Primal Kill (The Order of Vampires #5)

Prologue

PROLOGUE

L ong After 1730…

Time has lost all meaning…

Life is only pain…

Death is the only relief…

Cerberus Maddox XI growled, choking on dust and rubble, entombed by the crushing weight of clay-hardened earth that slowly compacted with time. Roots and gravel bound his mutilated body—enough to trap, paralyze, suffocate, and kill him again and again.

Unsure how long he’d been suffering or how many times he’d died only to return to this eternal torture, Cerberus clung to what was left of his decaying sanity, though his mind fragmented long ago. Immortality had no power here, and longevity had become a curse. With no blood to alleviate the endless pain or speed his recovery, existence was insufferable.

Sensory deprivation left Cerberus deaf, blind, and incapable of movement. He sometimes suffered the sweet relief of hallucinations where the fixed memories of his past also tortured him.

Those agonizing memories became his mirrored reality, his escape from the physical suffering that was his endless existence until he died once more.

Again.

And again.

And again, only to be brought back to this living hell.

Awareness came like baptism through fire. Sharp pain pulsed and surged through every wasted shred of him. The cycle never ended. It couldn’t. And by the thousandth time he died, he was certain immortality was a curse and his desire for vengeance would live forever inside of him.

His body hummed in agony. Each throbbing beat of his heart radiated awareness as tortured nerves buzzed and burned.

Echoes of muscle memory faded. Wounds deliberately healed and the dead cells withered away. Rotting. He was rotting.

Gone were his arms. Gone were his legs. Torn flesh and muscle left him a fraction of the warrior he once was. All he had was breath and pain, but there was no air left to breathe, so the pain inevitably won .

Dampness chilled his bones, stiffening every torn joint and shredded muscle into a tough, ossified husk. His decaying body became a raw nerve with time, exposed and infected, tingling with haunting twitches as he decomposed into a living corpse—buried alive for a long, possibly eternal, restless repose.

The stench of his rotting arms and legs reached his nose. His tormentors left his severed limbs with him so he could suffer the slow decay of his own muscle and flesh.

This deep in the earth, sand dampened to mud and slowly solidified into cold clay. Fossilized in time, encased in agony with no limbs left to claw his way out, nothing existed beyond his tortured mind.

The odd sensation of wrigglers and beetles nibbling the decay became a constant torment and comfort. So long as the worms were with him, composting his body's organic matter, he was never truly alone.

Trapped in the nothing.

No space.

No time.

Only pain.

His agonizing existence repeated on a steady loop of suffering and death.

Suffering and death.

The ricochet of time was lost in the darkness.

His disoriented mind forgot what it was to walk and breathe without agony. After years of this relentless imprisonment, he struggled to recall the wholeness he celebrated before his limbs had been torn clean—amputated by force with the excruciating purpose of punishing him.

Punishing him for her. He inwardly snarled.

She was nothing! A whore, like her mother…

He should have let her die when he killed her the last time. He could have prevented her from coming back. She was immortal but utterly fragile compared to him. How dare they do this on her account?

Once again, he vowed to make her suffer tenfold. He relished the day he would finally escape this living tomb and show her the agony he’d survived. How long had it been since he looked up at the sky and breathed fresh air? Years? Decades? Centuries?

Too long.

She knew nothing of real pain. He ached to show her how truly dreadful he could be. His craving to repay her for the crime of quartering and entombing him alive obliterated all other desires.

I’m coming for you girl…

The debt she owed him would cost her dearly. One day, she would pay for leaving him this way, just as he made her mother pay in the blood of those she loved.

Vicious bitch.

It was no wonder Lilias’s descendants were equally venomous. Wiping out her line would do the world a service.

Like a delicious poison, the temptation of his memories puzzled together a vision of Lilias when they first met. She’d been fresh and frightened, with supple breasts and a wet little quim just beyond flowering.

He seethed, hating the memory as his body reflexively responded with an unwanted jolt of lust. Damn the conniving cunt for still holding power over him. He still dreamt of her, still fantasized that she might choose him, even after what he’d done to her children.

It was a piss poor way to mask the current pain he suffered, pain caused by her daughter, but those memories were his only escape from his reality. Until his mind walked him to the end of his memories, and he suffered her abandonment all over again.

Like his lust, his hatred for Lilias never waned. He craved to cut her open, ignore her cries for mercy as her blood and tears flowed into a river, from which he would fill his cup. He’d drain her of every falsehood she’d spoken.

She was a beautiful pit of lies. She only used him for blood, protection, and secrets. She was a poison that needed to be cut out. Cauterized from this earth. Destroyed once and for all.

Color flashed in a memory and he could still hear her laughter. The exquisite sound thrilled him despite knowing it was a lie. Even the exact green of her eyes was still so precise in his mind.

He’d do anything to escape his present pain as the earth crushed him inside this fossilized tomb, so he chased the vision, hunting it down and transforming her affection into a malleable pleasure it never was.

He let his mind play, recalling the reality and imagining what it might have been had she not betrayed him in the end— poisonous witch.

The phantom tingle of his missing hands balling into fists haunted his delirium. An unfulfilled twitch that started to itch where he could not reach—would not reach for several more years.

Ah, she’s going to pay… And her daughter would pay. And her sons… well, they had already paid for the sins of their mother in life’s blood and hopeless cries.

He should have slaughtered them all, including Lilias’s self-righteous mate.

At least here, in the dark, she was still his. He had time to experience his Lilias in every way he could imagine.

Sometimes, he fantasized about choking her until her sobs silenced. Other times, he dreamt of slitting her throat again and again. But mostly, he envisioned the peaceful moment when she could have looked into his eyes and confessed her love.

In his mind, she could become anything he wanted, so why not make her the fantasy of his dreams? It was a cruel game because in those clawing final moments, when he was jerked back to the present and suffocated by the crushing earth once more, the dream ripped away, and the truth cleaved through him with ruthless precision.

It was his last thought before every death. His greatest failure. His eternal regret. And the one inescapable truth he could not erase.

She never loved him.