Dorian POV
“Please… please…”
Those words echoed in my head as the cold water slid down my back.
“…please… don’t kill him.”
It wasn’t hers I was hearing—it was my mother’s voice. The last words she had ever spoken.
The memory came sharp as a blade. The night our car was ambushed. The night everything was taken from me.
She’d been dragged from me, beaten until I could barely recognize her face. After every failed attempt to reach Ragnar, after every useless scream into the dark, our abductors decided we weren’t worth the trouble anymore. But they didn’t let us go.
They made her their example.
And even as the knives carved into her body over and over again, she didn’t cry for herself. She didn’t beg them to stop. She begged for me. For my life. While little me sat bound, useless, forc
