Chapter Text
Lucanis awoke with a gasp, arms, shoulders, wrists, elbows, knees and below aching, and a sting across his back.
It took a moment from him to register he was naked in a cell, the fuzziness of his mind not natural and blood spun in front of his face, the copper taste filling through his nose to sit heavy on the back of his throat and....
"Zara," he snarled and the Contract, hair darker than the blood she was pulling from him, stood, slipping the blood into the vial in her hand.
Despite being well within her fifties, she looked younger than him. Younger than the elven slave that stood at her side, as female as the Contract, ears pulled down by all the earrings stabbed into them, arms acting as a table for the tray that Zara set the vial of blood, Lucanis's blood, onto. "Oh, my, is that how you speak to your jailer?" she mocked as she spun her finger.
There was a sharp sound of something cutting through the air, the only warning Lucanis had, before another sting opened across his back.
Again his blood was pulled up, spun in front of his face, before being fed into another vial.
"You are a Contract," Lucanis corrected, and she spun her finger again.
"Do dead men have Contracts?" she asked as she set the second vial down on the tray.
A whistle sound and a third sting.
Zara taunted him with his blood as he breathed through the pain, an ache starting to build up in muscles over his ribs, and in his armpits.
How long had he been strung up?
"A Crow never fails a Contract. And I'm not dead yet," Lucanis snarled back as she spun her finger, an order to make a fourth vial.
A fourth strike of the whip, a fourth taunt with his blood, a fourth vial on the tray.
"That sweet little thing with you made a beautiful replica and fit your clothes so well."
Lucanis's first thought is Illario, and panic.
His second is slow in coming, a fifth lash to create a fifth vial cutting through it.
But it is a reminder that no, Illario is safe and sound in Treviso.
The Contract didn't touch him.
Just a silly, just fledged, Crow who was coming for another Contract.
Lucanis didn't even know the boy's name, but he was going for his first, solo, Contract.
Damn.
Poor boy.
"She wept for you, the heartless First Talon. Her darling grandson. You are dead and burned to her, ashes of a stranger sitting in an urn with your name."
Lucanis tried to push forward, but his legs below his knees are numb and the chains rattle, but he doesn't even move an inch, let alone far enough to rip her throat out with his teeth.
"Oh, pretty, pretty, demon," she cooed and Lucanis glances over as the fifth vial is set down.
Halfway through the first line of the tray.
Half as wide as it is long.
Fifty.
Fifty lashes.
He's on his sixth.
He braces for the count.
Each strike is precise, sharp, and cruel. His back feels raw by the tenth strike.
By the twentieth, he exhales on each strike to keep from screaming.
He will not give her the satisfaction.
The Contract talks, constantly. Taunts him with how he was sold out, how he is dead and gone, that even if he managed to escape today, they would believe him false and strike him down themselves before dumping his body in the canals.
If he escaped at all.
The twenty-fifth strike has the tears releasing.
A slap comes across his face.
Lucanis falls, but pulls himself back up to his feet.
A Dellamorte did not stay in the dirt.
A Dellamorte did not kneel.
A Dellamorte put themselves back on their feet.
"These are bodily reactions! Foolish child! Shame breaks a Crow before pain! Pride breaks a Crow before pain! Let it happen, do not lock it away! Heal him and start again, until he just lets himself react."
Catarina tsks sharply. "I thought you better than this Lucanis."
The thirtieth strike has Lucanis letting out a sharp sound of pain.
The fortieth had him punching out sharp noises of pain, letting his body react to the agony.
They didn't want information. They just wanted his blood, his pain, his humiliation.
But he was not kneeling, was he?
No, he was chained in place, in a way that felt like kneeling.
He was losing feeling in his arms, in parts of his chest.
His breathing was labored as the fiftieth strike hit, the fiftieth vial placed on the trembling tray.
The elf slave is looking pale, and shaking.
They're going to be dead before day's end. Are their arms aching, in pain already, and terrified they will drop those vials?
Lucanis wants to scream at that. Zara hums and crooks her finger.
A guard, heavily masked, in leathers, walks from behind Lucanis. The guard takes the tray from the slave and whistles sharply. Another slave, collar and shackles heavy around their neck, their wrists, their ankles, all chained together, enters, taking the tray, and leaves.
And then the elven slave is falling, throat cut and the blood is rising up.
And it hits Lucanis's back.
Agony locks up Lucanis's body, even piece of him in fiery agony. He can't breathe, let alone scream, and he's hitting the ground.
He tries to get up.
But his limbs are too numb and when he can finally manage movement, his cell is empty.
The chains with their shackles are in....sand? Yes, sand.
His hand swings around to touch his back, and he meets only smooth skin.
They....they had flayed it open.
His back had been open to the world, but now, there is no sign he had been injured at all.
He trembled a little as he forced himself to his feet, still naked and turned in a circle, the cold marble under his feet obvious.
Still in the cell he awoke in. He walked around it cautiously and froze when he looked up, through a crack, to find himself staring up at ocean.
No.
Impossible.
He....how?
He forced his gaze away and headed for where he had seen the elven slave hit the ground dead.
It took longer than he would admit to find, finally, proof that what had happened had happened at all.
One of those gaudy, horrific, things she had worn on her ears, weighing them down to make a mockery of them, was in his hand.
He curled over it, protecting it, and breathed through the sharp tightness of terror in his chest.
Proof it had happened was in his hand, when every other sign had been removed, even the blood.
Dangerous.
He would be wary.
He would have to be.
He doubted this would be the last time Zara did this to him.
He just knew this was the first time.