Burnt Devotion (Imdalind, #5)

“I am not speaking of the fire,” he soured, his voice trailing over my spine like ice.

I flinched at the sound, almost expecting what was coming, and glared into the space before me.

“I am speaking of the fire magic. I am speaking of the destruction our dear Wyn has caused.”

He might as well have been looking at a woman. It wasn’t the destruction he admired as I had assumed. It was the power. Or, more specifically, the power that laid inside of a woman. A woman I had already known him to lust after for far longer than would have been deemed appropriate.

I rolled my eyes as my chest tensed, my irritation growing as I turned toward my father. The dark curls that had loosened themselves from the slicked-back style he normally had fell over the piercing blue eyes that looked into me the moment I turned.

I flinched at the emotion and hatred behind them. The jolt of my fear was subtle, but still apparent enough he had noticed, a reaction that only caused him to smile more.

“I must have it.” The greed dripped off him as he took a step closer, his bulky frame coming level with mine.

I could not stop the eyebrow from rising or the twitch of my lip as I smiled at him. That was it? After everything, after failing to kill or capture any of them, after losing track of them and losing more than two hundred of the vile bats he had spent centuries creating, he wanted me to capture Wyn, to bring him her heart.

There had to be more. There always was.

My back tensed as I waited, watching him for some sign of what was coming. He only stood in the darkness of his greed. The vile emotion colored his face until, looking into him, I felt like I was looking into my own death.

“I suppose you want me to get it for you.” My tone was harsh, expectant even. I was treading carefully, waiting for the ice of his lies to crack, leaving the painful shards to press against me.

Before the question had even left my mouth, he began to smile, the wicked gleam of his greed stretching his face into a maniacal grin that was more sinister than before. Unbidden fear trickled down my spine, though I kept the malice on my face, unwilling to let him see my reaction.

His smile grew until I could see the rows of his white teeth, his eyes flashing red for the briefest of moments as he took a step closer. Then his hand wound around my waist as he pulled me toward him, the tips of his fingers pressing into the base of my spine.

My shirt lifted at the touch, the icy chill of his fingers pressing into my back, rubbing against the painful scars that ran the length of my spine. I would have tried to move away, to stop what was coming, but there wasn’t any point. He controlled me.

Moreover, after so many years, I had come to love what he had done to me—the pockets of poison that he had placed against my spine and the power they gave me when he released it into my blood stream.

His fingers pressed against the raised skin that ignited in memorized flames as his magic surged through them, filling the scar tissue and releasing the toxins enough to ignite within me, to cause the infectious fire to spread quickly.

A hiss of pain and fear seeped through my clenched teeth at the surge of power, his smile growing as he watched me writhe in a mad attempt to fight the venom, as he held me against him as one would a lover. To him, though, it was only control. It was only for a better view to watch me become what he had created.

My head fell back as the pain grew, the Vil? venom and black water seeping into me in an acidic burn.

It was a mixture that he had created just for me, a poisonous concoction he had pooled inside my bones, wrapped in his magic to control, to use me in any way he saw fit. Ilyan had thought it was only a scar, only the cut of a knife that Edmund had carved down my spine, but it was so much more than that.

He released the poison into me as my body became limp in his arms, my eyes staring unfocused at the orchestra of light and sound above us, my mind becoming a numb mass as any scream I might have thought of releasing lodged itself in my throat.

“Of course I want you to get it for me,” he growled, his animalistic voice rumbling in my ear as he pressed his lips against my jaw, the heavy breathing of his anger only increasing the tension in my muscles. “But, if you for one second think that is all I am going to do to you after what you have done today, you are sorely mistaken.”

His words came out like daggers against my skin. Then he shook my limp body violently in his arms before he dropped me, leaving me to crumple to the ground as the caustic poison ran its course. Fire ate away at the soft tissue of my body, leaving me weak and pained as I lay in the ash covered ground, the heat from the earth seeping into me in a slow burn.

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