Part 31 (2/2)

She had no memory of choosing to live.

She had nodded. She remembered nodding. But had it been her body spasming for air, her will to survive subverting her mind? Could Lucifer have been moving her head himself?

Aurora began to scream inside her dream. Because she didn't know. She didn't know if she had chosen. Or if he had chosen. Or if she had even known that she was choosing.

But she knew that she had never known what the choice truly was.

”He did this to me!” she screamed.

Silently.

And then she woke up, panting, gasping. She no longer needed the air, but her remembered self had needed it so desperately that she could almost feel her lungs burning.

She swung her feet over the edge of the bed, but didn't get up. She sat there, staring into the darkened room, remembering that night so long ago.

The night he had freed her.

When in truth he had enslaved her.

Rage and hatred and fear coursed through her. But in the end the fear won. He had thought her a fighter, but in his presence she was too afraid to fight. So she manipulated, schemed, seduced.

Her dark and glorious lord was far darker than she had let herself remember.

”And what were you thinking so hard about just now?” Lucifer asked suddenly from beside her.

She stiffened. She had never even heard him enter the room. She lowered her eyes, terrified that he might read the truth in their depths.

”I was thinking of you, and how overpowering my love for you is.”

”Ah.”

She licked her lips and continued. ”Deeper than an ocean, higher than a mountain,” she babbled, and what was worse, it sounded like some horrific song lyric. She hoped it wasn't. That would just be the most degrading thing ever.

More degrading than being locked in that cell, forced to choose?

She shook her head sharply, trying to dislodge the voice that seemed to mock her.

”What?” he asked.

”Words escape me to tell you how much I love you,” she said, fighting to hide the tremor in her voice.

He placed a finger underneath her chin. ”And what will you do, my darling, to prove this great love?”

Aurora felt the icy hand of fear on her even as she forced herself to smile up at him. Only one answer sprang to mind, and she went with it. ”Why, bring you the traitor Antonio, of course.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

Blood on neck, blood on hands

b.l.o.o.d.y wounds across the lands

The scars we leave will never heal

The tortured pain you'll always feel

And count your blessings yet you must

We could have left you ashes and dust

For life itself is the cruelest game

And played by us, ne'er twice the same

TRANSYLVANIA.

JENN, ANTONIO, HOLGAR, NOAH, FATHER JUAN, AND ESTHER.

”The natives are restless,” Jenn tried to joke, as wolf howls echoed through the monastery dining room. They'd been keeping it up since sunset. Her teeth were on edge. It was a couple of nights until the full moon, but apparently Viorica's werewolf pack was getting a head start.

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