Sharding talons, Ezaara looked as if she meant it.
Zens paused mid-stride, cocking his head.
Roberto held his breath. What was going on?
Baring his teeth, Zens snarled, “You despise me.” His voice turned as hard as flint. “You profess your love verbally, while secretly thinking I’m despicable.” Without warning, he flicked his hand and Ezaara slammed into the granite wall head first with a nauseating crunch. She landed with her neck at an odd angle.
Gods, was she dead? A black hole ripped through Roberto’s chest. As he struggled to contain his horror, his barricade against Zens disintegrated.
Zens loomed in his mind, stripping away his defenses, laying his emotions bare. “So, you love her? Let’s torture her some more.”
“No,” Roberto yelled, the chains gnawing his flesh as he strained to get free. Not the two people he loved most. The only family he had.
Zens flung his hand out. Roberto flew into the air. His chains strained, threatening to snap their fixtures out of the wall.
“Love the Queen’s Rider, do you?” Zens sneered. “And I thought I’d cured you of weak emotions.”
“Cured me?”
“Surely, having your father beat you prevented you from trusting people, Roberto?” Zens spun him a half turn in the air, his voice worming its way through the caverns of self-doubt the commander had carved through his soul years before. “Amato was clever, he hid Adelina’s existence from me, but, in a weak moment, he revealed he had another whelp. So, I forced him to beat her.” Zens laughed. “No one—not even his own flesh and blood—came between us. I mastered him, making him murder his own wife.”
Amato had tried to stand up to Zens and failed. He’d always assumed his father had been an eager accomplice. A chill skittered down Roberto’s spine. Zens was a monster.
“Your father loved you, until I cured him of it.”
He did remember his father loving him. But what good had it done him? Under Zens’ power, Amato had killed the woman he loved, and driven his littlings to hate him.
What hope did Roberto have against Zens? At a young age, the commander had infiltrated his mind, training him to torture others mentally, to kill slaves, turning him into a powerful pawn. Gods, would he never be free of Zens’ legacy? One day, would he, too, destroy the people he loved?
Zens’ eyes gleamed fanatically. He flicked his wrist and Roberto spun around in mid-air, flat on his back, the chains twisting around each other as he whirled, making a thick umbilical cord to the wall. As he spun, the chains tightened, yanking him lower.
The commander laughed. “000, look at him. Hung in my web like a fly.”
He kept Roberto spinning. The cave and its occupants became a blur. Zens’ laugh reverberated off the walls, sounding like a thousand madmen. Roberto’s gut heaved. He retched its meager contents over the floor. The chains tightened excruciatingly, getting thicker and shorter, as Zens reeled him in.
He had to pretend he was subservient. It was his only chance. Spinning faster and faster, Roberto shut his eyes, trying to feign defeat. “Zens, please forgive me for leaving you. I’ll do anything you want.”
“Forgiveness is not in my nature. Ask my parents.” Zens twirled Roberto until the chain was a bundle of twisted metal.
Roberto’s body slammed into the wall, the chains biting into his back. He buried his thoughts. It’d be dangerous if Zens knew he’d understood the quip about his parents—that he’d seen Zens’ memory of murdering them.
Zens turned to Ezaara—still prone on the granite floor. Beyond her, Adelina lay, scratches on her throat still gleaming red.
Not Ezaara, not again. Zens stretched out his hand, lifting it. Her body didn’t budge.
Was she dead? She couldn’t be, or Zens would’ve tossed her like a sack of flour.
What was going on? Roberto didn’t dare mind-meld with her. To keep his thoughts shielded from Zens, he examined his chains. His wrist and ankle were bloody and torn where the shackles had burrowed into his flesh. The chain was bunched in a tangled mess behind him, but the fixtures attaching the chains to the wall were now loose.
While Zens was occupied with Ezaara, Roberto stood. Body aching, he slowly turned until the chains were untangled. Then he hobbled back and forward, straining at the loose fixtures on the wall, playing the part of an agitated lover.
§
Zens radiated sickly yellow sathir, infected with an energy Ezaara had never seen. It felt wrong, unclean. Was this what gave him his formidable mental powers?
Her neck ached. She’d landed that way, but deliberately kept it at an odd angle, so Zens would think she was incapacitated. The cool stone chilled her back. She drilled down with her mind, focusing on the heaviness of the granite—its gray sluggish sathir, barely detectable, but there. She sucked the heaviness into her, desperately trying to become one with the massive immovable force.
Zens approached, boots scraping the granite. He flicked his hand again.
Heavy. Heavy as rock. Sweat broke out on Ezaara’s brow. Her flesh was stone. She was granite. Immovable. Zens battered at her. Her mind was a wall of rock. Her body, married to the granite.
Regular footfalls and clanking sounded behind her. Roberto, pacing. Out of the corner of her eye, Adelina stirred—her eyes flitted around the cavern, then drooped again—pretending.
Zens tugged.
Ezaara resisted. Something had changed: Roberto was pacing further than before. An extra step at the end of his route. He was up to something. She had to keep Zens distracted.
“Triple, support me,” Zens snapped.
000 lumbered over, grabbing Zens’ hand. Eyes drilling into her, they stared, jaws tight, dark saliva running down 000’s tusks.
A tidal wave slammed into
