“A week. We’ve been keeping a safe distance and tracking your destruction. You were one-track minded on a journey to get here,” Clay sighs while kneeling to the ground.
“Fuck,” Hale exasperates, and he pulls me to his body as I continue to let my tears slide.
“The army who faced us?” he continues.
“Araya obliterated everyone and everything you didn’t get to. It was the most surreal demonstration of power I’ve ever witnessed.”
I shiver as I think of the overwhelming mounds of power that had surged through me. I never felt like I even scraped the surface of my abilities either. There’s more in me I don’t really know how to use, and I’m glad my savage doesn’t know how to use it either. I can’t tell them that though. They’re scared enough.
“Have you been in Cheyenne yet?” Hale asks.
“We were waiting on you to come down before we got too close.”
“We?”
Several trucks begin driving toward us along with hummers and cars - all of them heavily armed and armored. Brazen steps toward us, and his eyes connect with mine without fear despite the chaos I personally unleashed.
“You okay now?” he asks with uncertainty.
“Let’s not discuss me right now,” I grumble while turning to face Cheyenne’s hidden chambers of misery. “Let’s just get this over with.”
Brazen and Clay take lead as Hale and I follow behind.
“Is Angelica okay?” Hale asks warily.
“Not really. She has been in and out of savage over the past few days. With the loss of her… well… let’s just say she’s hurting pretty badly right now. Grayson is doing an excellent job with her though,” Clay murmurs softly, and I see the turmoil growing in Brazen’s face as his jaw clenches.
He still doesn’t understand all of this. Of course, I don’t either. Us talking about Grayson and Angelica forces him to focus on Hale and me. Hale’s grip tightens on my hand as we near the steel tomb of painful memories, and I cringe the moment I see the crack I’ve apparently made during my savage episode - or perhaps it was Hale. Who knows at this point?
“It appears we have a better point of weakness now,” Clay asserts, and Brazen starts lacing the crack with his own concoction of explosions.
We all step back before the violent bursts ring out, and the chunks fly past us as they collapse to the ground with exhausted thuds. The dust rolls free from the debris left behind, and it hides the dark promise of the tainted secrets that have been sealed for centuries.
“You don’t have to go in,” Hale murmurs as I step through the broken wall.
This place is a maze. You’ll need help finding that room again,” I strain out as my body trembles beneath me.
I feel his concern for me seeping through his grip on my hand, and I cling to him as though I’m terrified of each corner we round. I am terrified.
The walls seem to whisper to me as they remind me of the days I spent in this hell. I shiver over and over to the point I can’t stop. Brazen’s breaths mimic Hale’s as they both watch my every tortured move. It’s dark, but I don’t need light to find my way.
I spent years blindfolded, gagged, and bound while being drug through these corridors. My destination was always the same. It would be harder to find it in the light since my eyes were rarely ever uncovered.
The whips are dangling like morbid decorations along the hallways - their uranium tips stained by the blood of so many of us. The scent of cigars is no longer there, but I can smell them as if they are. The walls bear the shadows of the expelled screams that painted the halls, and the stench of fear and death mingle with the absent cigars that burned the flesh on all of us.
I rub my face with my free hand as my mind flashes back to the numerous times I suffered those burns. My body would be scrubbed down with the uranium scrub that opened up my youthful, less resilient skin to their torture tactics. They would hover over me as the devil played in their pale eyes. They reveled in my screams, and I would fight to suppress them in order to deny them their sadistic pleasure.
The wall separates us from the room I haven’t stepped foot in since the day my gifts were revealed. I take a deep breath as Clay taps it three times. The familiar sound of the rock sliding on rock echoes in my ears to send the haunting chills all over me. The room almost screams at me to wash it free from its tortured memories. The stench of death rolls out to slap me in the face. Years of tortured memories flood back at once, and I almost feel the cuts, the stabs, the unfathomable pain as though it’s happening all over again.
My head starts spinning wildly out of control as the masked faces and pale eyes stare down at me, strapping me tighter to that damn table in front of my eyes. They open me up, take a look inside my body to see how I like surgery while conscious. I scream inside my own mind, praying for the vicious memories to cease. Their cold hands go inside my chest to grip my heart in their hand. They squeeze too tight, and it tries to explode under their grasp. They don’t want me dead though, they want me alive so I can scream. They want me to feel what terrible things their maliciously warped sadistic minds are concocting.
I feel myself growing sick as I double over in front of the room, my knees giving out completely as I expel all the contents of my stomach in the hallway.
“Shit, Araya. Let’s get out of here,” Hale urges as he scoops me up.
I just lean into him while nestling my head into his chest, and the gentle pale eyes show genuine worry as we pass by Brazen. The jaded air is almost suffocating me as the starchy room draws out my breath from behind.
Hale’s lips press against my forehead to bring me back from hell, and I snuggle into him as the marching feet pass us by to join them in the room of torture’s pride.
