+1+

Helios Thantos cut the same impressive figure.

He is clean shaven. His light brown hair has grown out but he’s kept himself neat. He wears a black vest that looks like some sort of high tech ultra-thin Kevlar. With his arms bare I can see the scar from where Sera’s knife had penetrated him 6 years ago. His black pants could also be Kevlar, his boots are thick and protective but his face is wide open for attack. Helios has a machine gun strapped around him but he isn’t going to shoot. No that’s not his style.

Helios had always been lithe but muscular, but it looks like he’d had time to bulk up. His angular face has a gracious smile on it--his dark blue eyes are calculating. 

 “Paris Prince.”, Helios says approaching the cage, “We meet again.”

Paris struggles to keep his eyes open. He thought he could prepare himself for this moment, but he couldn’t. No one could. Paris opens his mouth to speak but no words come out. I drag Paris to a standing position because he could at least have a bit of dignity since they’d kidnapped him in his underwear. Paris clings to me to keep from falling. This move sends an amused look through Helios’ eyes.

“Seraphina”, Helios says turning to her. She stands and his eyes linger over her revealing dress, “It has been a long time."

“Talk to me without a cage between us.” She spits.

Helios saunters closer to the cage and with a hand motion Troy and Eos move to stand in a defensive formation. I’d once been a part of that formation. Falling in line with Helios had once felt as homey as Aria’s dinner table.

“I miss this”, Helios says, “I miss your fire Seraphina. I know all the pain you’ve been through. Everything the humans have done to you. They imprisoned you, they rose up against you and they used you. Now they took your country from you-- gave it to Edwin Bless. Did you know he is in the pocket of several parties that want to remove Angels and reunify New York? I believe destiny freed me to ensure our people’s freedom.  .  . again. “

“All you ever want is power”, she says stepping closer to the electrified cage but not touching it.

“No Seraphina I want you. I want you to join me. Together we can wreak havoc on anyone who has wronged us. I won’t hold you back Seraphina. You want to slaughter my men for breaking your Sisters?  I’ll let you. They are replaceable. You are not. You are one of a kind, Seraphina.”  

He uses a set of keys to open the cage  at the same time Eos and Troy-- my former comrades-- train their guns at me. Helios holds out a hand to Seraphina and escorts her out the cage with the ease and confidence of trainer with a wild animal. Once she is outside the cage Helios quickly locks it

“See”, Helios says, “I trust you, Seraphina. I trust that fire in you. This is where you belong. That anger ? That discomfort you’ve been feeling?  It’s not your body that needs to be satisfied it’s your blood lust.”

Seraphina is a bit unsteady on her feet. At Helios remarks there is a quiet chuckle from the clean shaven guy. Sera was still barefoot and the sun baked earth was probably burning her soles, but she didn’t let it show.

“Fuck you”, she says and lunges for Helios’ neck. He smiles as she wraps her hands around his throat. Her whole body suddenly starts to shake and she falls backward into the hard earth, her body involuntary spasming There is a bit of smoke where the high-voltage electric gun Helios’ now yielded had burned through her dress. Helios takes his time before turning it off.

Sera spits blood out of her mouth and pulls one of the electrode sensors from her collarbone. A gaping cauterized mark blooms on her neck. She lunges for Helios again, he unleashes the stun gun a second time this time aiming where her midsection is exposed. The voltage is so high I can smell burnt flesh.  He rips the electrodes out of her abdomen releasing two streams of bright red blood.

“Leave her alone”, Paris says still clinging to me to keep him up, “Please.”

Sera forces herself to stand only to fall back down again. She curses and starts crawling clumsily towards Helios on unsteady knees with murder in her eyes.

“See”, Helios announces to the audience of men now standing in the windows and doorways, “This is what I need in a solider. Someone who doesn’t give up”

Helios bends down  to Sera’s level and turns on the stun gun again, this time an electric arc forms between two locked electrodes

“Seraphina, this thing is supposed to take out wild animals in seconds, but nothing keeps you down does it ?”, Helios bends down and fake whispers, “God, You must have fought like hell when you lost your virginity.”

Sera says something incoherent, her words coming out slurred.Taking advantage of her moment of weakness Eos and Troy lift her into a metal chair and zip tie her wrist and ankles.

“I’m going to kill every last one of you motherfuckers.” she screams getting control of her body again.

 “Leave her alone”, Paris says trying to catch Helios’ gaze, “Take me instead Helios. It’s me you want. I started the resistance. I lead the revolution… I locked you up instead of killing you.”

Helios doesn’t take his eyes away from Seraphina when he speaks.

 “Don’t worry Paris you will have my attention soon enough.”

“I’m going to kill you first, Helios”, Seraphina says trying to break free from the chair, “Then everyone else in alphabetical order. I hope you can run Eos.”

Helios laughs and smooths back his hair. Sera’s dead eyes bury into Eos who begins to shift nervously under her unblinking gaze.

“It’s time to come back to me Seraphina.” Helios says, “You should have been by my side during my reign but I ...I made a mistake and let you go. Look at me and tell me you don’t miss the fire between us. You don’t miss everything I taught you; how to fight, how to fuck, how to survive…how I turned your soft fragile body into this powerful machine.”

He runs a finger up her muscular spine and she tenses under her restraints.

“That was 15 years ago”, She says and I hear the note of weakness in her voice, “I’m not that person anymore.”

“But you wish you were”, he says, ”This is where you are meant to be. I know the blood lust calls for you. It’s urges to be satisfied”, Going against his own strict moral code Helios slides his a finger up her dress and deep between her legs “Fuck, you really have given birth”.

She spits in his face and that familiar rage inside Helios snaps--  he hits her so hard the chair she’s tied to topples over, then he starts kicking her face in. I know from experience that in that moment Helios can’t see. All he can see is red.  All he sees is everything he thinks he lost because of Paris fucking Price of all people.

“Helios”, my voice booms across the courtyard. I keeping my tone clipped and powerful. Instantly Helios snaps out of it. Just like old times. Me the literally voice of reason to his impulsiveness.  His right-hand, his lieutenant, his second-in-command. In that moment it’s like no time has passed and it scares the shit out of me.

Helios kneels down and moves a strand of blood soaked hair from Sera’s  face, “Seraphina Grigori. Your loyalty should be to your own kind. You know what Prince'speople did to us. What he did to my beautiful country…what he’s’ done to you. Domesticated you and put you in a gilded cage. You deserve better, Seraphina. I will have your fealty.”

Helios one-handedly sets her chair back up, Sera opens her mouth to respond but instead of words blood from her nose and busted lip flows down her chin. Helios walks back into to the compound with his back straight, I suddenly realize he hadn’t looked at me the whole time. He hadn’t acknowledged me even once.

“Fuck”, Paris says to himself pushing against the bars only to get shocked, “Fuck Fuck Fuck”

Troy and Eos tilt and drag Seraphina’s chair into the compound after him.

 

+2+

They leave Paris and I out there to bake in the sun all day. The courtyard mostly remains empty but every now and then someone will wander across. I try to keep a tally of the Angels and commit the faces of the humans to memory. I counted 29 men, only ten of them are Angels. 

When the sun goes down Eos and Troy move Paris and I into the house. I take a quick survey of what little I can see of the hacienda style house that served as the compound. The walls are cracked and crumbled--the floor is covered in a fine layer of dirt and sand. The inside walls are painted with graffiti, parts of the ceiling is weather worn and the low hum of the generator means this place is off the power grid. It must have been abandoned for years before Helios found it.

Paris and I are lead through a hallway and the only furniture I glimpse is old army cots and makeshift bunks that crowd what was probably the great room. We also pass the kitchen where I see an old man hovering around the stove with a manacle on his leg. I wonder if Helios has any more prisoners.

I’m curious what is upstairs but we are lead down a staircase and descend several feet into a sound-proofed basement, it was deep enough that I figured narcos probably hid stored drugs here years ago. This had to be an old cartel house.

Less than 30 men? Subpar security and infrastructure. . . Yeah, I could work with this.

The basement smelled like antiseptic and under the light of a single dangling lighbulb, I can see where Helios has constructed more cages. Paris pauses at the huge metal sink and medical set up in the far corner.

This was how Helios had created New Aeterna.

He built the prisons first.

The men shove Paris and me into another compact cage and thunder up the stairs, locking the door behind them.

“Leon”, Paris starts his voice shaking.

“It’s okay, Boss.”

“I let that monster put his hands on my wife. What…what were we thinking coming here? What was I thinking coming here? We need Adonis or….Ares. Callum. We need to reach Callum.”

I feel around for my phone…It’s gone.

“This is good”, I say, “We found him. All we need to do is find a weakness and take him down. He’s gotta be stockpiling weapons. We just need to get our hands on one”

 “You can’t let him have me”, Paris says looking at the medical equipment stacked in the corner, “If it looks like we can’t get out of this. I need you to kill me.”

“No fucking way. Sera would never forgive me.”

We sit in an uncomfortable silence. We’d been in the hot sun for nearly a day without water and I felt the pang of hunger like I hadn’t in years.

“One of us should keep watch”, I say implying Paris should get some sleep.

“Go ahead”, Paris says, “I can’t sleep until I know Seraphina is okay.”

 I manage to get five minutes of sleep before I’m thinking about my girl and Aria. I had to hope Adonis was keeping them safe.

The lock on the upstairs door clicks and Paris and I both snap to attention. I can feel my adrenaline pumping as the door creaks open letting in a stream of light. I hear two sets of footsteps coming down the stairs. I can see Helios’ figure in the shadows he has one hand on Sera’s shoulder and the other on her hip, he is half leading half pushing her down the stairs.

When they reach the landing he shoves her forward and she stumbles. Her head was shaved and her dress had been replaced with a gray tank top several sizes to small for her frame and a pair of black boxers.

She keeps her hands in front of her, feeling her way around the room. She runs headlong into a shelf of tools and Helios yanks her back into the shadows.

“This way”, he purrs into her ear and throws her into the cage with us. Underneath the swinging light-bulb I catch a glimpse of her face.

The most noticeable aspect being the uneven gaping Glasgow smile ripping the right side of her face open and bleeding down her neck. The rest of her face was unrecognizable and covered in bruises and abrasions from the stun gun. The entire left side of her face was a mess of swollen warped skin covered in fresh second and third degree burns. One of her eyes was blood red and the other one was swollen shut.

Paris didn’t move. There was an imperceptible intake of breath. But he didn’t move. Inside the cage Sera feels along the bars and turns to face Helios, the thin bars of the cage separating them. She had to force herself to look into Helios’ stony blue eyes. Helios’ seemed appalled by his own handy work.

“You did this your yourself”, Helios said as if she’d spoken , “You don’t have to love me anymore, but you can at least respect me enough to know I know what’s best for our people. I’m freeing you Sera. You’ll see in time.”

“It’s due--”, she starts before she can finish Helios shoves the stun gun into her face. She drops to the ground  and the overwhelming smell of burning flesh makes  me involuntary vomit.

Helios’ voice went sober, “Seraphina, In all my years I’ve never met someone take to killing so well. You work for me. You are my assassin, I made you what you are and I can make you better. It’s time for your first assignment”

Sera struggles to get to her feet and I do my best to help her stand.

" I told you...I will never work for you aga--”, Sera is cut off when he brings the stun gun to her face. He holds it here longer than he should, when she hits the ground I think she’s out cold but the current causes an involuntary shutter. Helios looks at Pars willing him to do something, but Paris just reaches down to help Seraphina back to her feet, she settles against Paris physically leaning on him for support.

“This is the problem with you Sera. You can take the torture", Helios says, "There is nothing you love, is there? Except maybe your sisters. Except maybe Aria and her suburban house and her bastard daughters. That little gray and white house of hers would burn easily. I could have them tied up and record th  sounds of those little girls burning alive screaming for their daddy to save them. I can play it for you every night."

“He’s lying”, Sera says still looking at Helios but talking to me.

Helios smiles, “Aria should have died a gruesome death a long time ago. You know how I punish traitors. You remember don’t you Paris?”

Paris keeps his head down.

 “Sera—“, I start

“Don’t you fucking dare Leon”, She says, “He is not going to blackmail us into doing his dirty work.”

“Sera…it’s my family.”

“Maybe I won’t kill the little bastards”, Helios says meeting Sera’s eyes, “Maybe I’ll sell them. My operation is having a cash flow problem."

Sera looks at me, her expressions were harder to read under the burns and bruises but I could still read it. It was disdain for me and Helios’ fucking ultimatum

“Fine”, she says and I can feel the tension leaving my body, “Who do you want me to kill?”

A crooked smile spreads across Helios’s face...

“Welcome to the team”, Helios says smiling congenially.

She spits at him again because that’s all she could do.

“You’re going to kill Edwin Bless.”

+3+

A long stretch of silence follows

Deep down I know we were all reliving those horror stories we’d heard about people who  escaped Helios’ prisons during the Regime. Helios knew how to control people. He knew how much someone could take before they broke or died. After 10 years as a dictator he was well studied in it.

I kept looking around the basement trying to figure out a way out of this fucking room. Out of this fucking cage. The bars were made of woven white gold, I’d been unable to break it even with the tiny knife I had hidden in my boot.  Paris’ thin dexterous fingers couldn’t fit through the gaps enough for him to get a needle through the lock.

In the corner of the cage Seraphina stirs. She’d passed out after Helios left and fitfully slept lying on her husband’s lap. Sera wakes up after a three hours and jumps when she sees the shiny needle between Paris' fingers. Paris' smile widens and he loops some loose thread from his shirt onto the needle.  He cradles her face in his hands, holding the split skin of the Glasgow smile Helios had carved into her face. She flinches when he begins to sew up the open wound. Her other burns and disfigurements are still fresh and sensitive to his touch. She holds onto his shirt to keep her hands out the way but still moves involuntarily as he works.

When he is near the end he lowers his face as if to kiss her, instead he snaps the thread with his teeth and swallows the needle.

+++

 “It’s dangerous, Leon. That kind of thing … it becomes a weakness. It’s coming, Leon. A world where we can live like the humans.  Live richly in all the ways that matter but we aren’t there yet. Until that day anything outside of our mission is a weakness. “

I wake up drenched in a cold sweat. It is pitch black outside and probably around  3am. I shake the dream from my head. Helios’ words were more like a memory than a dream. I could vividly picture the shitty godforsaken desert we had been camped out in when he said those words to me. I didn’t know when and where it had happened but a pretty girl had shared a cigarette and gone to bed with me without Helios helping me or paying her. I’d wanted to marry her…out of some form of loneliness and because that’s just what people did back then.

For some fucking reason I’d asked Helios’ permission to marry her and he’d given me that shit line. He always gave me that line when I wanted something outside of SGI

I’d felt like shit afterwards. Like a silly kid who had dreams of marriage, home cooked meals and real family to come home to.

It wasn’t silly though

I’d had it.

I’d had that dream life.

On the other side of the bed Sera is laying next to me, staring up at the flashing red light in the corner of our new cell. It was pushing over eighty degrees in the small bedroom and I can feel the metal springs heating up underneath the cheap mattress.

It was day four of our captivity and the madness was setting in.

---

Helios had separated Seraphina and I from Paris three days ago. Helios and four of his men had stormed into the basement with guns blazing. Helios opened the cage door and  two humans dragged Paris up from the floor and forced him out of the cage. Troy and Eos held Seraphina back and I thought about reaching for the knife in my boot but then I thought about my daughters. Paris kept his composure anything too emotional and Helios would have found too much joy in it.

“Don’t kill him”, I’d said.

Helios just turned his back on me.

A few hours later they came for us.

This time it was four Helions and four humans. Helios opened the cage and the four Helions pulled Seraphina off the floor while the humans wrestled her arms behind her back and handcuffed her wrist.. The humans pointed their guns at me and motioned for me to follow Helios up the basement steps

They took Sera and I  to the second floor of the compound to a small room at the end of the hallway. I clocked three locks on the outside of the door.

“I’ll come for you when I need you”. Helios said. The men shoved Seraphina into the room while I was walked in a gunpoint. Seraphina lunged for the door just as it shut, she threw her weight against it but the locks click in succession.

The bedroom was empty except for a dingy full size mattress and a delicate looking vanity with a large three sided mirror where Sera couldn’t escape her disfigured face; the burns and swelling left her almost unrecognizable…. though the mutilated raw exposed skin seemed to bother me more than her.

The room was infested with roaches that crawled nosily in the middle of the night, the small en suite bathroom was overrun with mold and the pipes leaked brown liquid into the sink before running clear.

Two MRES and a 64 ounce thermos with water had been placed on the nightstand and replaced each morning.

When we were initially locked into the room, the first thing Sera did was reach for the chair from the vanity and throw it into the floor-to-ceiling window in the room that looked out onto the courtyard. The glass vibrated but didn’t break. She was flexible enough with her hands cuffed behind her back to pick the chair up again and hurl it at the glass, it made contact with the wall leaving a crack in the plaster and some foul liquid seeped out.

“You done, sweetheart”, I said already getting tirde of her temper tantrum.

“Shut the fuck up”, she said turning coldly on me, “You shut the fuck up.”

“I don’t think so sweetheart. You have something to say. Say it.”

“Fine. This is all your fucking fault.” She said trying to fight her way out of the handcuffs, “He used your family against you. Us”

Sera had looked around the room and that’s when she noticed the blinking red light in the corner. It was a clunky security camera nestled way up in the celling.

“Fuck you”, she said to the blinking red light, “Fuck you.”

She used the chair to stand on top of the vanity and reach for the camera, even though her damn hands were cuffed behind her back. The c vanity table bucked under her weight and she came crashing down to the floor. She pushed herself to stand and smashed her entwined hands into the mirror, over and over and again until it was streaked in her blood. I grabbed her and shoved her into the small closet by the door and threw my weight against it. She banged against the door cursing at me.

“What are you doing? Let me out.”

“Calm the fuck down, you’re just as bad as Helios with your damn temper.”

“Let me the fuck out of here.” she said throwing herself against the door with each word.

I waited for about ten minutes then slowly opened the door. She’d bruised her shoulder pretty bad and reopened some of the wounds on her face.

“You calm now?” I asked.

She looked down at her bloody hands and the fragments of mirror still in her skin.

“You’re wrong. I’m not as bad as Helios”, she said calmly sitting on the edge of the dirty mattress and tilting her head up to the security camera, “I’m worse.”

She kept her eyes on the camera while I explored the foul smelling bathroom, stepping over dirt and dead water bugs. I turned on the shower and waited for the water to run clear before gathering enough to wash off the thin layer of grime that had formed on me with a bar of harsh soap. There was a distinct lack of outside sound that made me think this room was soundproof

There had been a neat pile of clothes on the bed, I’d been hesitant to put on the green camo and gray t-shirt that I’d worn as Helios’ man for nearly 50 years, but the clothes were soft and clean. If not a little used.

I ripped a piece of bedsheet and soaked it in water. Sera flinched when I gently wiped the blood off her hands, Sera was still wearing  boxers and a thin cropped tank top that showed off the large arrow tattoo she’d been strategically covering up for years. I awkwardly helped her into a pair of black pants and a pair of worn boots.

We moved to the only window in the room which thankfully (or strategically) overlooked the courtyard. The courtyard seemed to be the place where the men  or “The Legion” as they called themselves congregated.

Each morning they set up tents and makeshift workstations around the courtyard. I spotted two who were doing communications and possible intelligence gathering with a set of satellite laptops Helios brought down. A lot of the Angels were repairing old guns and stocking up an armory.

Every morning all the men ran military drills, trained in hand-to-hand and I saw Jorgen carrying piecemeal guns off to what had to be target practice.  A handful of the men piled into a Jeep and headed towards the bottling factory to work. Meals were served twice a day—thick hearty soups and gruel. Only sometimes with meat. The Helions always ate first. Eos and Troy appeared to have rooms inside the compound. They ate meals inside too.

I noticed there were no women, and in the three days of watching none had been brought in—but that was Helios' one virtue.

Helios.

Helios kept himself apart from his ragtag militia. When he made an appearance he is always strapped with that machine gun and Eos and Troy are always next to him. His new Alpha and Beta.

Sera and I didn't talk much during the first three days of our captivity but we observed the courtyard together. Occasionally we’d exchange a look that lets me know we are on the same page. The only real sound is the jingle of her handcuffs.

 “You know how this goes, right.” I’d said the first day, “Helios knows  how to break and control people then make them think it was their choice. He is going to try and get us to turn on each other. We are all we’ve got. We can’t turn on each other.”

“I can handle it”, she'd said watching Helios move among his men. She reached unconsciously for the missing necklace she usually kept he wedding ring on, I sensed the question she didn’t want to ask.

 

Author's Note

Muse: Okay, Lils so you just finished talking about things you regret in Lux Aeterna while presenting this dark chapter

Lils: Yeah, It lined up bad. It feels like I keep torturing Sera, but this is Helios not understanding what's important to her.

Muse: Also, Wow Lils so the villain kidnaps the protagonist and ropes them into his service by threatening children. Pretty sure this happened to Alan in Sunshine.

Lils: I’ve had this idea for years though

Also the scene where Paris sews up Seraphina’s face is a homage to this from Lux Aeterna, which is cannon in New Aeterna.

The Angel stands over me and holds out the long piece of thread and snaps it with her teeth.  She places the needle back into my sleeve and I run my hand over where she has sewn stitches over my cut smile.

This was another one of my flashing “SEE THEY ARE THE REAL COUPLE” moments.

I will also say that this is an oddly spliced chapter because to me the reveal that Helios wants Sera to kill Bless is a "Chapter Ender" (I like to end on cliffhangers) but Chapter three was so short and there was no real place for a "break". I struggled with chapter three because I felt like it only moved the "emotional" arcs and I couldn't come up with a plot. I'm so bad with "just show the characters having fun". I also couldn't really split or shift this chapter because chapter five is Aria's POV.

Also this chapter ends randomly in a flashback because in my document Leon wakes up in bed with Sera, has a flashback to how they got there, then comes back to the present for the next scene...but I had to split it up for reasons.

No more crazy flashbacks

Muse : Umm AYC has a flashback within flashback with a mini-flashback.