We Hunt the Flame(106)

“Nasir!” Zafira shouted.

He lifted his head. Her first time addressing him by name and she wasn’t even looking at him.

Shackles of steel clamped around his wrists. He was lifted as if he were no more than a sack. Something told him he should struggle. Fight. Try to break free. But the darkness, the shadows. The very thing he feared.

He

had

become it.

This was his affinity. The reason for his vision darkening every time he lost control of himself. He could wield the dark as if it belonged to him. His arms were wrenched upward. The click of a lock echoed in his ears, and then he was hanging on the wall beside her, shadows dripping from him.

Darkness is my destiny. His father was right.

It leaked like smoke from his fingers, from his lips when he exhaled, from him.

His eyes fell to the ifrit on the ground, stunned he could see a face, a form. Almost as if the creature were wholly human. It was the Demenhune. Deen. His torso was riddled with her white arrows, and black blood oozed from the wounds, the only sign he was an ifrit. Nasir knew blood and torture as well as his own name, but as Zafira pulled at her chains and begged them to stop, he felt a helplessness bordering on insanity.

“There’s been a change of plan,” the man said as he studied Nasir. He gestured to the bloodied ifrit. “Clean him up. I may still have need of him.”

Against the backdrop of her screams and the creature’s moans, two other ifrit pulled him—it—away.

“Fear becomes you, Prince,” the man said.

Nasir stared numbly. He had failed. Failed like the mutt that he was. Failed like the brainless boy his father claimed him to be. His father, who might be controlled by the man before him but was right about many things.

Her dark crown was coming undone, a snake coiling around her. Her arms were chafed in red, and the ring swayed with her labored breathing.

“Huntress,” he said, and something cracked in that pit where his heart should be. “It’s not real.”

She only wheezed. He made sense of the word she chanted over and over and over. Deen. Deen. Deen.

“Zafira,” he said gently, unable to savor this moment of whispering her name aloud for the first time.

She stilled and looked at him. Twin scythes of weeping ice.

“It’s not real,” he repeated, the words faltering on his tongue. The spirals of black escaping him were very, very real.

“Who are you to claim what is real and what is not?” the man asked. Nasir dragged his gaze to him. He was cloaked in darkness. His very words dripped with it. Darkness incarnate. “When your own mother holds enough secrets to bring you to your knees?”

Nasir only understood half of what the man said. The other half was obscured by the black bleeding from him.

Some semblance of the Huntress returned when she groaned, “Stop with the riddles, Lion.”

“For you, azizi,” he simpered.

Nasir went very, very still. The man shifted his amber eyes to him.

He’s alive. That was his first thought. He’s been alive all this time. He remembered Benyamin’s claim of a darkness festering in Ghameq, and Nasir understood the familiarity in those eyes.

He had looked into them every time he looked at his father.

No wonder Ghameq knew of Benyamin and Kifah.

“Bring me a knife,” the Lion of the Night murmured. But when he studied Nasir’s unflinching gaze, he smiled, and the shadows stirred in excitement. “Laa, bring me the poker. The Huntress must know I am not lax with my promises.”





CHAPTER 72


As much as she had wished he wouldn’t come, Zafira couldn’t quell a small echo of elation when the prince arrived. She was a little less alone now, a little less lost. Even if he was strung up beside her. Exhaling shadows.

“Will you bring me the Jawarat, azizi?” the Lion asked her in his soft murmur.

She clenched her jaw, and he read her clearly enough.

An ifrit brought him the poker, the steel rod black and unassuming. The Lion gripped it in his palm and set his cool gaze on Nasir.

And Zafira watched as the aloof prince came undone. Fissures in his wide gray eyes, a tremor across his parted lips. The shadows wept from his form, and a sound tore from his mouth.

A cry.

A cry.

She didn’t understand. Not even when the Lion pressed the poker into the fire and drawled a word. “Pathetic.”

Nasir flinched. The crown prince, who washed blood from his hands like soot from a fire, flinched. His breathing grew labored and he shrank back at the sound of the metal swooping across the dry air.

The scars on his back.

That senseless torture. The ridiculing word.

“Don’t,” Zafira said. She choked on the word, and the Lion canted his head at her. The prince stilled. “Please.”

“Touching,” the Lion purred. “Did you expect me to stop because you were polite?”

She felt the heat of the poker as he drew close, Nasir’s ragged breathing harsh in her ears. Her desperation burned, and she gave in. “I’ll bring you the Jawarat.”

Anything to make the prince stop shaking.

“Ah, but I would be loath to place my trust in a mortal. Let me propose something else: Until you bring me the Jawarat, I will keep him here. Continuing the rows of scars his father placed for him.” He furrowed his brow, looking at the prince. “Or was it I who did that? Pity, I’ve lost track.”