Chapter 16

CHAPTER16

Imove away from Ashen but I know he’ll follow. I head toward the exit for the patio. My thoughts tell me I’ve won a small battle against myself, but my chest hurts as though I’ve already lost.

I don’t look behind me as I pivot through the bodies on the dancefloor. Eryx’s eyes catch mine across the crowd. There’s a question in his gaze when it darts behind me and back again. My twitch of a smile and subtle nod seem to calm him. He gives me a nod in reply and watches but doesn’t follow.

The night is cool and chills my skin when we pass the threshold and arrive on the empty patio. The air seems thinner in the absence of the sun. The stars are bright across the sea. I walk to the stone railing of the patio and look out across the cliffs that plunge into the midnight shore.

Ashen comes to a stop next to me, leaning his arms on the stone. He’s close enough that I can feel his warmth but not near enough to touch. He doesn’t look at me but I can feel his attention on every little movement I make, from the way I press my hands together to keep from fidgeting with my dress to the way I sigh when the silence stretches on.

“You got me where you want me, Reaper. So, talk,” I say. My voice sounds more weary than annoyed. I keep my eyes on the ocean as the fleeting memory of my home with my sisters floats up to haunt me.

Ashen’s head dips a little. I glance over to see his gaze fall a bit lower on the shore. “I’m sorry, Lu.”

“For what, Reaper? What you’ve already done to me, or for whatever torture you’re still planning to inflict?”

A puff of air like the ghost of a bitter laugh escapes from Ashen. I feel him glance at me but I don’t return his gaze. “I am trying to help you. Your condition will not stabilize until you finish what Semyon started.”

I already feel that truth within me. My healing abilities may have returned, but my body and brain feel inconsistent at best. The visions I’ve had seem to almost come of their own will. I feel like there’s power within me that I’m not in control of. See also my bladder at times, apparently.

Even knowing all this doesn’t mean I’m eager to play nice with Ashen. In fact, my ever-present, simmering rage is just starting to come to a boil.

“Right, I’m sure you’re an expert now. Did Ember bring you the lab reports personally? Or did you watch on a hidden camera?”

Ashen’s spine tenses. I can almost see each vertebra locking into place.

“Did you know she came to participate, in the beginning? Until it became too grim for even her.”

Ashen is silent. A muscle ticks in his jaw as he looks at his hands.

“What did you learn about my condition that you’re now such an expert in, Ashen? Did the shit that Gallus injected into me tell you something? Or what about the bones he broke? Did pulling my fingernails off one by one teach you what would fix me?”

His heart hammers out heavier beats. I hear the tempo of his breath quicken.

I turn toward him, the red light of my eyes flowing across the stone until it locks to his face. My jaw is set like rock as we stare at one another. I glare through the hot tears that burn as they slide across my skin. I didn’t even realize they were there.

Ashen straightens and faces me. Flame brightens in his eyes. “Lu-“

“How about-“ I choke on my words. Ashen takes a step forward and I take one back, throwing my hand out to stop him from coming closer. My voice is low and fierce when I finally wrestle it under control. “How about the time he peeled back the layers of my abdomen to see if the magic of Semyon’s serum meant I could finally carry a child, Ashen? How about that? What about when he and your sister took… When they…”

I press my lips together. My breath stutters in my chest. My gaze falls to the floor and I try to push every memory of those moments in the dungeon into a prison in my mind. I can’t relive anymore of what was done to me. What was put in, what was stripped out. What was stolen.

“Lu…”

Those two letters pass Ashen’s lips with so much rage and pain and sorrow. And yet, it feels like not enough. Not nearly enough.

With a monumental amount of effort, I pull my sorrow back beneath the fury that lives under my skin. I wipe my eyes and take a deep breath. I turn back to the sea. I’d rather be haunted by the memories of my lost sisters than the horrors of this newest hell. “I will die before you put me back in that dungeon, Ashen. I will die before you use me as a weapon and do to the others what you did to me.”

“I am sorry, Lu, for what happened to you,” Ashen says. I look over at him. I can see how desperate he is to move closer, but he holds himself back. “I did not do those terrible things, Lu. I did not see or watch them. I did the only things I could to fix it.”

I let out a resentful laugh. “Ashen, you made me promise to do as you asked and then, when the time came, you said nothing. Literally nothing.”

“What do you mean?”

“In The Maqlu. You made me promise. If you asked me to run or leave you behind, you made me promise that I would. But you never asked me to do it. Not in the club. Not when you stood on the dais in the Shadow Realm and looked down on me. I trusted you, just like you asked. And then you let me down.”

“There was no time at The Maqlu, vampire,” Ashen says, ignoring my jabs. “And you could barely even stand in the Kur. We were surrounded.”

“I was surrounded. You were on the dais, looking down at me from on high.”

“Do you really think I had any other option? You have no clue how powerful Eshkar and Imogen are, Lu. We were outnumbered, outmaneuvered. If I died, what hope would I have of saving you? Because your fate would have been the same either way.” Ashen’s voice is clipped with desperation and his own brand of anger. “There was no way you could run. There was nowhere to run to. The only solution was to endure.”

I give a derisive snort as my rage climbs my throat and lands like bitter poison on my tongue. “Endure. That’s easy for you to say. You had to endure what, exactly, as I suffered immeasurable torture in your dungeon? Dinners and wine and dancing at Bit Akalum? The freedom of traveling to and from the Shadow Realm? The love of a woman you lost long ago who was returned to you as a prize for my capture?”

“She isn’t you,” he snarls, his voice booming into the night above us, the light in his eyes turning to black flame. He stalks a step toward me, then another. I plant my feet and refuse to move, even though the adrenaline surging through my veins screams at me to run. “I called in every favor. I cut every deal. I broke every rule. And worst of all, I knew that each moment that passed might mean I had already lost you. That each moment you endured in the cage might be your last.”

Ashen stops so close that I can feel my eyelashes shudder with the current of his breath. I press my molars together until I’m sure they’ll crack. My nails etch crescent imprints into my palms until I smell blood.

“If you would go to those lengths just to see your weapon completed, then I pity you, Reaper. Because you went to all that effort and still you will lose your war. I’ll see to that. I would rather burn your realm into nothing but dust. I’d rather die than win your battles for the Shadow Realm, oh mighty Master of War.”

Ashen’s hand snaps out and grabs my throat. Smoke billows from his back as his wings unfurl and consume the empty space behind him. Cinders and sparks rain across the stone.

“So there is a demon in you after all,” I say, tilting my head up in an invitation to squeeze. “I had convinced myself once that you weren’t like the others of your realm. Prove me wrong for the last time, just in case I didn’t learn my lesson. Finish it, so I don’t have to do it myself.”

Ashen’s thumb follows the line of my jaw in a caress so slow and gentle it could almost be imagined. “Such an elemental force of nature you are, vampire. Acerbic. Brave. Far too reckless,” he says, his gaze following every angle of my face.

“Stop wasting my time with your patronizing Reaperisms and kill me already.”

“I will not harm you. And I will not let you harm yourself.”

Ashen’s eyes brighten with determination. And then his expression takes on a fleeting wisp of apology. Before I even have time to react, his other hand crushes a delicate glass ampule to my chest. The liquid within the broken vial mixes with the blood of superficial cuts in both our skin and rolls between my breasts.

“What the-”

“Sabbi Leucosia libbu amaru nanam. Batiltu iskakku shul libbu istu abatu ana simtim alaku.”

A sharp breath cuts through the burn that still lingers in my throat. For a heartbeat we just glare at one another. “You fucker,” I seethe.

Without breaking our tangled gaze, I whip the kaiken from the sheath at my thigh and try to bring it to my neck, but my arm shakes as though my wrist is held back by an invisible hand. I pour all my strength into the effort. I grit my teeth and growl as I try to force my knife closer. The blade doesn’t budge, not even a millimeter. But I already know it won’t, because I know his words and what they mean.

The heart of Leucosia is a tempest. Stop the weapon of her heroic heart from destroying her own fate.

Ashen has taken away my power to end my own life, the last option I have to ensure I won’t be dragged back down into the depths of hell.

The purest rage funnels through my bleached knuckles and I turn my knife to Ashen, managing to swipe his shoulder with the dagger before he knocks it from my hand. His grip returns around my throat and he pushes me across the balcony until my back is up against the wall. My heart thunders beneath his other palm, the broken glass pressed deeper into my skin.

“Excellent. At least I can still cut you.”

We stare one another down. Ashen’s breath spills heat across my skin. The cinders and smoke of his wings curl through the space behind him, obscuring the light of the stars in thick shadow.

“I will not harm you,” he says again, his voice low and quiet. Black flame coils in his eyes. I feel their heat as they take in every angle of my face, brightening when they rest on my lips.

“You already did harm me. Again. Like, literally two seconds after you said you wouldn’t. Or has it escaped you that you’re still pressing glass into my chest, you fucking asshole?”

As if he really had forgotten, Ashen slowly lifts his palm from my heart. Shards of glass fall to the floor. Some linger, embedded in my skin. Ashen looks down with a crease between his brows and picks a splinter from my bloodied chest, then another, not bothering with the ones still stuck in his palm.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, his eyes not leaving my flesh as he pulls another fragment free. “I made the only choices I could for a chance to save you.”

“Apologies don’t mean shit when you do unforgivable things like, I don’t know, convincing someone to trust you and then betraying them to have them locked in a fucking dungeon where they’re starved and tortured for a month.”

“That was Eshkar’s doing, not mine,” Ashen says, his voice still quiet. His thumb presses to my jaw when I squirm as he pulls a long splinter free.

“Oh right, I forgot. My bad. You just stood there and watched that part, doing nothing. What you did do was rush to embrace another woman mere hours after fucking me in your car. And your house. Houses, actually, pardon me.”

His gaze lifts and bounds between my eyes as he edges closer still. “Whatever you think you saw is not what you saw.”

“What a surprise. The truth is lies. Reality and illusion are blurred. And the common denominator in all this fuckshit is you.”

We are immobilized in taut silence, my rage burning beneath my skin, my throat encased in Ashen’s steadying grip. Just like in his room when he pressed me to the wall, I think I can escape if I really want to. And part of me does want to run as far away from this place as I can get. An even more reckless part wants him to squeeze his hand until the world and all its suffering falls away. But more than I want to admit, a big part of me wants to stay right where I am, a sail in the winds of fear, tethered to his hand.

Sorrow and desire consume the fight in my flesh, one cell at a time. No matter how hard I fight, my heart is still determined to rebel against my mind.

“Why, Ashen?” I whisper. Wrathful tears gather in my eyes. They are drops of fury and loss and longing. “Why are you doing this? Tell me the honest truth, just once, if you tell me nothing true ever again.”

The flame in Ashen’s eyes does not dim. But within the fire I see more than anger and frustration. I see despair. I see agony and suffering. He has endured fresh pain and trauma, and it still plagues him, haunting every breath.

“Why do you think?” he asks, watching me for a reaction. I refuse to give one. Ashen breaks my gaze and leans close. Gooseflesh skitters across my neck and arms. Warmth blooms low in my belly as his lips brush my skin when he whispers in my ear. “Libbu isriq, ekimmu.”

The words slither into my chest and coil beneath my bones. You have stolen my heart, vampire.

“Then have it back,” I whisper.  “I cannot be your weapon.”

“I didn’t claim you would be.”

“You didn’t have to. You clearly want to take more power within the Shadow Realm.”

Ashen’s smile turns acidic as his gaze collides with mine. “Do you really believe that’s why?”

“Why else would you do it?”

“Why else indeed.”

I huff, leveling him with a poisonous glare. “You either tell me nothing at all or you tell me nothing true. I don’t know why I’d expect you to change course now.”

“You would only burn my words if I did.” Ashen’s eyes stay fused to mine for a moment longer before they return to my chest. We fall into silence as he pulls the fine splinters of glass from my skin with the precision of a surgeon and the patience of a lover. I glower at him but he doesn’t look at my face, his attention taken up with the pieces of the broken ampule still stuck in my flesh.

I turn my gaze away when tears I can’t blink back crest over my lashes. One slips down my cheek and lands on my clavicle, lingering on the ridge of bone before sliding toward my heart. Ashen’s hand stills. His thumb presses the drop, stroking it across my skin until it dries.

“Enough,” I whisper when he goes back to the tiny flecks that still dig into my skin. I try to push him off but he bats my hand away.

A muscle ticks in Ashen’s jaw, his expression full of determination and resolve as he keeps his focus on the work of his hand. “It is not done yet,” he says, but I don’t know if he’s talking about the glass that pierces my skin, or the fate that pierces my heart.