Chapter 1710: Flawless Victory
Quinlan came across the cell toward her through the wreckage he’d made of the room, and the closer look did nothing kind to the weight already sitting in his chest.
The big bad Black Fang, the woman who’d looked almighty even drenched head to toe in enemy blood, hung cracked open on the wall with her veins gone black beneath unhealthy skin.
He had watched her wade through battlefields and make slaughter look effortless, and for the first time, she looked like she’d lost.
’No.’
Quinlan understood within just a few moments of staring into her deep purple eyes that were gazing directly back at him.
’What am I even saying? This woman...’
Even chained and starving, fighting the most uphill battle of her life...
’She won.’
Everything they’d done to her in here had bought them her body, not one inch of what still burned behind her eyes.
The dungeon had been winning the war for her flesh, perhaps... Even that wasn’t certain, watching the crumbled dwarf corpse behind her.
But one thing was certain: they lost every other war they had picked with her.
’A flawless victory.’
Her eyes had not left him since he walked in. Every serpent tattoo on her body pulsed, stronger and stronger the nearer he came, and she watched him close the last of the distance like she’d stopped letting herself believe he was real.
His hand rose to the collar at her throat, the dwarven band sunk into skin it had spent days trying to claim, and his face went cold with disgust the moment his fingers found the metal.
"Stop!" Myrasyn’s voice cracked across the cell from the wall beside her. "You can’t just yank it off! The fat hairy ones are truly nasty creatures! Spawns of the devil, every last one of them! I bet that if you rip it loose they have some failsafe in place that will take her life!"
He knew that. His fingers didn’t pull; they followed the band to where it bit into her throat, studying, examining, tracing the seam with a touch that held nothing gentle and all of his fury, and his face darkened with every pulse of black it dragged out of her.
"They dared put this on you..." The words came low, more to himself than to her, and the cell felt colder for them.
He straightened from the collar and lifted two fingers toward the two women on the wall, one toward each, the tips touching their foreheads.
Myrasyn went rigid, her ears clamping flat to her skull.
"W-wait!" she cried out in alarm.
Was she about to get a hole punched clean through her head?!
In her defenseless position, she could not even hope to do anything about it!
Then the water came, welling up warm and soft, pouring over both of them and slipping under their ruined clothes to sheet across skin that hadn’t felt anything kind in days.
It moved wrong for water in the best possible way, pressing into the hollows of them, tracing every line of their bodies, lifting the caked grime and dried blood off in rivulets that ran dark down the wall, every current bent and placed in real time by a master who knew exactly what he was doing.
Myrasyn blinked twice, big-eyed, and somewhere in that second blink her heart stopped screaming about her imminent death.
Her skin came up clean and shining beneath the filth, bright the way it hadn’t been since the chains closed, and her face lit up like she was having the time of her life.
"I know you didn’t betray me," Quinlan said. "Thanks for keeping Black Fang company. I’m sure she appreciated it."
"!!" Myrasyn’s eyes widened.
Then her lips turned into a big, lively grin. "Yeah, we became besties for sure! We spent half of it laughing thanks to the news getting worse and worse and Ragnar losing his mind right along with it. Black Fang kept going on and on about ’tick-tock tick-tock, the villain is coming for you...’ and I thought I might just die before they even killed me."
"She did that...?" Quinlan mused.
Sera didn’t look up from the golden light pouring out of her hands, voice coming with obvious jealousy. "Quin. Are you sure you should be handing foreign queens sensual body washes? She didn’t even ask for it. At least make it cold or something..."
"I am NOT foreign, I’m practically family!" Myrasyn’s ears shot bolt upright.
"You are?" Sera repeated wryly. This shameless woman barely interacted with them at all. They were just using each other for mutual benefit until the last few minutes before it all went to hell.
"Y-yeah!!" The queen nodded profusely.
Sera turned an even flatter look on her, fully aware the queen would say anything at all if it kept the warm water running over her grimy skin, and Myrasyn’s face went hot as her ears swiveled to every corner of the cell that wasn’t Sera.
Then the humor drained out of Myrasyn’s face as her gaze slid to Black Fang, who still hadn’t said a word and whose eyes hadn’t left Quinlan once. "...She’s okay, right?"
"Yes." Quinlan spoke with utmost belief. "There’s nothing in this world that can make her lose it."
"Because she already lost it all?" Sera murmured, not pausing in her healing. "Venomborne Terror before puberty..."
Quinlan chose not to answer that. He raised his hand, and [Warp Gate] tore the air open in the corner of the cell.
Three dwarves stumbled through onto the bloodied stone, and the first of them slipped and went down hard, both palms plunging wrist-deep into a slick that had spread from the bodies.
"What!"
He shoved himself half-upright with his hands running red and a sound strangling in his throat, because some of the dead were his own colleagues.
The other two had locked up where they landed, the color draining from their faces until they were sick and bloodless, one of them muttering fast and broken under his breath.
All three were shaking, and not one could turn back toward the gate, the compulsion in their chests herding them deeper in no matter what their bodies wanted.
Myrasyn’s ears shot straight up. "Those are the royal smiths! Ragnar’s own forge-masters!"
"Aelindra was kind enough to point me to their quarters," Quinlan shrugged. "It was on the way here so I made a pitstop."
On the floor, the ruin that had been a councilwoman had no mouth left to argue how kind she’d been.
Myrasyn’s lips parted. For once in her long, loud existence, nothing came out of them.
"Take it off her cleanly, without causing any harm," Quinlan told the smiths. "If you aren’t sure you can take it off without failure, stop."
Quinlan knew the importance of commands and their phrasing. If the dwarves decided to conduct a final act of revenge by taking it off ’wrongly,’ well, that’d be it.
That’s why he had to make sure the command was clear.
Sera, who’d been pouring golden light into the worst of the wreckage since she reached the wall, drew her hands back to give the dwarves room, her eyes moving between the collar and the look on Quinlan’s face.
The smiths bent to Black Fang’s throat with grim, sick obedience and worked the locking runes under an order they had no power to refuse.
The band came apart with a click and dropped from her throat.
"Quinlan..." she finally spoke, voice rough, as if not fully there.
For days she’d held herself together on willpower and spite alone, and now the man who’d torn the whole dungeon apart to reach her stood close enough to touch, close enough that she could see the blood drying on his chest and the fury he was keeping so carefully leashed for her sake.
Quinlan reached up and brushed the matted hair back from her face, his thumb settling against the cheekbone he’d washed clean, and whatever moved behind his eyes then, he put no wall in front of it.
"Let’s get out of here, shall we?" He smiled, tired and crooked.
"The hunger won’t stop..." she rasped all of a sudden. "Get away from me, quickly..."
"What do you mean-"
Black Fang’s muscles bulged.
"Run!"
The manacles ripped out of the wall in a burst of stone as she came off it straight at him, faster than a body that broken had any right to move.
"Quin!" Sera shouted as Black Fang lunged.
