I began to move around him, when he replied, “There’s no one in holding, Your Highness.”
Okay, now I was seriously questioning his ineptitude. “What do you mean, ‘there’s no one in holding’?” I cocked a brow at him. “I sent Zaya to holding three days ago. She should be in one of the cells on this floor.”
“She’s not up here, sir.” He visibly swallowed. “I… I haven’t seen anyone taken to holding.”
“Then where the fuck is she?” I demanded.
He jumped back to his desk and started typing on his keyboard.
My patience began to melt with each passing second. If this jackass didn’t give me an answer in the next five—
“She’s on level f-five,” he stammered, the color leaking from his complexion.
“Level five?” I repeated, sure that I’d heard him wrong.
“Y-yes, s-sir.” He appeared ready to pass out now.
“Who the fuck put her on level five?!”
His fingers began to fly over the keyboard, but I shoved him aside, needing to see this bullshit for myself.
“Byron,” I seethed. “Page him immediately. I want to have a word with him after I’ve secured Zaya in the right fucking cell.”
Fuck!
How the hell had something like this happened? I’d been explicit in my request. Why the fuck would he take her down to level five?
I grabbed the keys from Alaric’s shaking hand and practically ran down the spiral staircase, furious with both Byron and myself. Had I just come to talk to her sooner, I would have known about her circumstances.
Lucifer’s nutsack.
He’d put her on the level where vampire prisoners were left to starve. No blood. No food. Barely any light. The cells down here were rarely used and saved for those who seemed to have lost their touch with sanity.
Very few ever made it out alive.
And Byron had locked Zaya up in a cell down here.
She killed a visitor, yes. But I hadn’t given her a sentence yet, and it sure as shit wouldn’t have included sending her here.
I grabbed a torch from a wall on the fourth level before descending to the bottom. “Zaya?” I called, using the flames to illuminate each cell along the way until I finally found her curled in a ball in the room at the end of the hall.
Grime, blood, and unmentionable fluids covered her from head to toe. She’d wrapped herself up in a filthy blanket, her eyes closed in slumber.
The stench of fish caused my nose to curl, but I had no idea where it was coming from. I used the master key to unlock her cell and stepped inside. They hadn’t even cleaned up the space from the last prisoner, his ashes littering the ground just behind her head.
Which explained the soot in her hair.
“Hellfire,” I muttered, setting the torch in an old holder beside the door. The fishy odor seemed to be coming from her clothes. I frowned at the green smear of something inedible on her shirt. Had someone tried to feed her? Or had they left her here to starve in isolation?
Un-fucking-believable.
I would have Byron’s balls for this.
How could he even begin to think this was okay?
“Zay,” I murmured, trying to stir her from her slumber.
She didn’t so much as budge, her weakened state breaking my heart. She’d definitely not eaten anything, which wouldn’t cause an issue in most demons, but her human side required regular sustenance. Just as my essence running through her being exacerbated her need for fresh blood, too.