23

My legs move on their own accord.

Daxeel is the puppetmaster, holding the strings to my muscles, my bones, my will. And he manoeuvres me with that one spoken command all the way through Hemlock’s dusky corridors to the door of his bedchamber.

Daxeel doesn’t look back as he grips the brass knob. And the moment he does, the untreated wooden look of the door suddenly darkens. Inky vapours lick over the surface, like thick, black smoke.

He pushes open the door, then draws back to let me pass.

I brush by him, not a word on my tongue.

The heat of the bedchamber hits me like a punch. It’s an instant, suffocating sensation that rolls over my shoulders and soothes my pebbled flesh.

The warmth kneads through my muscles to my bones when Daxeel comes up behind me.

His gentle breath disturbs my hair. It rustles at the crown of my head.

“Do you miss me?” His voice is a whisper weaved with exhaustion.

My chemise shifts with his touch; fingertips grazing my side. I stare ahead at the made bed, the black furs that invite me into them.

“The old you,” I say, and it’s the truth.

I hear the faint swallow behind me, the bob of his throat as he forces down my honest words.

I hurt him.

A cheap strike, but it lifts my chin a touch higher.

I aim to hurt him.

“I miss you.” The confession spills from him in a rushed breath. His chest deflates against my back. “I love you.” Words breathed, not spoken. His hand firms on my side. “Stay with me.”

My lashes flutter.

A soft breath unravels from me and I melt into his chest.

The chemise shifts against my skin. His hand flattens on me, pushes around my middle to rest on my belly. His thumb caresses me through the material.

“Stay with me, my vicious one.”

Darkness washes over us.

In it, we can’t be seen; we are in the shadows.

So no one can see my misdeeds, how I betray myself.

And all I can think is how this might be our final time together—my last chance to change everything.

I murmur my answer, “Make me.”

A gasp cuts through me.

Daxeel spins me around and yanks me into him. His hand comes up and steals my chin. He adds pressure to his grip; it pushes my head back to align our faces.

Exhaustion is draped over him like a weary cloak, but not his eyes—cerulean that gleam through the darkness of the bedchamber, flickering with the shadows licking around his boots. “Get on the bed.”

He nudges me back.

I stagger some steps before my legs bolt with his command, and I turn my back on him.

I look over my shoulder.

His eyes are pools swimming in the dark. Shadows peel away from his shoulders, start to melt into the blackness of his leathers. He watches me closely, as though he studies every angle of my face.

“And lie down,” he adds with a throaty weariness, his lashes low. “Do not fight me on this. I am tired of your battles.”

My lips curl to bare my teeth. “You mean to hurt me with your words.”

“Do I speak lies?”

“You speak viciousness. How do you want me? On my back or my front? On my knees?” I croon, then move around the bedpost. I don’t take my eyes off him. “Vicious male.”

I crawl onto the bed, never breaking eye-contact, and I watch the cut of his jaw deepen in shadows, the burn of his blue eyes through the dark.

A shiver of familiar fear runs through me, all the way to my core. But it’s the tension in his grimly set mouth, somewhere between rage and guilt, that steals my heart.

“You punish me still,” I go on and crawl over the mattress to him. “But how you crave me.”

He narrows his eyes on me and advances. “Always the arrogant darling.”

“I thought I was vicious,” I smile that word out.

He reaches the foot of the bed—

And he snatches out for me.

A yelp catches in my throat as he grabs me by the ankle, his hand as firm as a vine coiling around the neck. I swear his eyes brighten just that bit more before he flips me onto my back.

A reminder of his command.

“I said—” and the power of his command shudders through my bones “— lie down .”

I go limp.

Above, the gold trim on the cerulean ceiling flickers with the flames in the hearth.

“Do you mean to rape me?” I ask, softly.

The sheer honesty of my voiced thoughts startles him.

“Or,” I let a wicked and ugly smile warp my face as I look down my body at him, “do you think it is not rape if you force the command into me?”

Which one are you?

My father who sells me like cattle to a rapist, or my betrothed, the one who promises such vile things?

But Daxeel is neither.

His fingers slip away from my freshly lotioned skin. He reaches for the hem of his top leathers, then tugs it off over his head.

He tosses it aside, his chest bare, the ink of his tattoos glistening like freshly spilled tar beneath the moonlight.

“I mean to sleep in the bed with you, Nari,” he sighs, then leans closer, his knee dipping into the furs. “Not to take what you do not offer.”

I watch him move over me.

The sight of him alights a fire in my belly. The inky tendrils falling into his face, the burn of his eyes, the caramel hue of his complexion.

I reach out my fingertips to graze down his chest, feeling every contour, each jolt of his muscles under my touch.

“That’s convenient for me,” I murmur, my thoughts somewhat distant under his spell, “since I do not offer my life to be sacrificed.”

“Your jests won’t thaw me,” he says then dips his head to ghost a kiss along my jawline, but I know he only does this to hide that fleeting smirk from me.

“Then why are you smiling?” I ask. “Admit that I have always been the funny one.”

“Is that your identifier in Licht?” He runs his soft kiss along my cheek, his body prowling over mine, and I feel every bit the cornered prey he’s homing in on. “The halfling with the humour. Do you dazzle all at the High Court—do make your princes laugh?” His upper lip curls on the last words spoken.

I turn my cheek to him. “Is that what coils your heart?”

“Your slights that night are far beyond a kiss with a prince,” he growls. He presses his weight into one hand and pushes far enough to look down at me, at the glower I aim up at him. “I know how vicious you are, Nari—I know you let him spread your legs and take from you while my heart bled.”

My insides flip. Like eggs in a pan, they flip up too high, then billow down and—for a moment—I feel I’m falling, that Dare has snuck into the bedchamber and shoved me out the window.

I capture the breath before it can escape me.

My face is schooled as I blink up at him, slow. “Now why do you think that?”

“Think?” he snarls. “I know you bedded him.”

“I have bedded Affay many times.” I sniff and jut my chin. My hair rustles on the pillow. “But not that night.”

The lie is smooth sounding but it prickles my tongue the way a bell ringing prickles my bones.

Daxeel looks at me for a moment.

He blinks, then considers me, silent.

A frown carves into his honeyed skin. “Say that again.”

I arch an eyebrow. “That your assumptions and guesses and paranoias have led to so much pain? Affay did not lay with me that night. I laid with no one.”

His nostrils flare. A long inhale, a breath deep enough to swell his chest. But it’s the blaze of his cerulean eyes, the same shade as the painted ceiling, that curls my toes.

“You lie,” words hushed out in a rushed whisper.

My heart bolts to my ribs.

His lashes flutter.

Daxeel shoves from me as if burned. “ You can lie .”

I sit up, words pinned to my throat, damp hair wild around my stunned face. My lips are parted around silence.

And Daxeel falls back onto his feet, a stagger before he stills—and his hands fist at his sides.

We just stare at each other.

A tentative step closer, as though the roles have shifted, an imbalance shifted my way and made me the predator he’s cautious to approach. “All this time…”

I shake my head, a flurry of panic in my chest. “It is no lie. I cannot lie, Daxeel—”

Blue eyes flare with unspoken threats. He advances a step, a single determined step that silences me instantly.

My hands fist in the furs.

I draw my knees closer to my middle.

Daxeel utters a shuddered breath.

His gaze drops to my chest… and there, it stays. “Lie to me again.”

I scramble to sit on my folded legs. “I didn’t lie!” My words come wrapped in a hushed whine, the utter desperation for him to believe me.

But he doesn’t.

He knows the truth.

He knows I’m lying—and he hears the faint skip in my heartbeat. All the confirmation he needs before the inky blackness of his pupils spread into his irises, turning his stare as dark as his shadows.

Instinct has my shoulders tucking inwards, and I shrink back from his primal stare—pure rage stirring inside of him.

The air thickens between us.

Panic has my breath glued to my chest. The fear is too great to break the silence just for a fresh inhale of air, so I stay rigid.

Then he snaps.

A screech catches in my throat.

I throw myself aside, prepared to scramble off the bed—but he’s faster.

A feral growl rips through him. He lunges for me, snatches me by the leg, then tears me off the bed.

I stagger on landing, hands splayed in front of me.

I knock into the chest of drawers. An abacus topples over, a golden sun ornament hits the floorboards.

I inhale with a deep flare of the nostrils and whip around to glare at him. But I fast shrink back into the drawers.

Daxeel closes the distance between us in one step. Towering over me, the tips of his inky hair brush over his brow, and his lips curl to bare his teeth.

“Everything you have said,” he growls the words like a warning, a threat, “all your promises and declarations…”

“True,” I hiss at him, and though my spine screams from the bite of the drawers pressed into my back, I lift my chin and push up on my toes before I add, “All true.”

“I trust nothing you say, I believe nothing more than the depths of your viciousness.” He steps closer, and I slink back with the advancement. “What if I had forgiven you? What if all your clawing and chewing back inside of me worked—and I abandoned my mission for you?” His voice booms throughout the bedchamber. “For your lies!”

“Oh, spare me,” I snap at him through the quivers of my spine. “All you know are lies. You lie and lie—and scheme . Your bargain with Eamon,” I push the tip of my finger into his chin, “was a lie, was it not? You had no need to make the bargain, because you never meant to kill me at Comlar. You were always saving that for the Sacrament. So why even bother with the bargain?”

The growl of his words caresses my lips with his sweet breath, “It benefited me.”

“Your lies face no consequence,” I say and push at his chin. “So why should mine?”

He falls his weight back onto one boot, then runs me over with a dark look.

“Your lies have deceit behind them,” I go on. “But mine were only ever to protect myself—not to harm others. You lied to me, you have lied to Eamon, and every day you deny our love, you lie to yourself. You are a walking contradiction, and I loathe that about you. There’s a fucking truth.”

I push from the dresser and stalk past him.

I make it two steps before he’s grabbed my wrist and spun me around to glare at him.

“My mistruth,” he corrects carefully, “to Eamon was not to benefit me. I promised not to kill you at Comlar,” he concedes, and his fingers slip from my wrist, “and in return, he would care for Aleana while I could not. That is no selfish lie.”

“But of course it is,” I smile wretchedly around the words. “Because this was your plan, Daxeel. To deceive Eamon into believing that he was saving me—but all along, you meant to end me on the Mountain of Slumber.”

His face shutters.

At his sides, his hands curl into fists, then flex before he loosens a sigh.

He turns his cheek to me. “You know nothing of my schemes.”

“What would you have done if I never came here at all?” I can’t keep the snark from my tone, like all this built, rising frustration with him is freely spilling out of me, obliterating my instinctual fear of him. “If my father let me stay home in Licht, and I never joined him at Comlar, what schemes would you have concocted to lure me here, all the while calling me the liar?”

He scoffs a bitter sound, then slides his dead gaze back to me, dead from the exhaustion of our battles, the rawness of his own defeated heart.

His smile is small, dark. It lifts the corner of his mouth—and throws a sickly sensation through my insides.

Then the admission that strikes me silent—

“I brought you here,” he says as darkly as he smiles.

I blink, once, twice, then a shuddered breath loosens from my parted lips. “You planned it…”

His smile fades. And all that faces me is something hollow. Like he carved himself clean to get to this moment. That he died on the journey he chose.

“How much did you plan, Daxeel?” I swallow, hard. “How far do your schemes reach?”

His lashes lower.

Shadows flicker over his face, and he fixes his stare on the floor between us, like he can’t bring himself to look at me as he says it, “All the way to Ronan’s base.”

A frown cuts into my face. “The seed… The seed that didn’t work— it was you? ”

A cruel satisfaction glitters in his eyes. So much pleasure he gets from my demise—poisoned by the sheen that glosses his eyes, the pain that twists his mouth.

I see just as much regret in him as I see victory.

“You orchestrated everything,” I whisper the words I don’t want to believe, a truth that’s too slow to sink in.

He did this.

Daxeel did it all.

He set the trap—and watched me prance right into it.

He always meant for me to come here, to be the sacrifice.

He falls back to sit on the foot of the bed. His hands clasp between his thighs and he looks up at me from beneath his long lashes.

There should be pride in the way he looks at me, pride to match his words; but it’s all so empty, and I’m sure he died long ago. “It was all too easy to bribe a warrior to swap over Ronan’s seed at the base, to pull strings for his service to be suspended—so he can visit his wife before she departs to compete in the Sacrament.”

While she’s fertile, of course. While Ronan is fertile.

The night of the solstice, Ronan returned from the base—and when I got home from the High Court, he was in Pandora’s bedchamber. I left them alone, let them share their intimate moment.

I should have interrupted.

I should have kicked that door down.

I should have known.

I came here to the Midlands with something that feels so ugly now, so ridiculous.

Hope .

Hope that Daxeel would forgive me over time. Hope that Daxeel would love me again. Hope that he would save me from both my father and Taroh.

Ugly, silly hope.

All this time, Daxeel knew I would become a contender. He is the reason I am one. He knew I was Pandora’s only option for a second, and how exactly to have her disqualified.

The tears flow freely down my blotched cheeks.

I lift my dazed stare to him, but don’t truly see him. “And Eamon?”

Did he help?

Did he know?

“Eamon thought he was protecting you.” He tilts his head and hair falls into his eyes. “But he unwittingly sold you to me.”

My brow knits. The weakest frown drawn from my battered energy. A question.

“Eamon made a bargain on the chance that Dorcha wins this Sacrament. He needed to ensure his place in our dark world—so he did some favours here and there.”

My lips are wet around the whispered echo, “Favours…?”

“He handed over his favourite lover’s name.”

My throat bobs. “Fern.”

Daxeel’s hands tighten together, too threaded, too tense. He runs his teeth over his bottom lip before he lands his gaze on the fallen golden sun.

“It took just two letters to Fern for him to tell me all he knew about you—and your family,” Daxeel confesses, and that’s his tone, a confession he relents, but in a hushed voice, a sigh, not of victory. “I learned enough to weave my plan, to tamper with the seed, to have your father assigned to Comlar—and I learned a wicked truth. That you lay with that prince you slighted me with.”

“Because Fern told you that?” I scoff and run my hands down my face. “You did all of this, because what? Because my father made me slight you? Because you believe that I bedded a prince? And that is your justification for my fucking death sentence ?!” My voice gravels and I throw a hand out as if to strike him, but my legs won’t take me closer, so all I hit is the air. “Oh, I loathe you, Daxeel, I loathe you to my core! You selfish, proud beast!”

“You thought I didn’t know what you’d been doing in my absence, how deep you wounded me,” he pauses, voice wavered.

Shadows cut deep into his cheeks; he clenches his jaw, tight.

After a beat, he lifts a dark look to me. “But I have been tracking your every move. Eamon was fool enough to think you would be safe under his arm, that if he got you through your time at Comlar—” His lips warp into a wicked, deadly grin, devoid of any true feeling. “—he could steal you away from me, from your father, and that he had earned protection for you both. But he only handed you over to me.” Slowly, he pushes from the bed and rises up like a tower standing over me. “I intercepted the seed given to Ronan. I made it so you came here, that your father was assigned here. I made it so you would survive the first passage—all so I could drag you into the second passage.”

He advances with a single, purposeful step. His boot flattens on the floor, and my withdrawal is a stumble back.

The tears rushing down my face are silent, my throat thick.

I choke on a wet gasp as he moves for me.

His hands are quick to snatch me by the arms and he pins me to his chest.

Slowly, lovingly, he brings his face to mine. “You have a purpose, Nari. I warned you of it.” He kisses the corner of my mouth, a gentle declaration of our ugly, bitter love. “You will meet my dagger… when the time is right .”

And his tongue flicks out; he licks the tears from my lips.

I scream a wretched sound.

Rage barrels through me, rushes through my veins.

I yank out of his hold and aim my twisted face up at him.

“I’ll fight you!” I shout and swat out at him. I strike his chest, hard, but he is entirely unflinching. “I’ll fight you until the very end. There is no promise your kind will win this Sacrament—and I will fight like my folk to make sure you don’t.”

A pregnant pause swells between us.

For a beat, he is a statue, frozen in his tension.

A frown starts to crease his hard face, but I feel it, the slight shift of his energy—inside the storm, behind the cloud of pain, there’s a glimmer of panic.

I grip onto that. “I have loved you all this time,” I hiss the words in an exhale that comes from my gut. “I have regretted much, but never loving you. Now…” My chest deflated with a sigh. “Now I am seeing other sides to life. You want to know what I see?” My smile is wide and wet, and the teardrops dampen my jawline. “I see unrequited love in those around me. I see longing in your friends for things that will never be. I see my father selling me like cattle. And I see me in the middle of it all, begging those around me to love me as I am, mistakes and all—but I stand only with Eamon. He will forever be my Eamon, because no other loves my ugliness as he does.”

Shadows shudder around him. The dormant darkness turns to vapour and lifts from his shoulders, as though stirring from rest, as though ready to strike.

But all that comes is Daxeel’s answer, “I did. I loved you.”

“When it suited you,” I bite. “When you looked at me and saw a darling. A brat. You didn’t see me.”

His voice is soft. “I always saw you.”

I shake my head. “I won’t have you. If I survive it, I will walk out of this Sacrament—and never look back. Not at you or my family.” My jaw sets and the truth of my words bolts through me. My hand slaps to my breastbone before I say, “Listen to the beat of my heart, listen for the lie that isn’t here when I say, I will live my own life .”

These little fantasies of mine I entertained in my bed rotting, I have given them life, right now in this moment. I will turn my back on Daxeel who, as I realize, didn’t love me as I once believed. I will chase a future outside of these ugly males.

I will survive—and then, I will live.

Shadows unfurl from his shoulders. Some coil down his arms, others reach out for me, desperate, as he says, “No male can be without his evate after the bond is forged. If you do survive, if we both survive, then—”

“That sounds like a problem for you, because I will not have you, beast.”

He flinches as if struck.

My chin rises. “And if you are to sacrifice your evate, then should she not be allowed to do the same? No matter which way this goes, whether I live or die, Daxeel, understand this.” I take a step closer. “You will be alone. You will be without me. And that loneliness is what you deserve,” I spit the words at his feet, then reel back.

A single tear clings to his long, thick lashes. It wavers, dancing on the precipice, not quite ready to fall yet.

I spare him a lingering, hateful look full of the bitterness within our bond, this trap that binds us unwillingly. And now, aren’t we both unwilling?

I turn my back on him.

But before I can storm out of his bedchamber, and leave him to his own depravity, a thud comes from beyond the door.

I freeze.

Muscles bolt to bones. I flinch as if struck.

That horrible thud is closely followed by a shout, a female’s scream, and the wretched, thumping sound of a body crashing down to the stairs.

Someone has fallen.

Behind me, Daxeel is as still as I am, as though the winter chills of high mountains invade the room and frost over us.

Then we hear it.

The strangled cry that penetrates the door, that screeches through the walls of Hemlock House.

“ Aleana !”