Duke Guatus laid upon his black-sheeted bed, eyes wide open. His body was tight and tensed, which only made the ribs that jutted out from the thin, sickly skin of his bare upper chest even more prominent.

Remi glared at him, annoyance flaring in her eyes. She sat by the bed on a chair, leaned over him with a hand on his chest. "If you don't relax, this will take a lot longer than it has to, and I don't really want to be touching you for any longer than I must."

The duke's eye twitched. "You're lucky to simply have the opportunity to touch my skin with your dirty hands, woman! Most women could only dream of such a feat."

"Most women are lucky to be unaware of your existence."

The guards behind Remi tensed, as if they expected the duke to give the order to kill her. The one holding a sword to the back of her neck pressed slightly harder, hard enough to draw a thin line of blood.

Remi smirked a little at that, and continued on sending her energy through the duke. "Relax."

Begrudgingly, Duke Guatus did as she said. "This feels strange, almost like I have a bunch of warm strings with bugs running across them in my body."

She shrugged. "That's one way to describe it."

———

After expending her energy for a while longer, thinking and reaching for the words of her father, searching and finding, replicating and removing, Remi sat back, leaning into the chair.

She felt like someone had siphoned all the energy from her body and left her in a state of exhaustion. She moved to cross her legs, and grimaced. Her limbs felt heavy, and moved like deadweight—as if they were cases in concrete.

Remi sighed. She hoped she'd done it right. Not for the duke's sake, but instead for her own, because that would mean she could successfully preform the immortal procedure. Her father and uncle had never trusted her with it before.

Now she could get Bliss and leave.

"All done," Remi announced, ducking under the blade behind her and standing up. She dusted the invisible dirt off her pants.

Duke Guatus sat up. "Does this mean I'm . . . immortal now?"

Remi pursed her lips. "Not entirely. You have the potential for immortality now. That means that unless you contract a disease or something in your body fails, or if someone kills you—which I desperately hope for—you will live forever."

She didn't truly wish him dead. Furious hate blossomed in her heart towards him for what he did to her cousin, but she didn't truly believe it was the place of any one person to take the life of another.

But that didn't mean she couldn't bluff a little.

"And my beautiful face," the Duke pressed. "Will I still look this perfect in the years to come?"

Remi gave him an exaggerated eye roll. "If that's what you consider perfect," she gestured towards his face, "Then yes, you will remain that way."

It was a curse enough for his face to remain that way until his death.

"Good!" the duke sat up slowly on the bed, clasping his hands together.

Remi looked him square in the eyes, her gaze hard and penetrating. "Are Bliss and I free to go now?"

The Unseen Duke raised his thin brows into his pale forehead and gave her a wry grin. "I don't think so, little lady. You see, even if I stay down here for the rest of my life and hide my beauty from the world, I can't guarantee that I won't become sick, or that someone won't try to have me killed. Therefore, I've decided to keep you here forever as my personal nurse, and you cousin as my pretty little weapon—she turned seven of my guards into dust before she went down. Anyhow, my nurse and my weapon—sounds lovely, doesn't it?"

Remi knew this would happen. She could feel the deceit radiating off from his person from the moment she met him.

"Don't you think I've planned for that possibility?" Remi let out a cold chuckle and crossed her arms.

He narrowed his eyes at her. "Explain yourself," he growled. His guards made to move forward, their hands resting on their sheaths, but the duke put up a hand to stop them from killing her.

Remi shrugged. "I've created a ticking time bomb in your chest. Not literally, of course, but just as fatal."

Duke Guatus stormed over to her, his bare feet slapping against the cavernous floor. He slapped her on the cheek, snapping her neck to the side. Her cheek flashed red hot as it throbbed in pain.

Tears burned at Remi's eyes unwillingly, but she refused to let them spill down her cheeks. She held her red cheek with her hand, and spat, "Go on! Hit me some more. You won't be able to for much longer. Before long, you won't even have enough energy to get out of bed. You see, while in your body, I discovered a minuscule amount of cancerous cells in your lungs, and in preparation for a complication like this, I multiplied them. You now have an advanced stage of cancer raging through your body, multiplying and growing by the second."

The duke snapped his eyes down to his chest, then took a step back from her—fearful she would try something if he ventured too close. "How dare you marr my beautiful body with your poison!"

She mocked his earlier words. "Oh, I dare. And besides, your body already had cancerous cells in it. I can't create something from nothing—that would be impossible. It's your own fault for having a vulnerability that was so easy to exploit."

The duke's sharp eyes bored into her soul. "I should kill you here and now for your insolence."

"But then you would have to get my father to agree to send someone from my family to save your life from cancer, and they'd never do that, no matter how much you offer them."

In a huff of anger, the duke nodded his head in the direction of the door. Immediately, two guards walked out of the room, their eyes hard and determined.

A couple minutes later they brought in a handcuffed, very weak Bliss. She was so weak that she couldn't support herself with her bruised legs, and had to be held up by her arms. Her head sagged down towards her chest.

Was she even conscious?

Tears sprang to Remi's eyes with a renewed vengeance, and this time, one escaped down her freckled cheek.

She glared at him. "Hurt her and I'll never heal you."

His glare was equally as challenging, and he seemed to be more confident with his guards surrounding him. As if having his guards nearby somehow made him into a bigger man. "If you don't take away the cancer, I'll kill her. How's that sound?"

Remi bit back the angry words threatening to spew out from her mouth, and forced herself to remain silent until she could regain her composure.

He continued, "You have two choices, little lady. Heal me and live here forevermore as my slave, or see your precious cousin killed here before your very eyes. Either way, you never leave this cave."

Unable to hold back her anger any longer, Remi lunged for him, tackling the tall man to the floor. She let her anger flow into her arms and hands, slapping and punching the smug face of her captor with everything she had in her.

Too quickly, Remi was pried from Duke Guatus's body by one of the hulk-like guards. She hoped she'd done some permanent damage to his face.

If only Bliss was awake . . .

Remi flailed her arms wildly and wriggled within the man's grasp, but she couldn't escape, no matter how hard she tried.

She bit at his arms and tried to kick backwards at his shins, but he was like a statue—unflinching and unmoving.

He was wearing long pants and sleeves and a turtle neck, and without skin to skin contact, Remi couldn't do anything to his body.

Then a voice shocked her still.

"Kill the girl," the duke said coldly, his eyes watching Remi closely. "And ten burn her body so that she can't be brought back to life."

Realizing she was about to die, Remi once again began struggling against the tight grasp of the guard holding her in place against him. Her limbs burned in exhaustion from preforming the procedure on the duke and now having to fight for her life, but she refused to give up.

She would go down fighting.

And then, in one horrifying moment of shock, Remi realized that no one was trying to kill her.

Instead, the guards holding Bliss were removing their swords from their sheaths.

They let Bliss crumple to the ground and held their blades above their heads.

In one final, simultaneous movement, the two of them swung their swords down towards Bliss's small neck.

"No!" Remi shrieked desperately, throwing herself against the guard's arms in an attempt to save her cousin. "Stop!"

Tears flowed from her eyes freely now, and she cried out in desperation without restraint. "I'll do anything. Please!"

But they didn't stop.