Perhaps I was.

I needed to get my hands on that amulet.

A much grimmer thought followed the first: it had been Mallucé who’d so brutally killed all those people. How had Barrons summed it up? Whoever, whatever killed the guards and staff that night did it with either the detached sadism of a pure sociopath, or immense rage.

So, what was I dealing with? Sociopath or hair trigger? Neither boded well for me. I might be able to manipulate a hair trigger. I wasn’t sure anyone could survive a sociopath.

Mallucé stood, turned, withdrew a delicately embroidered handkerchief from the voluminous folds of his robe, and dabbed at his chin. Then he smiled, baring his fangs.

“How does your wrist feel, bitch?”

It had been feeling better actually, until he broke it again.

I’m going to leave a little to your imagination now.

Although it may not seem like it, this isn’t a story about darkness. It’s about light. Kahlil Gibran says Your joy can fill you only as deeply your sorrow has carved you. If you’ve never tasted bitterness, sweet is just another pleasant flavor on your tongue. One day I’m going to hold a lot of joy.

Bottom line is Mallucé didn’t want me dead. Not yet. He knew many inventive ways to cause pain without doing permanent, debilitating injury. He wanted me to anticipate the horrors he had planned for me, more than he wanted to begin those horrors, so I would feel the same helpless terror he’d endured. All those weeks he’d lain in his lair, fighting the poison in his body, he’d planned my death in exacting detail, and now he meant to take a long time enacting it. Only after he’d hurt me as much as he could without disfiguring me would the maiming begin. For every piece he’d lost, he told me, I would lose a piece. He had a doctor on hand to tidy up after his barbaric surgeries, to keep me alive.

I was going to be as insane as him by the time we died.

He had two Unseelie restraining me at first. Eventually he sent them away, entered my cell, and began a more personal assault. He seemed to feel we had a special, intimate bond. He talked incessantly while he hurt me, told me things that didn’t penetrate my pain-muddied mind, but might later, in clearer waters, resurface, and I realized he really had passed a great deal of time having conversations with me in his head. His words had been rehearsed, and were delivered with impeccable timing for maximum horrific impact. The vampire Mallucé, with his Addams Family Goth mansion, his steampunk clothes, and his seductive, fanged portrayal of Death, had always been a showman and I was his final, captive audience. He was determined that his last show would be his greatest. Before he was done with me, he told me, I would cling to him, seek succor from him, beg him for comfort, even as he destroyed me.

There is torture and there is psychological torture. Mallucé was a master of both.

I was holding up. I wasn’t screaming too much. Yet. I was clinging tenaciously to the side of a tiny lifeboat of optimism in my sea of pain. I was telling myself that everything would be all right, that Mallucé might have taken my cuff, but he would never discard a relic that might prove useful to him somehow, especially not an ancient one, worth money. I assured myself that he’d tossed it in a cave nearby and that Barrons would track it, and find me. The pain would stop. I wouldn’t die here. My life wasn’t over.

Then he dropped the bomb on me.

With a leprous smile, his face so close to mine that the putrid odor of rotting flesh nearly choked me, he sank my lifeboat, drove it straight to the bottom of the sea. He told me to forget about Barrons, if that was my hope, if that was what was keeping me from succumbing to mindless panic, because Barrons was never coming for me. Mallucé had seen to it himself when he’d stripped off my “clever little locator cuff” back in the alley where he’d run me to ground, along with my purse and clothing. He’d left it lying there, amid broken bottles and debris.

Hunters had flown us here; we’d left no trail on the ground to follow. Pure mercenaries that they were, Mallucé had outbid the Lord Master for their temporary services. There was no chance that Jericho Barrons or anyone else would ever find or rescue me. I was forgotten, lost to the world. It was him and me, alone, in the belly of the earth, until the bitter end.

Phrases like “belly of the earth” really get to me. The thought of my cuff lying back there in that alley, useless, got to me even worse. I was hours from Dublin, beneath tons of stone.

Mallucé was right; without the cuff, I would never be found, alive or dead. At least Mom and Dad had gotten a body back with Alina. Mine would never show up. What would it do to them, to lose their second daughter without a trace? I couldn’t bear to think about it.