Chapter 47

Iwake like a punch to the heart.

My eyes pop open, and I gasp a breath, gaze scouring a net of palm fronds to the powder-blue sky beyond. I rip at my chest with clawed fingers, brutally aware of the shards of crystal dome still wedged in my lungs and withered heart. Poking out of my smashed and splintered bones.

There’s a gnarled, overgrown forest of thorny emotion stuffed inside me, filling every dark, shadowy corner. Raw, painful emotion I’m too scared to touch. To handle.

Like I’ve forgotten how.

Silver vines have twisted around my bones and organs, sprouting a nest of pretty slate-colored grayslades bearing charcoal filaments—so fucking beautiful I ache in places I never knew existed.

I don’t deserve those flowers.

Don’t deserve them—

Whimpering, I roll to the side, looking toward the sloshing sounds of the ocean.

A stretch of turquoise water glimmers in the sunlight. Small, frothy waves lap at a thin stretch of dark-blue sand that clings to my skin. My stomach clenches, and I gag, coughing up a vile mix of salt water and bile.

The storm must have dumped me onto the beach …

Rhordyn’s shirt hangs off my shoulder, torn in places but bone dry. Like I’ve been here a while. I pat my thigh, finding my sheath empty, though there’s a familiar weight around my neck …

I finger my necklace, confused.

How did I secure it after I ripped it off?

After—

You did this.

Cainon’s hissed accusation attacks me like a barbed whip slashed at my heart, and I see the look in Zane’s eyes as he fell. See him reaching for me—clutching that cloak with his other hand.

A guttural moan morphs into a sob as I crawl toward the water.

You did this.

I shove to my feet, stumbling over my steps before I run—colliding with the splashing waves, falling to my knees. The water swirls around my waist while I claw at my chest and tight throat. While I reach behind my arm and pinch harder than I ever have.

You did this—

I suck a shuddered breath, release an agonized scream.

That jungle of emotion shifts and squirms, thorny vines battling each other for freedom, making them impossible to dislodge. My scream turns into deep, chest-cleaving sobs that threaten to split me.

Don’t cry.

His words come to me like a blow of icy wind, making my skin pebble.

I look out across the azure water, reminded of the cloak I bought Zane; wrapped for him; poured all my love into.

The cloak that got him killed. Just like I got my brother killed.

My mother …

Rhordyn …

So many others.

I think of the jellyfish I once watched from the edge of a cliff. How jealous I was of their freedom to simply … drift. My whole body yields to the idea, aching with the sudden urge to swim out into the depths.

Just drift.

I push to a stand, wading through the water, charging forward—

“Stop.”

My heart leaps into my throat, the commanding baritone a blow from behind, like a rope snagging around my knees, almost pulling my legs out from under me.

Slowly, I turn.

My heart stops.

I see his eyes first—silver swirls that pierce through the tousled mess of his sea-stained curls, whipping me up inside. His all-consuming stare makes a sob burst up my throat.

Stubble paints his chiseled features, his face a beautifully barbaric masterpiece. He’s shirtless, standing amidst the jungle’s dense shadows, arms crossed, wearing a pair of tattered black pants that cling to his legs like savage strips of art. His silver-scrawled tattoos wink and flicker, hugging his powerful physique, yielding to every bulging brick of muscle—so much bigger than they were before …

Before.

Even my imagination is forgetting what Rhordyn really looked like. Is painting him bigger, sharper.

More fiercely captivating.

Just more fuel to the blaze of pain I’ve been cradling since I took his life. Or perhaps I’m wrong? Perhaps I didn’t get washed up on this shore at all? Perhaps we both somehow made it into Mala and this is really happening; he’s really here.

Perhaps I’m dead, too.

This rich sense of peace cups my heart with warm hands as I run to him, deep, heaving sobs clawing up my throat as I kick up sand in my haste. I draw close enough to smell his frosty musk on a whip of wind before he drops his arms, drawing my attention to the tattered state of the left side of his chest …

It looks as though his tattoos have been cut from his skin, one by one. Torn off in messy strips around the red, risen scar directly above his heart. Right where I …

Where I …

My feet still.

I look up into his eyes and see they’re hard like flints. Register the energy rolling off him, smashing against my chest, making it hard to breathe.

“You. Bared. Your. Throat.”

He charges—pinching the space between us in a few explosive strides.

A bolt of fear slashes through me.

I turn and run, staggering blindly through the sand, colliding with a palm tree. He slams into me, crushing me against the trunk, leaving barely enough space for me to inflate my lungs.

His fist strikes the tree, the creak of splitting wood tightening every muscle in my body. He shoves his head into the side of my neck and huffs sawing breaths upon the bandage Baze bound me in. “You … bared … your … throat …”

His tone is hauntingly calm.

Somehow, that’s much worse.

“I …”

I don’t understand what’s happening. I thought Mala was supposed to be a rich, happy place. All colorful and bright and—

“You looked death in the eye and crooked your finger,” he growls, nudging my head to the side. His lips skim my ear, sending a zap straight down my spine as his hand threads around my chest and presses upon my heart. Like he’s checking for its beat.

A tender shield despite the catastrophic energy lashing against my skin, gusting down my lungs.

His lips graze farther down, over the bind around my throat, the next words spoken through a crackle in his voice as that hand applies more pressure. “You fucking yielded, Orlaith.”

“You’re dead,” I say, my voice a strangled sob. “I—”

Did terrible, unforgivable things.

He pushes closer, and I feel the deep, catastrophic beat of his life force thumping against my back like the blow of a beautiful, mighty hammer. “Obviously not.”

My soul lurches, my entire being clutching to a single wild thought …

A thread of hope.

He’s alive. He’s standing right behind me.

The world rips out from beneath my feet so fast my head spins, a relieved sound whittling up my throat that feels stolen.

Not mine.

I don’t understand this reality. Don’t know how to handle it, or why it’s been gifted to me.

I don’t understand.

Alive …

But—

“I got you in the heart …”

“You missed.”

“Impossible.” I know where to strike. Baze taught me well. “I felt it push through!”

“Sorry to disappoint,” he says, the words bitten with such malice I hear the ones he doesn’t say. Feel them slice into my chest and slip amidst that messy, mangled forest—a willing victim to those piercing thorns.

For the first time ever, I fucking hear.

“I …”

Regretted it the moment I did it.

Almost followed you over that waterfall—more than once.

“Yes, Milaje?”

The words won’t come out. They’re lodged so deep in my throat I’m certain the only way to force them free will be to vomit them up.

He’s here.

He’s not dead.

A vine of relief sprouts from the fleshy mess of my mashed-up heart, its tip perfectly honed, like the needle I used every night to prick the tip of my finger. It dips and weaves about the staggering organ, threading through all the broken bits, tugging the torn edges toward each other like it’s trying to stitch me whole again.

Tears stream down my cheeks as I weave my hand out from the crush of us and trace the flexing might of his strong arm, all the way to his hand still pressed upon my heart—

He shoves away so fast I crumble, spinning. My legs fail me, and I careen sideways, then lose my balance and fall back into the sand, landing hard on my ass.

Rhordyn stands over me like a storm wrestled straight from the sky, molded into a man.

A monster.

His eyes are black, ears sharp, features so cut and refined I’m convinced he was sculpted by the Gods themselves. That they hewed him from the deepest, darkest corners of the universe.

Looking at him makes me want to fall to my knees and weep.

He’s here. He’s really here.

He reaches behind himself and rips the talon from where it must have been stuffed down the back of his pants. My heart slams against my ribs as he sends it thudding into the sand beside me, that curved length glinting in the sunlight.

He watches me with the focus of a hunter fixated on his prey. “Pick it up.”

My breaths become staggered, fumbled things …

There’s no feeling in his tone—a cold-blooded challenge that ices me to the core.

“N-no,” I sputter, feeling what’s left of my heart mulch through his clenched fist.

“PICK. IT. UP!” he roars, and I sob, scrambling back. Managing to clamber to my feet while still maintaining his eye contact.

He retrieves the talon and stalks every step I scurry backward through the sand, his stare a savage blend of unflinching determination and frosty condemnation.

I realize, like a stone clipping me in the skull, that he’s been masking so much of himself since the start. I’m but a mouse dangling by my tail before his fathomless might. Waiting for him to pounce and gobble me down.

My wild emotions shift amidst my cramped insides, abrading my most tender parts.

Battling for space.

For air.

“It was a mistake,” I blurt, scurrying over fallen fronds and shards of coconut husk. “I— I thought you were a—”

“Monster? I am.”

“—murderer.”

“Also correct,” he bites out, like he tore the words from a carcass and spat them at me.

“I thought you fed on people!”

There’s the faintest softening of his eyes. “Only one. Now and forever.”

I stumble over a log that almost cuts my feet out from under me, his admission turning my insides all warm and swirly.

Good things I don’t deserve to feel.

“Though she’s a literal pain in my chest,” he tacks on, and my gaze drops to the red, risen scar on his pectoral.

The scar I made.

Another cluster of vines pack amidst my insides, cramming me so full I can hardly breathe for fear of thorns piercing my skin.

Poking through from the inside out.

I almost trip again—something I can’t afford right now. I’m certain that if I crumble all the way to the ground, he’ll crush me like a stampeding herd.

“Cainon said—”

“I don’t give a fuck what Cainon said, Orlaith. You listened. You believed,” he grinds out, his words stone barbs lobbed straight at my gut. “You disappointed me.”

My heart dives into an acidic pit of guilt, and I waver, forced to slam my hand against a trunk to steady myself. He doesn’t slow his prowling advance, like a shadow chasing its captor.

I clamber into action again, whimpering, my pulse whooshing in my ears. “He showed me an abandoned burrow—”

“His father’s burrow. The one I extracted Baze from years ago.”

I stumble on nothing but my own naïvety, remembering Baze’s scars.

Calah made them…

Recalling the conflict in Baze’s eyes after he stabbed Calah through the chest, it all slots into place like razor blades.

I blink, tears shredding down my cheeks, face twisting, eyes narrowed on the mighty shadow stalking my every step. “This is what happens when you keep so many secrets, Rhordyn! People get stabbed!”

His upper lip peels back, a darkness falling upon us, like all the light just got sucked out of the atmosphere. Big, heavy raindrops begin to fall through the canopy and patter upon the underbush.

“Don’t lecture me on secrets,” he says past lengthening canines. “You’re riddled with them. I can smell them on that bandage.” He points at my throat, making my cheeks burn, and I slap a hand up to smother the shame. “That hand. Even your fucking tears reek of them. But don’t worry.” He waves the talon at me. “I’m not about to stick this through your chest because of it.”

Another slash to the heart, struck with such precision while I scramble along physically.

Mentally.

Emotionally.

“You told me you were going to show me your worst and—”

“You stabbed me in the heart.”

“You said I missed!”

“You did,” he snips as I clamber backward over a fallen tree. He steps over it like it’s a twig he could crush with his bare fist.

“What is it, then?” my curiosity plies, the rainfall growing heavier, plastering my hair to my cheeks. “Your worst?”

“You can’t handle my worst. You stabbed me in the heart. By mistake. Because Cainon told you to.”

“I thought you had your own burrow beneath Castle Noir! I thought you put my people in chains and cages!”

He shakes his head; a single slice to the side. “Never once. Though I might re-evaluate my morals if you keep trying to die.”

I flinch all the way to the marrow—stripped bare.

Too seen.

“Stop.”

“Never.”

I moan, almost tripping again. “I … I thought you were …”

“Dead?” he bites out, the word a stabbed conviction that slides between my ribs and pokes into something squishy. “I was.”

My face crumbles, more tears leaking down my cheeks, melding with the rain. If anything, it only makes him look at me harder.

Fiercer.

His head banks to the side as he stalks me deeper into the jungle, forcing me to nip glances over my shoulder, dodging more debris with each fumbled step. “Did it make you feel better, Serren? Watching me bleed for you?”

Another flinch.

Another wave of thorny, chest-buckling pain I don’t know how to handle.

My back collides with something hard and cold—a large slab of blue stone that’s nowhere near as brutal as Rhordyn’s body when he powers into me, punching breath from my lungs again. With a mighty strike of his hand, he stabs the talon into the stone right beside my head.

I gasp, every cell in my body shaking with adrenaline.

He remembers my name …

My silent sobs turn into deep, guttural sounds that are ugly and messy and bubble up my throat and nose as he tips my head with a pinch of my chin, forcing me to look into his ebony eyes. Forcing me to face my messy expression ricocheting back. “Did. It. Make. You. Feel. Fucking. Better?”

My mouth opens; closes.

I want to speak. To tell him I didn’t want to live in a world without him.

That I still don’t.

I want to tell him that I don’t just love him. That a single four-letter word could never define the way I feel, nor could it explain the way my soul bled with his absence, driving me to do things that will always stick to my skin like a layer of filth.

I want to tell him I was blind.

Hurting.

That my self-hatred bled off the page and tainted him because I was sick. Traumatized. That I had no idea how to ask for help, or tell him I wasn’t okay.

That I’m still not.

That my chest is so full of thorny things I’m too afraid to touch. To handle.

But I can’t tell him any of that because the people I love get struck down with an axe or my own caustic power. They get fed to the sharks.

The people I love die.

“Answer me, Milaje.”

The words are a blunt force that rattles me all the way to the core. They punch down my throat, rip truths from my heart, and pull them out—their dangled roots dripping blood all over the both of us. “No. I’ve never felt such unbearable pain …”

Something softens in his gaze as I suck a gasp, my throat raw, like I just breathed fire through it. I heave breath, but he doesn’t move. Doesn’t stop pinching my chin or forcing me to look in his eyes.

“Then I guess it’s good your aim was off.” His next exhale is an icy blast battering my lips. “Now, I need you to listen because I’m only going to say this once.”

He drops my chin and pushes so close I can feel all the bulging slabs of his rock-hard body. Can feel the solid evidence of his want for me.

A whimper worms up my throat. A desperate, selfish, needy sound I chomp down on.

Not for you.

You threw him away.

He tucks my hair behind my ear and cradles the side of my face; a tender motion I yearn to lean into.

Fallinto.

A polar contrast to the hard words thrown from his mouth.

“Consider this your first and final warning,” he says, leaning so close his lips skim mine—like dragging an iceberg across my cupid’s bow. “You bare your throat like that again and the entire world will suffer.” My heart skips a beat as he leans back an inch, looking at me with a hardness that dwarfs every other look he’s ever given me. “I can’t be held accountable for what rips out of me if I’m forced to watch you die.”

How do I tell him I wasn’t baring my throat to Cainon’s sword but to the weight of my lethal existence?

My face crumbles.

His stare flays.

“Are we clear?”

I swallow a sob and nod.

A deeper shade of black sweeps over his eyes, making me feel like I’m in the midst of something … else. Like I’m being watched by not just him.

By something cataclysmic.

“Say the words,” he rumbles past his canines I’m certain have grown thicker, longer; his chest swelling against me with crushing promises. “I need to hear you tell me that you’re clear as fucking crystal.”

“I got it, Rhordyn.”

He releases a bestial sound that makes me shudder from the tips of my toes all the way to my pebbling nipples, then steps back. I plunge to the sand in a heaving, coughing, throbbing heap, my entire body flushed with a heat that threatens to unravel me.

He rips the talon from the stone and stalks off.

Catching my breath, I watch him through wet, stringy strands of hair as he moves between trees, splashed in rain as he picks up his sword, strapping the sheath across his torso—a rippling tower of menacing might. He snatches something else off the ground, then charges toward me, staring me down like a natural disaster I want to fall into.

“Something you want?”

He’s paused a few feet before me, his sword back where it belongs, his eyes still black like the dark between stars.

He’s breathing … heart beating …

Here.

Alive.

So beautifully alive.

Perhaps this is some sort of dream, but it’s a perfect one. He’s angry, fierce, frightening … but he’s here.

Is there something I want?

Yes.

“No.”

This rumbling sound boils in the back of his throat, and he hoists me up. “I told you not to lie to me if you can’t do it convincingly.” He grips me around the ribs and tugs me forward, my breasts brushing his torso as he slams something into my sheath.

I look down and frown at the hilt of my dagger now poking out the top, then slowly lift my gaze to his eyes.

He had my blade this entire time?

But why?

Something slashes within the depths of his eyes like a whip of blades. “Because I didn’t trust you to wake up with it, Milaje. For good reason.”

My heart stills.

He thought I’d—

I drop my stare, recalling the moment his voice struck and stilled my feet.

Stopped me from going …

“The boy’s fine, Orlaith.”

Frowning, I look up into his obsidian stare. “What?”

“I saw Baze pull him from the water,” he says, tone softer than it was before. “He’s fine.”

Realization strikes, widening my eyes.

My mouth falls open as Rhordyn spins, prowling through the jungle while my pulse roars in my ears. While the trees seem to sway with my tipping perception.

Zane’s okay …

Della didn’t lose another child.

My knees buckle, hand slapping out to brace myself against a tree as I cup the words he just gifted me and pull them close to my chest. Smooth them into a shell I use to cradle my broken heart.

Baze saved Zane.

I shake my head, whimpering.

Rhordyn’s alive. The people who were caged in the burrow are free and hopefully partway to Ocruth by now. The rest of the ships are hopefully also sailing to Ocruth …

It feels too good to be true.

Another whimper, and I clap my hand over my mouth to catch the whittled sound of relief, because it is too good to be true.

If I let myself fall into this feeling, my walls will crumble.

My guard will drop.

I still have death coiled within the chasm inside my chest, hunting every step I take.

Hunting the ones I love.

I may have missed Rhordyn’s heart, but that sizzling darkness … It took my own flesh and blood.

No.

I pinch the vine of relief threatening to stitch me whole again, and pick it free of my heart one plucked loop at a time—the messy lumps of flesh falling away from each other in devastating increments. I rip it out at the roots, wincing from the sharp pain that almost makes me gag, then tuck it in a bundle at the base of my chest.

I forge a dome—just one—setting it atop the bloody corpse before turning my attention toward the forest of emotions crammed within my chest. So much wild collateral I have no idea where to begin untangling it all without making a bigger mess. Without potentially disturbing that strange, macabre creature I hatched back on the pier—the one I can sense hiding down there somewhere amidst the painful clutter.

Perhaps if I just … back away? Ignore it all?

Avoid the haze of the past few days. The bandages. The wounds tucked beneath my skin. Avoid the icky memories that try to tame me into a fucked-up plait.

Yes.

Don’t touch it. Don’t look at it. Don’t think about it.

Avoid.

I tiptoe out, blink back to the now, and release a shuddered breath.

“Keep up,” Rhordyn bellows from ahead. “We have a lot of ground to cover if we ever want to get home.”

I scrub at my face, allowing the faintest smile to slip free, along with my gathered tears.

Home.

With him.