The clinking of chains echoed down the hallway, sharp and metallic. Kael's bare feet left smeared trails of fresh blood with every step, his gait uneven, barely holding himself upright. He didn't have the luxury of stopping. The moment he tried to pause, the chains wrapped around his body were yanked hard, choking him. He growled, but couldn't fight back.
They'd injected him with wolfsbane before dragging him out of the underground cell where he'd been rotting for over two weeks. He couldn't even remember what sunlight looked like anymore. Now, the light stabbed at his eyes like a floodlamp, blinding, painful, impossible to focus through.
He stumbled forward, barely conscious, dragged from a silver-laced iron cage by the same people who had razed his village to the ground. And now they were hauling him into a mansion, opulent, pristine, and so out of place it made his stomach turn.
