Her brow furrowed. I could feel her body literally disagreeing with me. “No, give him everything outside the room. I’m telling you, he doesn’t need to hold on to this very long. They can stay with me outside the room, but I at least need to go that far. Ivan can put his bubble up and cut me off from hearing anything.” I glanced to Misha, who confirmed what she’d just said.
She glanced back at Stephen. “Do you want to do it now?”
“No time like the present to go fumbling through the dark,” Stephen said, grinning at her. She looked at everyone else, who were all in agreement to make it happen now.
“Do you want my hatred for Giana too? I mean, I want to make sure you have enough material,” Misha asked, grinning at Stephen.
I/2
Outside the room where we kept Armando, Ivan told the guards to take a very long break, then cut the cameras off once they were gone. Sephie still felt nervous, but also determines). On the elevator down, I caught her silently talking to Andrei. They had a signal they gave each other to indicate the other should fish in their head. Once we were outside the room, she glanced at him, then looked at Stephen. “Yoden, I’m really sorry for what I’m about to give you,” she said. She looked at falters me, then to Ivan. “If he there, do what you did with me the other night with Ilya. He might not, because he can handle cold much easier than I can, but just in case, you need to send him everything right away.” She looked at Stephen, saying, “if you do falter, it’s going to come after you as last-ditch effort. Let them protect you the same way they would me. It’s going to feel like you get hit with a wall of fire, but just remember to breathe.”
She stepped away from me, taking Stephen’s hand and puling him with her. She dropped his hand and took in a deep breath. “Give me a second,” she said, closing her eyes.
I could feel everything she was going through as she relived everything with mando. It was brief, but it was intense. All the fear, the betrayal, the heartbreak both for her and for Giana, the anger, she went through all of it trying to contain it to give it to Stephen. “I’m sorry,” she said as she grabbed his hand. let
Stephen doubled over like someone had just suc ker punched him in the stomach, letting out something between a loud exhale and a groan. She didn’t go of his hand, trying to help him stay upright. I could see tears streaming down her face as she watched him feel everything she had felt. He sucked in a sharp breath, standing up. His face was red and his eyes were somewhat wild. It almost looked like his bloodlust was coming to the surface. It took him a moment of holding onto Sephie before he finally gained some of his composure back. He looked to Misha, saying, “I’ve got plenty, dude. We’ll figure out what to do with your hatred for Giana later.”
Sephie tried to smile, but it only made more tears fall. He looked back at her putting his hand on her cheek. “Don’t worry, Seph. I can handle it. You shouldn’t have to anymore,” he said, kissing her forehead. He glanced at me and motioned toward the room where Armando was being kept.
Ivan walked to Sephie, wrapping his massive arms around her. I watched her hide her face in his chest as we closed the door behind us. Once she was out of sight, I let my anger take over. Stephen needed it to break Armando and I wanted Armando’s last conscious moments to be nothing but terror as he looked at my black eyes.
Adrik
Armando’s eyes got wider as he took in the sight before him. Stephen was intimidating in his own right when his bloodlust took over. Then you add in me and I’m surprised Armando didn’t p iss himself. I had been keeping him restrained, mostly just because I still had moments where I couldn’t get the image of Sephie with her wrists tied behind her out of my head and I wanted him to know that discomfort as long as possible.
I would give him periodic breaks from it. Just when he got used to not being restrained, that’s when I’d have him tied to the chair again for days on end. His memory had never been the best. I wanted to make sure he could easily remember the feeling.
Now, however, he was on a break. He was free to move away from us, but his fisir kept him firmly in place. He was frozen in the chair, his eyes shifting nervously from me to Stephen and back again. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out.
Stephen was staying remarkably calm, despite struggling with everything Seph had just given him. He walked closer to Armando, “Do you want to know what’s about to happen?” he asked. Anytime Stephen would use psychology as a weapon, his voice got a certain tone to it. Almost like he was mocking the person, but in the most sinister way possible.
Armando kept looking between me and Stephen, which caused Stephen to glance back at me. “Oh, I know what you want to know first. You want to know why his eyes are black. Allow me to explain. You see, you made a deal with a demon. There’s a very slight chance you might not have known you did, as intelligence was never your strongest attribute, but it was ultimately because you’re so weak that you couldn’t fight off the evil. Either way, you have a demon that’s been riding you for years.” Armando kept looking at me while Stephen was talking. His eyes were pleading with me to save him as some part of him realized what was about to happen.
Stephen continued, “now you shouldn’t feel too bad about being such weak stace that a demon got in. Happens to lots of people. Happened to Boss, as a matter of fact. The only difference is, Boss made his demon work for him. Which makes him infinitely more powerful than you’ll ever be.” Stephen paused to let Armando comprehend what he’d just said. “See, your soul tried to take the easy way out of life. It tried to s kip ahead quite a few levels, but it did so in the most evil way possible. It meant that innocent people had to die, which can’t go unpunished. That’s where I come in. My job is to make sure your soul spends the rest of your very long life learning to never, ever do that again. I’m going to make sure neither one of you leave that body until that body dies from very, very old age.”
As Stephen was talking, I was watching Armando watching me. I couldn’t see his demon, but I knew it was there. I could feel it. I could feel when it took over and stepped forward. Armando’s eyes went black as well. If it caught Stephen off-guard, he didn’t show it. Armando laughed. He looked at Stephen, his expression dripping with hatred. “You’re not strong enough to do that,” he said. “You don’t have enough power to do that to me. You have no idea who I am.”
Stephen was quiet for a minute, like he was having second thoughts. He crossed his arms across his chest, looking at Armando. He walked right in front of him, bending down so he was eye-level to him, saying, “why do you think I brought him too, dum bass?”
When Armando realized the full meaning of what Stephen had just said, he tried to quickly get away from Stephen. Stephen anticipated it and caught Armando by the throat, throwing him back down in the chair. “Did I say you uld leave?” he asked, his anger now clearly visible. Armando coughed a few times, trying to weigh his options.
Stephen stepped back from Armando. He glanced quickly at me, then looked back at Armando. “Just as a courtesy, I’m going to give you something to keep you in your seat before we get started,” he said. I knew he was asking for my anger. I was more than happy to provide it.
Sephie had explained how she pushed her anger to Andrei and Misha when they fought Vitaliy’s guys. She was right. It was more difficult to send to anyone other than her. My anger was a complete raging inferno but I saw Stephen’s sly grin turn up one side of his mouth when he felt it.
I watched as Armando’s eyes changed back to normal and a look of horror cane over his face. He was seeing something I couldn’t see. I wasn’t sure if Stephen could see it or not, but much like Stephen’s sisters, Armando was frozen in place. His hands gripped the arms of the chair he was in, like he was on the edge of a cliff trying to save himself. His knuckles turned white. Every muscle in his body tensed as he was trying to not see what was being shown to him.
Stephen took a deep breath, looking back to me once more. “That was just the warm-up. Keep it coming. It’s clearly working,” he said.
I cranked up the inferno as high as it would go and concentrated on pushing it all to Stephen. I always wondered if there was a limit to my anger. Would I ever hit the end of it? Would it run out? Judging by wha I was feeling at the moment, that answer was very clearly no. The more I concentrated on keeping my anger as high as possible, the more it responded and the hotter it burned.
I/2
Stephen turned back to Armando. One last time, we saw his eyes go black as his demon tried to think of a way out, but his body wasn’t responding to its demands. There was already a clear disconnect between Armando’s soul and his body. The demon was powerless. Stephen hit him with more memories from Sephie and Armando let out a blood-curdling scream. It was the last sound he made. As Stephen gave everything back to Armando that he’d done to Sephie, I could clearly see the light behind his eyes go out. There was nobody home any longer. Stephen turned back to me after a few moments. “It’s done,” he said, almost like he was surprised it had worked.
Surprisingly, my anger dissipated easily. Almost instantly, even. Stephen caught my look of surprise and laughed. “I’m as surprised as you that all that went away so quickly,” he said. “You’ve never been so angry before. I could’ve broken ten Armando’s and you still would’ve had plenty leftover.”
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.