Ian was chained from the ceiling of the dingy stone chamber with iron manacles fastened about his wrists, burning at the flesh beneath.
"Either kill me or cut me down!" he spit at his captor. "But you can't keep me here forever!"
His captor laughed, deep and throaty. "Can't I?"
"What do you want from me? The deed is done, you've already lost..."
The next second, his captor's face was scant inches from his own. "If I've lost, it's because you failed!" Then, as punishment for his insolence, the flat of an iron blade traced along his cheek and down his neck, leaving a trail of angry red welts.
Ian flinched away from the sizzling sound of iron against his Faerie flesh. "I'll make you pay for this, bitch..." he vowed.
"You dare speak that way to your Queen?" Elizabeth asked haughtily, pulling down the hood of her cloak and stepping into the faint hint of light spilling in the barred window.
"What are you going to do? Torture me?" he asked sarcastically, seeing as he was already a prisoner in her torture chamber.
Elizabeth's dark eyes flickered dangerously. "I can make your life a living hell, Doyle," she informed him, "Or I can show you mercy...if you give me a reason."
He scoffed. "If the stories of your so-called mercy are to be believed, I highly doubt I want it."
"I grow tired of your insolence," she snapped, then thrust the iron blade into his stomach, making him cry out in pain, both from the wound and the bite of iron.
For a few moments, he could do nothing but stare as if in disbelief at the blood trickling down his torso to drip on the flagstone floor.
"Your life means less than nothing to me," Elizabeth informed him. "The only reason I haven't killed you yet is because something about you amuses me."
"If you let me down, I'll practice my curtsey..." he deadpanned.
Elizabeth approached and Ian winced in anticipation of the iron blade being thrust into his stomach again, but instead, she took the key from the inside pocket of her cloak and reached as if to unlock his manacles.
Before she did, though, she paused, stepped back, a thoughtful expression twisting the cruel red lips.
"The question remains, though..." she spoke, twisting the key about her finger. "Why in God's name would I trust you a second time? I placed my trust in you once and you managed to fail spectacularly – you had one task, a simple task for an acclaimed hunter such as yourself – and you couldn't even kill one little beast..."
She turned to stare out the cell's lone window, cloak whipping around behind her. The sound of far off trumpets could be heard, if barely, announcing the Kingdom's celebrations.
"Do you hear that?" she asked. "They announce the nuptials of my daughter to the beast you assured me you could kill – with one shot, at that. Today, she's married to him! My daughter, wedded to a beast!"
Ian rolled his eyes at her histrionics – afterall, he was already being tortured, a little insolence wouldn't go amiss. "How many fucking times must we go through this?" he asked, almost as if bored. "I would have had his head on my wall, if it weren't for your daughter getting in the way..."
"If you're intending to ingratiate yourself into my good graces, you're failing," she warned.
"Then, it's a good thing I know how to fix this..." he said, almost airily.
Elizabeth raised a brow, interest piqued. "Well, then?" she demanded when he failed to elaborate.
"First, I must know what price you're willing to pay," he said, foreboding.
She cocked her head to the side, unamused. "I already paid you – and a great waste of gold that was..."
"I'm not talking about something so pedestrian as money," he scoffed. "This solution will require magic and, as we both know, my magic has a price." A wicked smirk threatened to break out across his lips.
"Spit it out already!" she ordered.
"What if Emily – nay, all of us – lived in a world where she wasn't the wife of a beast, but of another man, one of a more respectable sort?"
"And what world would that be?"
He couldn't hold back his smirk any longer. "One without magic..."
"And her husband?"
His smirk grew impossibly wide. "Give me Emily's hand in marriage and I promise you that she won't remember Derek. In fact, she won't remember any of this. No one will but the two of us."
In the next moment, his manacles were unlocked and he was collapsed into a heap of limbs on the cold stone floor.
"And what becomes of the beast?" Elizabeth asked and it was clear that he was winning her over.
"I'll make him suffer," he said simply.
At last, he'd said something with which Elizabeth could agree. "What must we do?"
Ian stood, wincing at the pain rippling out from his stab wound as he did so. With a pass of his hand, blue sparks of magic flickering out to knit together the flesh, he healed himself. "Enact a dark curse," he said, almost reverently. "It will require great sacrifice, though," he warned. At her raised brow, he said, "The heart of the thing you love most. If, in fact, you do love anything other than yourself..."
"And how do I know I can trust you? You've already let me down once before," she reminded him.
He waggled his brows lasciviously. "Because this time there's something in it for me – something more precious than gold."
"What, pray tell, is that?"
"Suffering," he hissed. "I feed on it, I luxuriate in it, in the chaos of broken hearts beating for naught, in the wake of destruction. I crave it like a redcap craves blood, like a nixie craves the thrashing of a young girl drowning. It enervates me, fills me with life. It is the single sweetest thing I can imagine..."