SEVENTEEN
Day seven in hell.
As warm water ran over her underwear-clad body, Lila rolled her head on her neck. She’d just taken the edge off with a quick orgasm—her first since arriving here—while trying to avoid thoughts of Abyssian.
But the ring was a constant reminder.
She glared at it. “Fucker.” Healing wasn’t unwelcome—all of her bruises, burns, and abrasions had mended—but she had no idea what other spells the ring might carry.
Plus it felt like a mark of possession, a tiny slave collar.
Despite her healing, she was fading overall. Her head ached, her muscles were stiff from sleeping on the floor, and she still hadn’t eaten. Nor had she figured out an escape. Which meant she didn’t know enough.
She raised her face and rinsed her mouth. Perhaps she shouldn’t antagonize the demon king—a source of information—if he returned?
She exited the makeshift shower, wringing her hair out, and almost stepped on an encroaching runner of fire vine. Before long, she would be hemmed in at the center of the tower.
Yesterday she’d used the edge of a food tray to sever a branch, and four more had taken its place, like a hydra’s head.
How to defeat it? As she pondered solutions, she scratched another slash on the wall to mark her captivity.
Two spiders poked out from holes to watch her.
They no longer terrified her, thanks to her immersion therapy. She’d named that pair Chip and Dale and fed them jellyfish-soup-creature-thingies.
None of the others would approach her, still pissy because of her venom harvesting.
How different life here was from her life in Sylvan Castle when she had strolled out to her private garden and coaxed fawns to eat lilies from her hand. She must be missing her home badly; she’d dreamed of a deer last night.
In her reverie, she’d been sprinting circles in the tower when a fawn came bounding into the courtyard, its tiny hooves clickety-clacking on the stone floor.
Bits of grass had dotted its muzzle, the young fawn still a clumsy forager. Lila had gazed around, mystified by how it’d gotten into a tower with no doors. And what would a woodland creature be doing in hell?
She’d breathlessly eased closer to it, inching out a hand. . . . Just as she’d been about to pet its head, it’d disappeared.
Was her subconscious trying to tell her about a possible exit from this place?
Focus, Lila. Fire vine. She began to pace. The threat of the vine was like a puzzle devised to test her. How to conquer a poisonous vine that spread nonstop but couldn’t be cut?
Maybe she could build a stone barricade out of the remaining relics. A bulwark of raunchy statues. Lovely.
The ancient inscriptions on the walls were just as dirty as those statues. She’d read some, everything from She seized his horns, guiding his mouth to her nether lips, demanding the wonder of his tongue to In a frenzy of possessiveness, he rubbed his aching horns all over her breasts, marking her with his scent to Licking the pierced head, she sucked him greedily, awaiting the heat of his promised seed.
Judging by the bulk of them she’d read, demons were obsessed with horns, claws, piercings, and—
A loud splashing sound carried from the lava river below.
She meandered around vines to the edge of the terrace. At least the ash had started to settle outside. She hadn’t coughed a single time today, and the foreboding feeling of this place had lifted somewhat.
She gazed over the railing. Blinked.
A dragon—multiple times bigger than any she’d ever seen—was swimming in the lava. Metallic blue-gold scales covered its gargantuan body, and two rows of black horns protruded from its head.
Must be Uthyr, one of the Møriør. If he was visiting, would the baneblood archer show up here too?
She rubbed her hand over her chest. After her dream of the fawn, she’d had yet another nightmare about the fey-slayer.
The dragon took a mouthful of lava and spurted it up like a fountain.
Dragons. Swimming in lava. Of course.
This demonic world was foreign to her, but by all the gods, she would figure out how to survive here until she could escape.
She would adapt. She always did. When she’d been cast into the mortal realm with only a bag of clothes and a Book of Lore, Lila had been as good as doomed.
Until she’d figured it the fuck out.
She’d learned to live without luxuries and order and servants. Without knowing where her next meal would come from. Without any promise of safety.
Fearing human detection, she’d learned to accept her loneliness and pour her energies into educating herself.
At fifteen, she’d finagled a way to buy the one tool she’d coveted: an ID. After that, she’d set about exploiting weaknesses in the mortals’ financial and social structure to pay for her education.
Just as Lila had promised Saetth, she flourished with every hardship she survived, like the fire vine that grew with each cut—
Her eyes went wide. That’s it! Suddenly she knew how to defeat the vine.
She laughed at the solution, stamping her feet. By not defeating it at all. . . .