Filed To Story: Cursed Legacies Series Free PDF by Morgan B Lee
“I tried,” I mutter to the absence around me.
Not enough. Even with sacrificing your magic, you were never going to be enough. I deserved better than you. You should have accepted my rejection, but now look what became of our quintet. Our fates are your fault.
My head rolls from side to side as I lie trapped in the iron chamber, confusion pounding through my skull. I try to blink away the blurriness to observe the dark room around me, but it’s no use. The iron shackles have weakened me for months, just as I intended. When I am more myself, I can get out of this coffin-like chamber and move about the barren, rune-etched room—but physically and metaphorically, the shackles stay on.
Something clangs nearby. It’s the same sound I hear whenever the blond, curly-haired human arrives to check on me. Or when that oversized, tattooed leprechaun comes here with orders to force-feed me through magic.
I wish the big oaf would stop that. It’s merely prolonging the misery.
Yes! Let the misery end!
a voice screams at full volume inside my head, making me wince.
“Shh,” I tell it.
Darkness tinges the edges of my blurry vision as the voices grow louder. As usual, I black out for an indeterminable period of time, but when I open my eyes, I notice someone has lit a few candles inside my prison to ward off the darkness.
And then I hear her again, somewhere off to the side.
“If I didn’t know better, I would think you’re a masochist for doing this to yourself.”
I love and loathe that voice. It’s been nothing but cruel to me for as long as I’ve been in this hell, but it would be far crueler if it ever left my mind.
Even now, you can’t let me go, her voice hisses in my head.
I reject you, Silas Crane. Leave my memory alone.
“Is there room for me in that…whatever that is?” she asks.
“Leave me alone to rot,” I slur in half-English, half-fae as the ringing in my ears increases in volume.
“Riamh sa’vita so, no gach ni vivit leanas,”
that voice replies smoothly.
Meaning,
Never in this life, nor any lives that follow.
It’s such beautifully spoken fae, but I know it’s coming from my head just like everything else. I’m momentarily distracted by a madness that seems to submerge the world around me. Everything is warped and false, twisting inside my brain to torment me.
This is all your imagination, voices agree.
We can help you, weakling.
You only deserve one kind of escape, my handsome lunatic, my keeper’s voice agrees.
The permanent kind.
The only thing I know to be true in this hell is that none of it is. Then again, sometimes I forget to remember that truth, just like I forget myself and all I’ve ever been.
Letting myself forget would be easier. Fading like my sanity would be a simple thing.
Let go, my father’s voice agrees.
All you’ve ever been good at is failing, after all.
“As if you know. You only knew me as a child,” I defend myself in garbled fae.
That irresistible voice says something nearby me, but it’s drowned out as someone in my head snarls,
Who cares about your past? This is the time to escape.
Break free while you still can, before this one hurts you.
This invader is here to kill you!
another hisses. Use her to fuel your death magic, and you can end this.
“If only I could threaten the voices in your head,” her voice sighs nearby.
My breathing grows labored as horrifying paranoia skitters across my chest like a large arachnid, its needle-like legs leaving body-wracking shivers in their wake. My head continues to throb, so I try to bang it against the iron frame I lie upon, but remember the blond human put a pillow behind my head to stop me from doing just that.
“I think I know how to snap you out of it.”
Death, the same voice agrees as an echo in my skull.
Snap out of it! She’s about to kill you!
Fight!
“Fighting is pointless,” I drawl before realizing I used all the wrong words.
But then a familiarly breathtaking scent implodes the space around me.
My lungs constrict violently through the vicious burn of thirst in my throat. The voices in my head break into choruses of screams, the ringing in my ears intensifying as I instinctively struggle against my rattling iron chains. My fangs have descended on their own as blind need takes over.
That blood.
I know the scent of that blood.
I can’t fucking think clearly enough to figure out where I’ve tasted it before, but I need it. Crave it. Desperately.
This scent is a lie, like everything else. I’ve had fits of insanity with daydreams exactly like this—but never has it felt so real. Never has my body reacted so viscerally.
When the scent of blood draws closer and something warm drips on my cheek just beside my mouth, I struggle against my chains once again, trying to lick at it.
“Closer,” I rasp in fae as anguished thirst consumes me.
And finally, glorious blood drips into my mouth.
Holy gods above.
This flavor—the sheer power of the intoxicatingly singular magic gracing my tonguesends my entire system into frenzied need unlike anything I’ve experienced.
I need more. Now.
Use your magic! my father shouts in my head.
Use this power and free yourself! other voices chant, drowning out my every thought until?—
Magic explodes from my bound hands, breaking the shackles on my wrists and ankles. The fact that everything is blurred around me doesn’t stop me from rolling out of what’s left of the iron enclosure to tackle the source of this searing need.
New Book: Returned To Make Them Pay
On her wedding anniversary, Alicia is drugged and stumbles into the wrong room—straight into the arms of the powerful Caden Ward, a man rumored never to touch women. Their night of passion shocks even him, especially when he discovers she’s still a virgin after two years of marriage to Joshua Yates.