[i]What a sick bastard,[/i] Jacob’s upper lip twitched as he fought the impulse to curl it in disgust. Even if Regis had a sliver of intelligence left inside his head, it was obvious that his sanity was long gone. The way he spoke to his captors, as if he was the one in charge, was astounding. It was like every time he was returned to his cell after an interrogation, he forgot that he was going to be tortured again if he continued to refuse to talk. In a way, Jacob’s visits had been a merciful offering. If Nox-Fleuret would just confess to him the information they were after, he wouldn’t have to endure another round of beatings with the questioners’ tools of torture. Granted, once they had what they wanted from him, he was certain that King Atlas was going to have him sentenced to death, but at least that would be less painful than the repeated torment he was going through now.

“If you consider an end to your suffering ‘nothing,’ then yeah, I guess there’s nothing in it for you,” he agreed with a sardonic roll of his eyes. After putting up with the rebel leader’s attitude for a whole night, his patience had been whittled down to a nub, and he didn’t even pretend to put up with the cheeky comments anymore. If it wasn’t for the fact that the military had a set of protocol in place for dealing with prisoners already, he would have unlocked Regis’s cell himself and beaten the shit out of him multiple times by now. Everyone knew he deserved it after everything he’d done to the royal family—especially Caspian.

As Regis described the sick ways he would have liked to turn the prince into a trophy, Jacob eyed him with revulsion. Now more than ever, he was convinced that the rebellion was a plague upon Aspiria. If their leader was this deranged, it spoke volumes about the way the terrorist organization was being run. His stomach churned with the image of Caspian’s body taxidermied like the prize of a serial killer, but he knew Regis was lying about burning him. He’d seen human ashes before, so he knew what they looked like. The dust beneath their feet had been too fine of a powder to belong to any previously living creature. If it had come from a body, they would have been stepping on bits of bone and teeth.

“You’re a twisted son of a bitch,” he growled. It was hard to tell if Nox-Fleuret genuinely believed the prince’s corpse had been burned. Perhaps it had. Just because the bit about scattering the ashes in the house had been a lie didn’t necessarily mean the rebels hadn’t incinerated Caspian’s body. If they had, he was going to have yet another piece of bad news to deliver to Atlas. He cringed as he imagined how the king was going to react when he woke up to find out that his only son was dead and they might not have any way to recover his body.

Almost as if he’d summoned his own nightmare, his phone pinged with an alert. The guard glanced down at it and took a deep breath as he saw a message on the screen from one of the security guards in the palace. Atlas had woken up. “Shit,” he exhaled under his breath. Tossing one more cold look at Regis, he tapped into the military’s frequency on his com device, “The use of Aproveset on Nox-Fleuret is approved. Bring him in for interrogation as soon as the drug is ready. I want that information out of him before lunch.”

Directing his next words at the prisoner, he tilted his chin up, “I gave you a chance. Now you’ll find out what happens to dumb fucks who don’t do what they’re told.” With that, he turned and headed out of the prison, leaving Regis behind as he prepared himself to confront his king with nothing but bad news.