Fuck you, Fates. This is what you deserve for fucking with me, having one of your most powerful sacrificed for their Goddess.

When I whipped my head up again, I leveled the group with what I hoped was my most insane, saccharine smile. “Bring it on. I’ve been waiting to die for longer than you know.”

Hayyel pressed her lips together, while her companion took a half step back. The male’s face filled my vision again as his hand wrapped around my throat and pressed me back into the table. “Maybe we should give you one more reason to want to before you go.”

The unmistakable sound of a belt unfastening filled the room a moment later.

My bravado slipped and my stomach dropped.

“What a way to stick it to the infamous Halálhívó. Raping his mate.” A malicious glint filled his turquoise eyes as he chuckled.

A snarl tore from my chest, and I lurched forward again, gnashing my teeth in an attempt to defend myself. I managed to sink them into his bicep, and I clamped down with all the force I could muster. Screaming, I held on until he jerked his arm back, and then a metallic taste flooded my mouth. I spit the blood at him immediately, along with a chunk of his flesh. The red spray across his pristine gray leather armor delighted me.

“Fucking whore!” he shrieked, backhanding me. My head whipped to the side, but I’d been hit enough times that it didn’t phase me.

I turned back to him, grinning, the warm liquid dribbling from the corners of my mouth. I hoped I looked insane. The Angel clutched his injured arm, and more ruby dripped between his fingers.

“Zaph, go clean yourself up. I’ll watch over our prisoner,” Hayyel said, hardening her attention on me. Her platinum hair was tied in a bun on top of her head, two sharp sticks poking through it. She pulled one free, then licked its length. “You too, Sara.”

The female beside her huffed but left the room with Zaph. I braced myself on my elbows and took a quick perusal of the space, trying to find any way out of my situation. The gleam in Hayyel’s eyes and the way she toyed with that stick sent a shiver down my spine.

We couldn’t be far from the battlefield, given the canvas surrounding us and the churn of voices outside it. As for weapons, well, I was out of luck. The room seemed to be bare, save for the table I was chained to. The space wasn’t large, but if I could off balance myself and tip it over, there might be room for me to wiggle free…

“Don’t mind Zaph, he’s still upset that your mate carved up his forehead,” she purred, flicking the thin device from her mouth and pressing it into the skin above my ankle.

A memory flooded my mind, one of Rokath and I riding into the Paks Desert where he spoke of the ambush that sparked the war over a decade before. How he had let a single male go after it with instructions to tell the Koron he had started a war after carving up his face with a bronze dagger.

Zaph must have been that male.

All air fled my lungs as she trailed it up my leg, lifting the pale blue fabric along with it. I tried to smother the shiver that wanted to wrack my frame. When the dress was nearing my hips, she stopped, then grabbed my wrist and flipped it over. Hayyel’s attention flicked to my face and the corners of her mouth curved upward. “Looks like he carved you up too. But what should one expect from a brute like the Halálhívó, or any Demon really? With your dark magic and evil intentions, even to one another.”

She dropped my wrist and then gave it a little sympathetic pat. “You won’t have to suffer his abuse much longer.”

“You know nothing,” I spat at her.

She had the nerve to laugh. “Don’t tell me you think Demons are capable of love? That the Fates offer your kind mating bonds is a lie. A falsehood in an attempt to force other races to empathize with you. Tell me, did he hold you down while they inked your back too?”

My mouth popped open involuntarily as I was confronted with the true depths of fanaticism the Angels possessed. “Of course it’s a real mate bond. Otherwise you wouldn’t have to use your drug to block it.”

She waved her hand as if she were dismissing my comment. “Another trick you play with your dark magic. Another reason why it must be exterminated.”

“How can you possibly believe this? The evidence is right in front of you,” I shot back, unable to help myself.

“I see nothing,” Hayyel said, tracing the neckline of the dress with her stick now. It trailed dangerously close to my throat, and then my heart. I didn’t dare move, sink back onto the table to put space between it and me. To do something like that was to risk Hayyel snapping and shoving it between my ribs.

Xannirin, Kiira, Rokath, Rapp, they were all right—the Angels did not respond to reasoning.

I was totally, wholly, utterly, fucked.

Tears pricked at my eyes, and I gritted my teeth and willed them away. I would not cry, would not break in front of this bitch.

She whipped around and faced me again, the sharp silver tip digging into my bicep, right around the spot I had bitten Zaph. “Perhaps I should mark you myself, as retribution for what you and the Halálhívó did to my husband.”

Zaph was her husband? I laughed, a crazed, wretched sound that had Hayyel’s hand twitching away from me. “Do it.” It was abundantly clear then that the two had planned all this out as some sort of revenge for how the war started. How they started it.

And he would have raped me in front of her, and she wouldn’t have tried to stop it?

I offered her a look that I hoped conveyed even more hate than I held for Rokath in our first encounter. My tattered heart squeezed at the thought of my mate. Fates, how far we had come, how much had changed since that first night.

I wished I’d told him I loved him. Fuck the Weaver and the Reaper, if they were going to tear us apart anyway, we should have enjoyed what little happiness we could have stolen from them.

I wished I’d let him tell me he loved me too.

At least it was me that was going to die and not him. That was some solace. He’d be grief-stricken from our bond, but as he’d demonstrated time and time again, his self-control was immense. My death wouldn’t cripple him like he thought it would. He’d pick himself up and move on, kill all the Angels so the Demons were safe from their zealous desire to exterminate us.

Hayyel bared her teeth at me, then swept lower, yanking the dress up and revealing the tops of my thighs. She pressed her tool there and I tensed. “Perhaps here, so he can see blood trickling down your thighs and wonder what we did to you.”

I sucked in a sharp breath as she dug it in. But then she returned to my shoulder and pressed it right over my heart. “Maybe I’ll carve his name right here. Show Rokath that Zaph claimed you from him before we sacrificed you.”

“Then what are you waiting for?” I spat back, simultaneously bracing myself for the pain to come. This time, there would be no tender kisses from Rokath to soothe the cuts, no primal pleasure in the deed and the claiming that followed.

Hayyel seemed thrown off by my insistence that she act, and I made note of it. She expected me to cower beneath her, to beg for mercy, and since I seemed to have no qualms about suffering, she didn’t know what to do.

Her icy blue eyes bounced between mine as if she were trying to gauge my behavior. “Demons are such strange creatures. You deserve no more of my attention.”

She swept from the tent a moment later, the sheer blue sleeves of her uniform fluttering as the wind blasted her. A wink of sunlight caught my attention before it swung closed again.

So it’s been at least half a day since my capture.

Rokath was likely out of his mind if he didn’t already know the Angels had me. From my chains and state of dress, though, I sensed that they had already sent word to my mate. I was to be a sacrifice, so I assumed that also meant they were going to make a spectacle about it.