Making the characters suffer

Yesterday, I finished making all the changes that my colour charts told me needed to be made to Future Found. Wow, thought I. I'm almost done. Need to look at words, sentence structure, spellcheck, read it aloud but the heavy lifting is done.

Then last night in bed, I had a bit of an epiphany – I've been too easy on my protagonists.

That's not to say that nothing's happening in this book. There's a serial killer, a series favourite is having a truly crap time and there's some real shake-ups politically and socially in the bardria. The two protags also have some issues to deal with – both of them at different points have someone trying to choke them; one gets cheated on and then cannot trust the other; a pet is almost killed and a father jailed for threatening some babies. But they're not – you know – SUFFERING.

They manage to deal with all these things relatively easily cause while they're difficult and hard, they're not life-changing. That's what I need – something life changing.

The problem with that is one of the protags is a guardian and as anyone who's read Secret Ones and Power Unbound can tell you, the guardians are pretty tough to hurt. Really, if you're going for them, you're going for the kill – you won't survive going in there half-cocked. But then, it's too easy to go for the non-guardian.

Of course, I'm focussed here on physical suffering. Maybe mental suffering would be enough?

I've come up with an idea that works well in the storyline, but I don't think it's – nasty enough. But how to get nasty with someone with that much power?

More thinking is required, I think.