"Why did you blackmail Isabel into trying to kill me?" I asked the helpless young man held up in the air by my restraining bonds.

"F… Fuck you…" George sobbed through the pain brought about by the charred remains of his hand. He was in so much pain that he was barely able to speak even that one curse.

Another fire bolt was sent his way, but it didn’t make contact directly with him. Instead, Isabel had it detonate early, but close enough that he would still feel its heat roll over him. 

"Do I need to remind you of what you will lose if you don’t answer, or try to lie to us? Oh, and don’t be a cunt anymore than you usually are. You slipped up around me once before. We already know you're working for someone else." Isabel joined in the interrogation, and if the sadistic grin on her lips was anything to go by, she was enjoying it much more than I was.

"T… there was a magister…" George finally spat out an answer.

"Good, we’re finally getting somewhere." Isabel laughed, and seeing as how she was so keen to torture her, I just let her go for it. "Which magister?"

"Cromwell!" He answered, much to my distress.

"FUCK!" I bellowed out.

Both Isabel and George’s attention were drawn to me after my outburst, but the woman was the one who spoke since she had no fear of freely speaking her mind as our captive did. "I take it you know of this Magister Cromwell cunt.

"It’s actually Archmage Cromwell now," I replied. "Yesterday he succeeded my father and was promoted to Warden Arcanum. And, yes, I do know him."

After taking the hint that I wasn’t going to further explain how I knew the latest member of the Council of Thirteen, Isabel turned back to the integration at hand. "What was Cromwell offering you to do this for him?"

"..." George quietly sobbed, not answering her question.

Instead of Isabel, it was I who retaliated this time. I did this by using the restraining bonds to force the charred nub where his hand should be to press up against his chest. The young man startled to wail out as soon as his sensitive, raw flesh experienced more pain from the pressure I was making him put on it. Eventually, after a few seconds of this, I returned him to his original star position and said. "Answer her question: What was Cromwell offering you?

"He said that he would arrange an opportunity where I could show my family my real worth, and increase my standing among them." George cried.

"Huh, was that all a life is worth to you, standing?" I rolled my eyes.

"You don’t understand. I may be related to an archmage, but I’m only his great-grandnephew. I’m just trash to most of the Garners." 

"Oh, boo hoo. Your family doesn’t like you, but that didn’t stop you from treating others like shit, did it?"

"You don’t understand, you were the son of an archmage!" George shouted as the tears ran down his face.

"Don’t I? The first time I actually saw my father in person was at his funeral. All you arcanists are the same!" Fueled by my anger and hatred, I shouted back at him, but a moment of clarity and calm broke through as I remembered Hannah and my mother, who were technically arcanists themselves. Because of that, I had a correction to make. "No, all of the founding families are the same. You don’t care who you hurt or abuse, as long as you fulfill your selfish desires."

"Isabel," I sighed as I turned around, turning my back on the young man. "Do you mind continuing? I need a moment to calm down."

The fiery young woman didn’t hesitate for even a second before continuing the interrogation. "Where is the evidence you have on my sister kept?"

Not wanting anymore pain, George immediately relented and answered. "Cromwell has it, he always has. He only gave me copies of it so that I could control you and, if you failed, control your sister."

"That cunt!" Isabel snapped. The anger in her eyes was palpable as she began to draw a runic array in the air, but I was unable to see her doing that since I had my back to them both.

"Alek, was there anything else you wanted to get from this fucker?" Isabel asked me before putting the finishing touch on her spell.

"No, I’ve got everything I need from him. We should probably-" I answered, but once I had given her the answer she wanted, the rest of what I was saying got cut off by a torrent of fire and the wailing scream of a dying man.

I immediately turned around as soon as I felt the heat on my back. My eyes dropped and my eyes widened as they watched the young man I was holding helplessly in the air being consumed by a raging inferno. The fire, the same spell Isabel had used that messed up my car door in our fight, was pouring out of her hands, slowly turning everything in its path to ash.

"Why the fuck did you do that?" I shouted at her, but I didn’t bother to try and stop her now that it was already too late. George was already gone.

"Did you really think we could have just let him walk after what he did. He may not have been popular among his family, but he was still related to an archmage. If someone as powerful as they are finds out we tortured a member of their family, they will have far worse done to us, just to send a message." Isabel was lit up by the fire as she spoke, revealing the sadistic grin scretched across her lips.

Although what we had done to George wasn’t anything remotely good. Murder was still something I could barely comprehend being a part of. "Still we could have-" I tried to reason with her, but she cut me off.

"Trust me, Alek. That cunt deserved to suffer more. It was a mercy to kill him this quickly after everything he made me do." She shouted back, but despite the fact that her eyes were on the torrent of flame which was quickly consuming her mana along with the body within them, I could clearly see the tears starting to run down her cheeks.

Given that Isabel was willing to murder someone to protect her sister, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that George could have easily blackmailed her into doing other things. As the embers of the woman's fan of flames spell died out, I found my way over to her and pulled her away, so that she could no longer look at the charred remains of the man who hurt her.

I hugged Isabel tight, not at all in a sexual way, but in a supportive one. "No one is ever going to hurt you again. At least not without your consent first." I rubbed her back and just tried my best to be there for her as she took a few moments to cry into my shirt. 

Once the young woman started to recover, she wiped away the tears from her eyes and put on her usual stern, perpetually angry expression. "If you tell anyone that I just cried like that, I’m going to burn you." She threatened me, but it honestly didn’t feel like she meant it all that much.

"I promise, I won’t tell anyone, but does that mean I can tell people about how I bent you over a picnic table and spanked your ass until you were coming on my cock." I teased the woman, which momentarily brought a smile back to her lips.

"You’re a cunt, you know that?"

"That’s not a no."

"No!" She shouted, but she was more and more now.

"Fine, my lips are sealed. Unless, of course, you ever want them unsealed and on your pussy." I continued to unashamedly flirt, and although some may have thought it was weird for me to be like this after just being an accomplice to murder, my behaviour acted as a kind of coping mechanism, for not only me but also to help her through this.

Isabel just shook her head, not saying another word as she turned her attention back to the charred skeleton in the centre of the warehouse floor. "What are we going to do with the remains. We can’t just leave them here. His family could have a divinier track them down once they realise he has gone missing. The same is true for his ring."

Spreading raw tendrils of divine power out across the warehouse, I gathered all the wayward ash, fingers, and the ring he was once wearing into a single pile where the skeletal remains laid. After that, I explained. "We should throw them off the edge of the city. If the remains are far enough away, then the divination magic won’t work properly, but we have to be thorough. We can’t let even a speck of ash remain in the city.

Isabel let out a big long sigh before she said. "This is going to be a pain in the ass, isn’t it?"

"Yeah…" I sighed back because we had quite a bit of work ahead of us, covering up our murder.