Read Online Blood Witch by Thea Atkinson - Free Book Online Page A

how
pleasurable that release was. She noticed Corrin's slow grin of
satisfaction and wanted to see him dead right then.
    "Come, then," Yuri
said and started out of the bathhouse in purposeful strides that
gave Alaysha a short moment of panic that she would be left alone
inside again. It wasn't until she felt Yenic take her left side and
she could smell the sweat on him from the insult to his body that
she felt as though she could move. She wanted to reach out to him
and might have if Corrin hadn't pushed them both aside to catch up
to Yuri.
    Yuri stopped
abruptly, just where the bathhouse met the tunnel that snaked out
towards the entrance. Corrin stood next to him, waiting, until Yuri
looked over his shoulder at Alaysha.
    "Put him in the
chains."
    "Him? Corrin?"
    Yuri's brow
lifted. "Corrin? I thought you called him the carrion?"
    Alaysha would keep
his gaze. She would. She would not look down in the face of that
bald knowledge.
    Corrin backed up
before Alaysha could protest or agree. "You've lost your mind," he
told Yuri.
    "I have lost one
thing only, and it is not my mind." Yuri stepped closer to Corrin
whose face shifted from disbelief to panic. Strange how a man so
adept at offering pain could quake so. Yuri seemed oblivious to the
man's fear, and Alaysha could see how his own training was used to
great effect. He took in Alaysha's rigid posture, her dreams
realized, true, but a fearful thing to see occur nonetheless, and
he advanced on Corrin once more.
    "If you do not
retreat to those shackles, I will kill you right now."
    A sickening kind
of hope crept across Corrin's face. He knew he would not die in
this moment. Alaysha could have felt sorry for him until Yenic took
her hand. It was hot, too hot, and clammy with sweat. She didn't
have to look to the table next to those shackles to be reminded of
the tools that lay there waiting for use, to know how afraid he'd
been. How badly The Carrion wanted to use them.
    She lost her
pity.
    "Will you choose,
Corrin, or must I?" Yuri asked.
    Corrin shuffled
back into the cavern and stood waiting beneath the shackles.
    Yuri nodded at
Alaysha. "Bind him."
    Wordless, she did
as he told her. Corrin glared into her face, and although she
wouldn't take in his eyes, she knew they were filled with hate.
    "I was too easy on
you," he whispered.
    "My father would
have killed you otherwise."
    He chuckled low.
"Your father pretends he doesn't know how I trained you. Are you
truly that stupid?"
    She said nothing,
merely jerked his wrists into the manacles, stretched them, pinched
his fingers with the clamps.
    "Truth is," he
said. "I told him everything. How you wept. How your ribs sounded
when they cracked. How much you enjoyed our time together."
    She gathered spit.
How dare he? How dare he make her remember. She grabbed his chin
with her fingers to hold him fast, looked into his black eyes, and
sent the gob straight at him.
    "You can rot in
here," she said.
    He acted as though
the fluid wasn't there. "I would if he didn't need me so badly." He
chuckled. "You go with your boy. I'll just wait until Yuri returns
for me."
    Her legs were
trembling, but she managed to leave him and follow out the
bathhouse into the intermittent dark of the tunnel. Yenic took the
back, her father the front. She was so engrossed in her thoughts
she wasn't aware Yuri had stopped until she walked into his
back.
    He turned and
looked down at her. The blue eyes that rarely met hers and that
could be so striking were merciless in their directness, with the
flickering light of torches playing over them.
    "You told me
before the thing that made you agree to kill me was because I never
gave you a choice about killing others."
    She said nothing;
she had said it, just nine or so turns ago, when he wanted to know
why she was willing to put him and the entire city to her power to
save just one girl: Aedus.
    He looked over her
shoulder in the direction of the snaking tunnel. "You have that
choice now."
    Kill Corrin?
Surely he