushed beneath her.
“I’m not saying it won’t hurt, but we don’t call it torture, Rosalind. We’ve talked about this. It’s an interrogation.” He glanced at a small camera in the corner of the room. He crossed to it, covering the lens with a small cloth. “It may get a bit unconventional, so I don’t want any of this recorded. But it will be an interrogation, nonetheless. I do hope you’ll be as willing to share with me as you once were. Did you know that your information led to Miranda’s capture?” He raised the legs of the chair on to a cinderblock, so they were now higher than her head. As much as she dreaded what was coming next, this position made it easier for her to move the knife, since her hands were no longer pinioned.
“The sea-witch I told you about,” she said through labored breaths. Slowly, she inched the knife up and down against the knots.
Josiah picked up the watering can. “She looks so much like you. I enjoyed breaking her. Though, I’m not sure she was sane to begin with.”
Rage flowed through Rosalind like molten lava. She wanted to crush him.
She cut a glance to Caine, who remained still as a statue, watching. In a room rigged with iron dust, his magic was useless here.
As she rubbed the knife’s blade against the rope, Josiah pulled a dark hood over her face, and her heart rate sped up. She knew how this worked. It made it easier to torture people when you couldn’t see their faces. Right now, the spotlight still penetrated the cloth, but that wouldn’t last long. Next, Josiah would wrap her head with a towel, shrouding her vision in darkness.
She’d watched him do it to the incubus. She didn’t want to think of the demon’s name, but as Josiah blotted out the light with the second cloth, it came to her anyway: Malphas. Fair-haired, but with gray eyes just like Caine’s. Josiah had staked him earlier that night. The hawthorn wood had still protruded from his shoulder when Josiah brought Rosalind into the cell. His pale eyes had looked so tormented, and she’d wanted to yank it out, but Josiah had stayed her hand.
I can’t think about that now. She needed to focus on getting the hell out of there. Josiah was drawing this out, enjoying her panic. When she’d said humans didn’t enjoy torture, that they only acted tactically, she’d been lying to herself completely.
Still, the longer Josiah drew this out, the better chance she had to get herself out of here.
Her heart galloped in her chest, and she slid the knife against the knots.
Maybe she deserved this, after what she’d done to Malphas. Josiah had told her that the incubus had brutally raped and murdered three women just days before. He’d said that the demon had left their naked, broken bodies in a Walden Woods. There were the pictures of three brutalized corpses, shown to Rosalind in the cell as she stood just inches from the incubus.
As she’d stared at them in horror, Malphas had eyed her evenly, his breath rasping. He hadn’t said a word.
Josiah had done all the talking: “That’s what an incubus will do if you ever get near one. This monster would tear you to pieces if we let him free.”
The pictures of the broken corpses had twisted her gut with disgust.
After Josiah had wrapped the demon’s head with the towel, he’d told Rosalind to pour the water over his face. All part of her training. She was too soft, apparently, since she made the fatal mistake of viewing demons as humans instead of as cold, sadistic predators. In a fight for survival, there was no room for gray areas.
She scraped the knife against the rope.
It was too late by the time she realized Josiah had a bad habit of passing on shitty information. There was every chance that Malphas had never been anywhere near those girls.
The watering can scraped across the floor as Josiah shifted it, and fear rushed through her body. She’d gotten nowhere with the ropes. You couldn’t seriously cut through a thick rope by slowly rubbing a blade against it—