And that was if they were lucky.
“Was it worth it?” Revenant seized Reaver by the throat and yanked him off the ground. “Was leaving your family vulnerable in order to rescue a traitorous female worth it?”
“She’s not a traitor to my side,” Reaver choked out. He sucked in a wheezing breath. “Wait… my family. Vulnerable?”
Harvester wondered the same thing. She’d call the Horsemen a lot of things, but vulnerable was not one of them.
Revenant, his annoyingly luxurious black mane obscuring his face, leaned in as if to tell Reaver a secret. “They’re recovering from an unfortunate accident. Very sad.” He didn’t sound very sad, but there was definitely an odd note in his voice. “It was so against the rules.”
“Accident?” Reaver sucked a gurgling breath. “Rules? What rules?”
“The ones you like to break.” Revenant heaved Reaver across the room.
Reaver hit a pillar and crumpled to the ground, bits of stone and dust showering him as he tried to push to his hands and knees. Revenant launched at him, and with a sick, twisted smile, Slag tapped his bracelet.
Reaver grunted, and for a brief moment, Harvester got off on his pain. Malevolence was a faint vibration shimmering along every nerve ending, feeding into her pleasure centers like an erotic drug. Daddy’s DNA was just the gift that kept on giving, wasn’t it?
You’re an angel. Your mother is an angel, and your father, bastard that he is now, was an angel when you were conceived. There’s more good in you than evil. Fight this, Harvester.
Reaver’s words in the cavern came back to her in a rush. Her mother… she’d died only three hundred years ago, an innocent casualty of a small uprising in Heaven, according to Raphael. She hadn’t known Harvester had fallen from grace on purpose, and it was one of Harvester’s greatest regrets that her mother hadn’t learned the truth before she died.
Fight this.
Reaver grunted again as Revenant pounded his fists into his face and body, and this time, Harvester took no pleasure in his suffering.
“Stop it!” she screamed. She scrambled across the floor toward them, her knees cracking painfully hard on the floor.
She dove for Revenant’s legs. She didn’t make it. An agonizing pain wrenched her neck as she was jerked to a sudden stop by her hair. Gethel, her fist wrapped around Harvester’s ponytail, hurled Harvester through the air.
She hit the wall in a crack of bones and stone, and everything went black.
When she came to, she and Reaver, his face badly bruised and bloodied, were propped against the pillar he’d crashed into, chains connecting their collars to hooks embedded in the stone. Both Gethel and Revenant were gone. The asshole Nightlash, Slag, was sitting on a marble bench a few yards away, a satisfied smirk on his ugly face.
“Only reason you’re not both dead is that the Dark Lord wants you alive. You,” he said, jabbing his finger at Reaver, “are for his bed until you beg him for death.” His smile widened. “He shares with Slag.”
“Slag’s right,” Harvester agreed. “He does share. But I doubt he shares with demon morons who refer to themselves in the third person.” She shifted to cast a furtive look at the guard situation near the front entrance. There were three that she could see. “He also likes audiences.”
“That was very helpful,” Reaver said dryly.
She slid a glance at him, trying to get a bead on what he was thinking, but his expression was shuttered, his attention focused on their surroundings. The familiarity of his expression made her smile. She and Yenrieth—Reaver—had spent a lot of time hunting minor demons, and she knew the look he got when he had a plan.
A Khepri entered, its nasty insect head swiveling. It drew Slag aside, and the moment they were distracted, Harvester leaned closer to Reaver.
“So… what’s the plan? Tell me you have one.”
“I snagged a key to our collars off Revenant when he was tenderizing me,” he said, and she wanted to kiss him. “But lifting the key was too easy, which makes me think it’s a trap.”
Her heart sank. “It’s our only chance.”
“Agreed.” He rested his head against hers, and again the familiarity came roaring back. They’d propped each other up more times than she could count. “Let me know when Slag turns his back.”
“You got it.” She kept one eye on Slag and the other on the door her father would use when he arrived. The thought made her throat close. She’d do her best to kill both herself and Reaver if she had to. She couldn’t endure more torture, and she couldn’t bear the thought of Reaver going through it, either.