11. June

Chapter eleven

June

T he fluorescent lights flicker and buzz, a maddening electric mosquito, but that irritation pales compared to the raw lightning spearing between my ears.

"132...133..."

Dr. Faulkner's nasal voice drones on, each number a chisel chipping away at my sanity. I grind my teeth, tasting metal on my tongue, as another surge of voltage rips through me. My bones vibrate and tendons snap taut, as if the sadistic fuck is trying to play me like a human guitar.

"Tell me, Juniper," he croons, trailing a latex-clad finger along a particularly livid scar, "where is your precious Cara now? What would she think, seeing you like this?"

I swallow a howl as his nail finds a fresh laceration and digs deep. "Fuck you," I rasp, my voice a ruined husk of its former self. "You leave her out of this, you sick bastard."

Faulkner tsks, eyes glittering with malice behind his wire-rimmed glasses. "Oh, but she's already so deeply entangled, isn't she? The delicate little flower who thinks she can weather the storm of Deveaux family politics."

I surge against my restraints, ignoring the white-hot agony that lances through my nerve endings. "If you touch her, if you even breathe in her direction, I swear to God I'll - "

"You'll what?" He cuts me off with a sharp bark of laughter. "Bleed on me? Whimper and moan and beg for mercy? Face it, Juniper. You're in no position to be making threats."

He leans in close, his hot, sour breath washing over my face. "But perhaps we can come to an arrangement. A little quid pro quo, if you will. You give me what I want - a nice, pliant puppet to dance to the Deveaux tune - and I'll ensure your precious Cara remains untouched. Protected, even, from the worst of your mother's machinations."

I bare my teeth in a snarl, even as a flicker of doubt curls in my gut. "And why the hell should I believe a single word that comes out of your lying mouth?"

Faulkner shrugs, a oily smile playing at the corners of his thin lips. "Believe me, don't believe me. The choice is yours. But know this - Elaine's patience is wearing thin. And when it snaps completely..."

He makes a slashing motion across his throat, a parody of a grin stretching his gaunt features. "Well. Let's just say that pretty little artist won't be so pretty anymore. And as for the brat she's carrying..."

Red. Crimson. Scarlet.

A deep, droning roar fills my skull, drowning cognition in a retching tide of blood-drenched fury. The chains and electrodes and slivered skin fade to insignificance against the inferno erupting in my core.

They dare. They dare to threaten what's mine, the only pure and perfect thing I've ever called my own? They dare imply that my child - my fierce, wild love made impossibly tender flesh - might be ripped untimely from this world before ever drawing breath?

No. A thousand times no and fuck no, a neon-bright denial scrawled across the underside of my atrophied soul.

I will peel the skin from their bones in still-screaming strips. I will turn the earth to salted glass and choke the seas with corpses before I let them lay one desecrating finger on Cara or the fragile promise we've kindled between us.

My bonds shear like cobwebs as I lunge for Faulkner's pencil-scrawny throat, a guttural snarl erupting from a place so deep and primal it vibrates in my very nuclei. His eyes bulge comically behind his spectacles as my fingers clamp down, each tendon and vein throbbing against my palm in panicked staccato.

"You vile, soulless, malignant little toad," I croon, tasting his fear like ambrosia on my tongue, "I will see you and all your misbegotten ilk scoured from the face of this blighted fucking earth before - "

Twin pinpricks of scorching agony lance the meat of my shoulders. A red-hot railroad spike rammed through my eye sockets and out the base of my skull. I convulse, gagging on a garbled howl, before my nerveless fingers slacken and slide free.

Through the strobing crimson haze I glimpse two black-clad wraiths materializing at my sides, Tasers still crackling in their ham-sized fists. Of course. Faulkner's ever-present safety net, primed to drag unruly experiments back across the shattered border of sanity.

I hit the frigid tile like a sack of overwrought meat, cheek mashed against filthy ceramic, every synapse firing white-hot agony down my screaming dendrites. Somewhere above, the sharp slice of expensive leather on linoleum, a throat clearing with self-satisfied delicacy.

"An admirable effort, truly. The sheer Neanderthal brutality of it sent quite the atavistic shiver up my spine."

A toe prods me, fastidious as a housewife disposing of a particularly noisome bit of roadkill. "But as you can see, your charming obstinacy has once again proven...insufficient."

The foot rolls me with surgical precision, splaying me onto my back like a snared rabbit. Faulkner's face swims into focus, blotchy and empurpled, eyes lambent with lunatic glee.

"Now then. Shall we continue?"

The snap-hiss of live current buzzes in my peripheral, the scents of ozone and singed hair acrid in my nostrils. I squeeze my eyes shut, lips peeling back from clenched teeth, tendons cording in my neck as I brace for the inevitable onslaught.

But in the lightning-split instant before the fire swallows me, I tumble down, down into the warm velvet dark behind my eyelids.

There in the sheltering shadows, Cara waits. Limned in gossamer gold, lush and luminous as a Botticelli angel, serene as a Madonna. My hands - whole and unscarred, elegant and dexterous as they were Before - rise to cup her beloved face, trace the salt-damp swell of her cheek with a touch lighter than thistledown.

"Do you trust me?" I rasp, shock-raw throat turning it to a raven's croak.

Quicksilver eyes, glinting in the gloom, fathomless as the sea and just as enthralling. "With every beat of our hearts."

I shudder, a full-body spasm that verges on the ecstatic. The truest vow we can make, an affirmation of the bond that sears and sustains us despite the unceasing tempest without.

"Then know this." I tilt until our brows meet, until our lashes tangle and our breath mingles, cinnamon and honeyed cloves. "No earthly force, no power in this benighted universe, will keep me from you. From our family."

A hand, still rope-raw and needle-pricked, presses light as a sigh against the swollen silk of her belly.

"I'm coming home, my wild. I'm coming home, if I have to slaughter the armies of hell and sow the earth with salt to do it."

She smiles then, slow and enigmatic as a sphinx, a warrior queen girding herself for glorious battle even as her fingers twine through mine.

"Then I'll wait, my love. At the edge of the world, at the end of all things, I will wait for you."

I bury my face in the jasmine-and-orange-blossom cascade of her hair, breathe deep the scent of hearth and home. "Let them come," I growl, savage and exultant and ablaze with the purity of purpose. "Let them unleash their worst. We will meet them, you and I, and we will make them bleed."

The words hang between us, a blood-oath, a covenant signed and sealed in the marrow of our matching souls. And as the first white-hot flares of electric torment ravage through me, I cradle their echoes close, a lodestar to steer by through the hellish shoals ahead.

I will come for you, Cara. For our son, our daughter, the world-devouring love we've blazed into being between us.

Faulkner can shatter my skeleton, Elaine can send her jackbooted thugs to grind me to gory dust.

It will make no difference. My path is locked, my purpose fixed and unshakable as the pillars of creation.

I will have my vengeance. I will reclaim my reason for being.

And together, my valkyrie, my Boudica, my queen of wreckage and ruin...

We will teach them the true meaning of fear.

The lights flicker overhead, a sickening strobe that sears my retinas and sends shards of pain lancing through my skull. Or maybe it's just the aftershocks of Faulkner's latest round of "therapy," the electrodes still sizzling against my temples, the acrid stench of singed flesh and despair heavy in the air.

I don't know anymore. Don't know where the torture ends and I begin.

The door creaks open, and I flinch, a pavlovian response to the sound that always heralds fresh agony. But it's not Faulkner who slips into my cell. It's Sarah, her face drawn and pale in the guttering light.

"June..." She breathes my name like a prayer and a curse, her eyes wide with horror as she takes in the ruin of my body, the wasteland of my soul.

I try to speak, but my tongue is a dead, desiccated thing in my mouth. I make a sound, a broken, animal noise that might be a laugh or a sob. Sarah flinches as if I've struck her.

"I don't have much time," she whispers, glancing over her shoulder at the door. "I managed to disable Faulkner's system, but it won't last long."

She presses something into my hand, cold and hard and unfamiliar. A phone. For a moment, I just stare at it, uncomprehending. Such a simple thing, a relic of a life I can barely remember.

"It's Cara." Sarah's voice is urgent, insistent. "She needs to hear your voice, June. She needs to know you're still fighting."

Cara. The name is a knife in my gut, a balm on my shattered psyche. I lift the phone to my ear with a trembling hand, half expecting it to dissolve into smoke and ashes.

"June?" Her voice is a distant echo, a half-remembered melody. "June, baby, are you there?"

I try to answer, but the words clog in my throat, choked by the bile and the blood and the screams I've swallowed back for so long. Cara keeps talking, a desperate, pleading litany, but I can barely hear her over the roaring in my ears.

Her voice is wrong. It's not the warm honey and whiskey I remember, not the sultry purr that made my blood sing. It's thin and reedy, sharp with an edge of hysteria.

"Don't fucking talk to me, you goddamn bitch." The words rip from my ravaged throat, a guttural snarl that I barely recognize as my own. "I don't know you and I don't fucking love you, you cunt! You're just another one of Faulkner's little fucking tricks. What'd he promise you? Huh? What'd he promise you after I break?"

Dead silence meets my vitriol. For a moment, I think the connection has been lost, that this was just another layer to the twisted game they're playing with my sanity. But then I hear it.

A sob. Small and broken and so achingly familiar that it pierces through the haze of rage and confusion like a bolt of pure, searing light.

"June..." Cara's voice is a cracked, trembling whisper. "June, what have they done to you?"

The anguish in her tone, the naked despair, hits me like a physical blow. It's real. She's real, not some twisted figment conjured by Faulkner to torment me.

"Cara..." I choke on her name, on the impossible tangle of love and loathing that rises like gorge in my throat. "Cara, I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry. I don't...I can't..."

The words won't come, trapped behind the wall of trauma and confusion that Faulkner has erected in my mind. I hear Cara's ragged breathing, sense her struggle to hold back the flood of emotions threatening to drown us both.

"It's okay, baby." She forces the words out, each one a shard of glass. "It's going to be okay. I'm coming for you. I'm going to bring you home, I swear it."

Home. The concept is so foreign, so utterly inconceivable, that a harsh bark of laughter rips from my chest. But before I can respond, before I can give voice to the yawning void of hopelessness that threatens to swallow me whole...

The line goes dead.

I stare at the phone in my hand, watching as it blurs and fractures through the prism of my tears. Distantly, I register Sarah retrieving it, her touch gentle as a whisper.

"I'm sorry," she murmurs, and I can hear the ache of sincerity in her voice. "I'm so sorry, June."

Then she's gone, slipping away like a ghost, leaving me alone with the wreckage of my thoughts.

Cara. My Cara, my north star, my reason for drawing breath. She's out there, fighting for me, for us, even as I'm being unmade in this sterile hell. The thought brings a fresh wave of anguish, the jagged shards of my love for her tearing at my insides.

I fear...God help me, some small, twisted part...fears she's just one more sadistic illusion about to unravel any second. How can she be real? Her touch, her voice, her devotion - when everything else is designed to break and defile me without end?

What if this is the cruelest cut of all - Faulkner dangling her as salvation, only to pervert her into a weapon to finally shatter my mind beyond all repair? Can I bear that risk, that loss, without losing my last fingerhold on selfhood?

But another part of me - fragile, battered, but still stubbornly clinging to hope - whispers that she IS real. That our bond is stronger than Faulkner's depraved machinations. That her love is the one pure thing left in my hollowed-out existence.

I don't know anything anymore. What's real, what's illusion, where the borders are between my fractured psyche and the physical world that is my waking nightmare. But in the end...it doesn't matter.

Real or not, phantom or flesh, I'll cling to Cara. To the memory of her smile, her eyes, the sweet rightness of her in my arms. I'll cup that sputtering flame of desperate hope in my mind's hands and breathe on it with my dying will.

Because it's all I have left. The only thing that might see me through this abyss without losing the last ragged shreds of Juniper Deveaux.

So I'll endure. I'll choke on tears and bile and the screams I dare not voice. I'll wade through seas of blood and deception and shattered mirror selves. I'll walk through the flames of Faulkner's mind-rape and let them scorch me to the bone.

And I will hold the image of Cara in my heart like a talisman, like a prayer. Cara, my angel, my center, my last fraying lifeline to a world beyond purgatory.

I'll stagger through Hell and beyond, until I can drag my broken, burning body into her arms. Until I can bury my face in her hair, breathe her in, beg her to never let me go.

Or until I shatter into a million razor-edged pieces, too far gone to ever be pieced back together into something resembling a man.

Please, Cara. Please be real. Find me. Save me. From the demons who torment my flesh...and the far worse ones devouring my mind.

You're my only hope, the only light in a world gone black as a grave.

Don't let me be lost. Don't let me forget.

My love. My heart.

My salvation.