Chapter 59

Ionce sat at a vanity while Rhordyn disassembled my self-perception. Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to this one while I ruminate on the flaming pit of anger whipping at my insides, trying to tone it down to a dull simmer.

An impossible task.

There’s ire in my eyes. Fire in my veins. Hurt in my heart.

A hot meal comes, chills, goes. Someone enters to fluff my pillows and pull down the covers on the bed I don’t shift into. I’m offered tea—I don’t answer.

Too scared of what will spew forth from my flower-pressed lips should I open them.

They leave it anyway, scurrying off, pinching the air with the sharp tang of fear. I watch the whorl of steam disappear, and the remaining light in my room drains, dropping me into a black pall.

Still, I stare at the mirror I can no longer see, hand cast palm-up upon the vanity, hairbrush hung loosely in my limp fingers. The other is curled around the pot cradled in my lap—the one Enry gave me, stuffed with soil that was fed my blood and tears that has now sprouted a bouquet of wildflowers that boast every color of the rainbow. Flowers that somehow managed to germinate, sprout, then bloom in just two days.

The seconds tick by, a slow, steady drip …

Tick … Tick … Tick …

The gulls make their morning calls, and a rosy shaft of sun cuts through my room and caresses my sallow skin.

I release a shaken breath, letting my gaze trace over the darkened dents below my eyes … down to my necklace …

I would have lied to you forever if I thought I could get away with it.

My fist tightens around the hairbrush, hand whipping back and hurling it at the mirror, the collision akin to lightning smacking down from a black-smudged sky. Glass shatters—some bits popping off the surface and flying back at me while the rest remain stuck to the stone.

I look into my fragmented reflection that finally mirrors how I feel inside.

Gaze dropping, I pluck a shard from the scattering and flip it in my palm, studying its many sharp angles …

He taught me to bleed so beautifully.

I wonder … will he bleed for me?

* * *

The crisp morning air bites into my lungs as I make for the city beneath a grapefruit sky, the shard of glass loosely caught in the clutch of my hand. A layer of fog swirls off the cobblestones, still wet from the deluge that raged through the night. The streets are empty apart from a smattering of women swishing the contents of chamber pots down drains and a few men sitting on doorsteps, puffing on pipes or sipping from steaming mugs.

I pass beneath the spindly reach of the mail tree—catching curious peeps from some of the sprites hanging upside down from gnarled twigs—then head into the thin alleyway Gael led me through what feels like a lifetime ago …

I tighten my grip on the shard, relishing its bite. The sharp edges slice into the flesh of my palm, and a slippery warmth wets my skin, dripping in rhythm with my steps.

I toss the shard in a dumpster, painting the side with a splash of red, and continue.

Drip,step.

Drip, step.

Drip,step.

The back of my neck prickles, and my heart toils.

He’s there. A monster who caught a whiff of his prey. Because that’s what I am, I realize …

Prey.

I lead him into the sordid shadow of the wall, down the tight alleyway that runs along the base of it, and past the wooden barrel that I sat beside as I snipped my crystal bloom. I reach the edge of the drain and drop onto my bum, then leap into the soggy muck that splashes up my calves when I land. Turning to the drain, I take a deep breath and step past the cluster of lanterns illuminating the entrance.

With every step I take down the tunnel, his footsteps splash behind me—loud and hulking. As though he’s purposely making his presence known. Like I could ever miss a beat.

I’m tuned into him. Innately.

I always thought there was something special about the fact that I feel the scrape of his stare across my skin. Or that his scent has such a physical effect on my ability to function. That he could see into me, through me, exposing the very core of my being to his intoxicating self.

Now I wonder if it was just my body’s built-in awareness screaming at me that there’s a predator in my midst. If my sick addiction to pain confused me into thinking it was something more.

I have, afterall, always been a sucker for punishment.

There’s a new grate at the end of the tunnel, lit by the halo of blazing lanterns. Also replaced.

I can feel Rhordyn crushing the space behind me like death come to steal my last breath. Can feel his silent questions hammering into me like nails through my vertebrae as I pull my hairpin free and dig it into the lock.

Twisting.

Flicking.

It clunks open, and I shove the grate wide, leaving a smear of blood across the bars. I pocket the pin and step out across the large, slippery stones glistening in the morning light that does nothing to ease the wild thoughts thrashing inside me.

The long grass tickles my sodden calves as I walk down the hill with a set jaw and a firestorm in my heart. The small orchard Gael and I ate beneath comes into view, and I feel them watching me from the shadowed pools hugging the jungle ahead—so deep and dark in contrast to the places where the sunlight hits.

Irilak.

Lured by their attentive stares, I pass the peach tree in long, determined strides, drawn to that hard line between life and a swift, dehydrating death that separates me from the truth.

The nest of Irilak converge like a dark, flickering storm of vapor—so many of them it’s hard to pull the individuals apart. A divot in the swarm forms before me as my foot slides into the shadows.

A large, chilled hand clamps down on my arm.

My head whips around, and I look into Rhordyn’s pewter eyes. “Let go of me.”

He snarls, hand snapping down at his side.

I rip my stare forward and step deeper into the gloom, paving a path through the Irilak like splitting water.

The silence is deafening.

There are no birds tittering their morning tune, no bees bouncing from bloom to bloom, no wind rustling through the trees. Nothing but my footsteps crunching across the underbrush, announcing my every step that’s not followed by him.

“Orlaith, that’s far enough.”

“No,” I bite out through clenched teeth.

Not even close.

I keep walking, putting distance between us until I’m fully immersed in shadow and the noose of predatory stares. Finally I stop, my heart a hammer in my too-tight chest as I spin.

Still.

He’s standing in the spill of morning light—a pillar of robust beauty caught on the edge of uncertainty, his features shadowed by something I can’t interpret. Dressed in black leather pants and a shirt that hugs his chiseled physique, I can see every breath barrel into his broad chest.

He’s breathing faster than me …

I think he’s nervous, too.

“The Irilak feed off anything with a heartbeat. Anything but … me,” the rasp of my voice echoes through the hungry hollow between us—a chasm gored by the secrets he kept, “and the Unseelie.”

The still between us grows more fragile than the mirror I shattered.

He doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, but there’s a question in his shadowed eyes. Unlike him, I’m not going to make him wait nineteen fucking years for the answer he craves.

I reach behind my neck, and he severs the space between us with a bone-rattling growl. The Irilak flinch in tandem, like an undulating wave.

I undo the clasp, releasing the necklace.

Releasing the face of my felled species.

The jewel thunks heavily into my palm, and my skin peels down, loosening me from its crushing squeeze, leaving me bare in the ways that matter. A fragile rose exposed to his violent, snipping stare as I toss the necklace into the empty space between us, and it lands with a thud amongst the underbrush.

A beat passes. Another.

I lift my chin. Look down my nose at him.

Challenge him.

He drops his head, and his chest inflates as a savage rumble rattles free—reminiscent of the sounds the ground makes when an earthquake strikes.

The storm in my stomach churns.

Cracking his neck from side to side, he crunches his fists, upper lip twitching. Slowly, he lifts his head, looking at me through thick shreds of hair, the swirl of his silver eyes turning matte black.

A violent energy radiates off him, rippling the air between us and electrifying my skin, making it pebble.

His foot lifts, and my heart stops, then starts again in a frenzied array of beats that chase each other for traction.

He sets his boot down over the line.

No.

Another step, and there’s a swirl of scurrying darkness as the Irilak drift back …

Please no.

All the silver bleeds from his hair to match his ebony gaze that fades into the skin around his eyes, and his tattoos ignite with flickering, slashing bolts of light, like there’s an electric storm caught within their scrawled confines.

His features harden.

Sharpen.

The tapered tips of his ears peak out from thick, inky locks, and his muscles swell, chest broadens, his face carving into something transcendent—a brutal beauty that feels lethal to look upon, like he’s borne from the dark space between the stars that bears no life. A hollow, never-ending blackness.

An eternal fall I just slipped into.

The Irilak shy away from his presence, shrinking like shadows squashed by the rising sun.

My feet refuse to shift, but my heart gallops against my ribs as though it’s desperate to escape his barbed energy.

Still seizing me with his grave stare, he plucks my necklace from the ground, dangling it from his fingers, striding forward.

A hunter closing in on his snared prey.

The awareness inside me has its hand wrapped around my spine, trying to jerk me backward. Screaming for me to run. Fighting the urge, I stand exposed, naked and raw, shame and guilt my only veil as he towers over me.

There’s something just behind his eyes that makes me feel dominated. Like one prolonged stare could have me tilting my neck, pleading for him to clamp onto my flesh, burst my skin, and drink from me in greedy gulps.

He pushes my hair back with a sweep of his hand, and I gasp at the purity of his frosted touch …

“You really are a monster,” I rasp, like I just swallowed a thorny seed that’s stuck in my throat.

Choking me.

He rakes my face with his glacial gaze, settling on the thorned tips of my ears. “Your monster,” he whispers, and I draw a staggered breath.

Hold it.

Leaning close, his icy exhale pours over me, fingers threading through my hair, tugging me close, fitting me against him so perfectly—as though we’re bound together by something greater than ourselves. “Just yours.”

A tear escapes, and I let it track its course.

He pulls back, looking down on me, his gaze gentle and brutal as he slips the chain around my neck, slowly, his touch a wintry caress on my fervid skin. I hear the clasp close, but barely feel my mask peel up as I watch my light blink out in the reflection of his sable stare.

“Are you afraid?” he asks, and I catch a glimpse of sharpened canines.

“Should I be?”

“Yes.” He brushes my hair off my shoulder with a look that pilfers my soul. “I’m far worse than anything you’re imagining.”

He shackles my wrist with his hand and drags me deeper into the jungle like a weed freshly torn from soil still crumbling from its exposed roots.

My heart labors. “What are you doing?”

“Something I should’ve done a long time ago.”

“Which is?”

“Letting you see the worst of me,” he growls, a roughness to his voice that sends a gush of icy dread pulsing through my veins. That stabs the shards of that broken mirror through my fleshy heart.

I know the worst of it. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

I want to scream it at him, those shards digging deeper, deeper … splintering through the organ. Threatening to drag me under the dirt before I have the chance to do the right thing.

The thing that betrays my heart and him in the worst possible way, but saves those who don’t have the power to save themselves. Those who are flowers to be crushed beneath his booted feet.

Rhordyn lugs me down the slope of a frail path hacked along the edge of a steep ravine. A river barges through the gorge with ferocious force, charging toward a waterfall roaring ahead—an angry swirl of misty spray.

A broken sound splits from my trembling lips as I gather my emotions in the crush of my palm, rip them from my ribs and my heart and my lungs like the weeds they are, their bloody roots coiling up. I stuff them into that cold, dead place deep inside, then trap them there with a crystal shell for them to wither beneath.

I draw a long, unburdened breath, feeling my chest loosen.

My shoulders straighten.

I’m dragged toward that juncture between channeled rage and pouring destruction. Can feel the waterfall’s thundering violence in the pit of my chest, churning with baleful ferocity, alight with the shrill, tortured screams of a slaughtered species …

I look down into the frothy fall, unable to see the bottom past the storm of angry mist battering my face, dousing me in my own need to spill.

For my people.

For Baze.

My corrosive anger, my crippling hurt, my world-rocking devastation of what Rhordyn really is—what he’s done—it all boils into a thick venom pulsing through my veins.

A thousand slaughtered souls seem to chant my name …

Serren.

Serren.

Serren.

“I have something to say!”

He stops so abruptly I almost slam into his back, my hand coming up to buffer the collision—fingers splayed over the solid panes of his muscled physique.

Such a beautiful monster.

I drop my hand at the same time he drops his grip on my wrist, and a waiting silence ensues while I stand, staring at the spot between his shoulder blades.

A pit of tension clogs my throat, blocking my words.

I swallow it back, gritting my teeth against the bloom of tears stinging the backs of my eyes. “A confession.” The word comes out damaged, and I clear my throat, tip my head to stall the spill of tears, and stare at the pale blue sky through gaps in the canopy. “You and I … we’ve done horrible things.”

His breath quickens, his shoulders rising and falling with its pace.

“I think that’s why I can’t let you go,” I admit, chin trembling. “Because we’ve both been forged by the lives we took.”

The sawing labor of his breath slams to a halt, like he’s suddenly cast in stone.

I blink, those tears finally falling down my face. “I killed my mother ...”

The words are whispered.

Choked.

Barely there.

An ashy confession that wraps me in a shroud of melancholy, spoken to my beautiful, broken ghost.

A single bite of my damage he craved.

One final blow for him to absorb.

“Orlaith …”

I sense him shift, slip my hand behind my back, and wrap my sweaty palm around the thick handle that feels so cold and final.

“My name is Serren,” I whisper, and he spins.

There’s a sorrow caught in his eyes as they begin their gentle fade from black to the familiar, safe silver. Fissures crackle through my crystal shell as his chest inflates with the ammunition for words he doesn’t get a chance to speak before I rip my hand up and drive it forward.

I feel the tip of the brutal weapon pierce the hard meat of his chest to the tune of his hollow grunt. Feel it drive through muscle and sinew to the round of his heart, where it splits the organ keeping his life afloat.

Eyes wide, his stabbing stare bleeds me …

And then it drops, landing on the weapon protruding from his chest. To my hand, still wrapped around the hilt, painted in the life force spilling out of him as something inside me withers so fast the world rocks beneath my feet.

My bloody hand falls heavily at my side.

His lashes sweep up, and he looks at me, silver gaze fading, his lips shaping silent words I try and fail to read.

More fissures crackle through that shell, releasing spores of emotion that clog my throat.

I can’t breathe. Can’t think or blink. Can’t peel myself from the sense that I just plunged the talon through both our chests.

We fall to our knees as one, and a line of blood dribbles from the corner of his mouth as his hand cups my face in a silent goodbye that burns.

He smears a tear across my cheek with his thumb. “Don’t … c-cry,” he rasps, and his chest jerks with the inability to draw breath. There’s a sadness in his eyes that screams a thousand words of sorrow he can no longer draw the air to speak.

Words chant through my memory, attacking me with their softness …

It’s said that your heart must be full to pass through Kvath—the God of Death—on your journey through to Mala.

A sob bursts free.

The thought of him drifting into that endless nothing that haunts my nightmares flays my chest with a slice of panic, tilling a truth I pass him on a hand still slick with the blood I drew. “I told you you’re the worst thing that ever happened to me,” I choke out, and his face buckles like I just twisted the talon, the blunt end of a grunt punching through. “I lied—”

He tips forward, pressing his lips against my forehead—a kiss that burns in a way that makes me gasp.

Warm. Not cold.

Warm …

My cheek, too, is cradled by a warm grip, and I cup my hand against his, sealing it there, heart shattering into a thousand bloody pieces.

I broke him …

I did this …

I can’t take it back …

“And I don’t hate you at all,” I sob, eyes squeezed shut. “I just love you so much it hurts. Both of us.”

His hand grows heavy, and I struggle to keep it pressed against my cheek.

Nuzzle into it.

Don’t leave me.

“You’re the happily ever after I don’t deserve.” I whisper, then feel his body waver.

His kiss falls away.

I open my eyes in time to see the light bleed from his, and gravity eases him backward. He tumbles off the edge of the cliff, and I snatch at the air, an agonized scream ripping up my swollen throat.

Arms reaching, he plunges through the pillow of mist that does nothing to soften his fall …

Gone.