Chapter 16
sixteen
TALON
When we eventually emerged from our room, I finally gave Avery a tour of the castle. She’d deserved to have it long ago, but I hadn’t wanted her walking around before everyone knew what she was to me.
Now that she wore my mark, there was no reason to keep her to myself.
While we walked, I couldn’t stop looking at the thin flames I’d put on her throat.
She wore me on her skin. An announcement to everyone in the castle that she was taken.
That she was mine.
When I wore a matching one, no one would ever be able to take her from me. And I couldn’t fucking wait for that day.
She’d retreated from me a little after we left the room. She didn’t seem angry, anymore. Just… uncertain.
I hated that uncertainty, but I knew it would take time for her to see that I wasn’t going anywhere.
And I could wait.
Everyone we passed was friendly to her. After I nearly lost her, everyone knew she was my fated mate.
After the tour, we stopped by Stella’s room to see if she was still there, but she was gone. Probably headed out to see Evan. It was difficult to stay away from your fated mate, even if they’d turned you down.
From there, we went to my office in the castle. I wanted to take Avery back to our room and spend a few days alone with her, but the uncertainty she wore like a mask told me that was a bad idea.
She was curious what I spent my days doing, so I showed her the long-winded reports from a few different departments. The cooking department, the guards, and the education department were all very needy and very involved, not to mention all the others.
I explained how I used to have no choice but to fly back and forth between the castle and the Manor because of our lack of internet connection.
There was a shiny new computer on my desk, now that we had wi-fi and phone service. It had taken an eye-watering amount of money and time to make that happen, but it was finally done.
I showed her the to-do list on my computer, and watched her eyebrows jump upward when she saw how much shit there was to get done.
“You really are the king,” she said, perched on the edge of my desk with her arms wrapped around her middle. The sweater she had on flashed me peeks of her bare abdomen every time she lifted her arms, so I was a fan.
A big one.
I was even more obsessed with the mark on her throat, though.
“I keep the place running. I’m basically a glorified janitor who cleans paperwork messes instead of physical messes. And the physical ones would be much more satisfying.”
“That’s what all the kings do, Tal. They keep things running.”
“That doesn’t make me a king.”
Her lips tilted upward, just slightly. “Okay.”
I rolled my chair closer to her, stopping when she tensed slightly. We were only separated by a few inches.
She eyed me, with clear tension in her shoulders.
I needed to break that tension.
“The most important thing on my to-do list is to spend the rest of my day in the hot springs. Care to join?”
Her tension eased, her gaze growing amused. “Fine, but we’re not screwing down there. I need some space.”
“So do I. My cock is painfully hard right now.”
It was a lie.
My female had satisfied me enough that I was only half-mast at seeing her leaned up against my desk the way she was.
But the remark filled its purpose, making her smile a little more.
“Liar,” she said, but there was no heat behind the words.
“Not all lies are cruel, Ave.” I stood up, capturing her hand before she could tuck it in her pocket.
We slipped out of the office together, and Avery remained close to my side as we made our way down through the castle.
“If you sincerely believe that, tell me a lie you’ve given Stella,” she countered.
She didn’t think I’d ever lied to my sister. She thought we were too close.
“I lie to her every time I tell her that more guards want a chance into the rotation guarding Sylvester.”
“That’s barely a lie. She knows you force them into it.”
“Alright.” I considered it.
Avery clearly wanted a big lie. One that would’ve changed things if I shared the truth, the way it had when I hid what we were to each other.
There was an obvious one. I was reluctant to share it, but she didn’t trust me at the moment. If I ever wanted that back, I had to trust her first.
“You can’t tell her this,” I warned.
Suddenly, I had her full attention.
We turned a corner, and I saw a door that I knew led into a storage room. I towed her toward it, and she made a sound of surprise when I pulled it open and revealed a room stocked full of toiletries. There were some cleaning supplies too, but it was mostly an empty room we’d filled with things we may need in case of an emergency.
It was only one of many.
And there was a department for that too.
I pulled her inside with me, closing the door behind us. “You take this secret to the grave,” I warned.
She nodded, her eyes wide and slightly worried.
“When we caught Sylvester, he had a few journals full of pictures and descriptions of what he’d done to his victims. All of them had clearly been read frequently. It was something out of a fucking nightmare. Between those entries, the books were full of fantasies he had about what he wanted to do to Stella. The ways he’d hurt her, and more. I kept them until everything was figured out, and burned them afterward. I never told anyone else about them.”
Her eyes widened. “How bad were they?”
“Worse than you can ever imagine.” My chest rumbled dangerously. “She thinks he just used her to protect his identity, but it’s a fucking lie. She was his main target. The one he wanted to kill the most. The reason he started in the first place. If she knew…” I shook my head.
“She’d blame herself even more than she already does,” Avery whispered.
“Exactly.”
“She can’t know. We can never tell her.”
I shook my head. “We take it to the grave.”
She met my eyes. There was uncertainty in her gaze, but iron, too. “I didn’t tell my sisters about Wendell,” she said softly. “They would’ve blamed themselves for not realizing what was going on, and I couldn’t let them do that.”
“What happened with him?” I asked the question carefully. I didn’t want to scare her away. Especially not while emotions were running high because I had hidden the truth from her.
Her gaze fixed on my shoulder.
She bit her lip.
“You don’t have to tell me.” I put a hand on her waist, unable to resist touching her in some way. “But you know it won’t change the way I feel about you.”
“What if it might?”
The uncertainty in her eyes made me want to find a way to kill the bastard again.
And kiss the hell out of her.
“Then you’d better tell me while you’re still trying to get rid of me, huh?”
She gave me the tiniest of smiles before the expression vanished. “Wendell was… dominant. And charming. Very charming. We met at a bar, when my sisters and I went out to feed. Blair stayed home, and Izzy stayed with her. We never left her alone, and Blair only fed a fraction as often as the rest of us. Clem and Zora were off with other guys when I met him. He was a werewolf, but he had connections. He borrowed a room from a vampire friend. We slipped inside together, and fucked. It was the first time I really, truly enjoyed sex, and I wanted more. So we made a plan to meet up again.”
I forced myself to remain calm. I knew my possessiveness was ridiculous at the moment. Avery was mine. The fucker from her past was dead, and he was less than nothing to her.
“It went on for months,” she admitted. “Just once a week. I told myself and my sisters that it was just to feed, but they called him my boyfriend. And they weren’t wrong. The first time he invited me to his place, I was excited to go. I thought it was the next step, you know? But when I got there the first night, his personality had changed. I blamed myself for it. I was nineteen, and I didn’t know better. If he was cruel, it was my fault for being ridiculous, or not thinking hard enough about something. The first time he hit me, I tried to leave—but he had learned about my sisters. He threatened to hurt them. So I stayed.”
I stepped closer, and she put her arms around my waist, pulling my body to hers. She wanted support, and I would never deny it.
“How long did it last?” I asked.
Her cheek was to my chest, and there was too much clothing separating us, but I didn’t try to remove it. The moment wasn’t about sex, or even intimacy. It was about Avery facing her demons.
“Almost a year,” she whispered. “It got worse over time, as those situations usually do. The night it ended was just like so many others. We fucked. He got angry. I bled. When he grabbed my throat and marked me while he cut off my air supply, I finally snapped. It felt like a dam blocking my magic had burst open. He was immobilized entirely by my power. I thought about just leaving, but he had figured out where my sisters and I lived. He had threatened them. There was only one option.”
She trembled against me.
I held her tighter, trying not to shake alongside her.
“I killed him,” she said. “It doesn’t haunt me, either. I killed him to protect my sisters and to free myself. And then I set his house on fire to hide what I had done. I told my sisters we broke up, and spent the next year tense, waiting for someone to show up looking for revenge. They didn’t. We survived. And I don’t regret it.”
“Good. For what he did to you, he deserves so fucking much worse.”
She hugged me tighter, and I felt her tears on my shirt. “I’ve never told anyone that before. It feels good not to be the only one who knows. Just… don’t make me regret it.”
“I won’t.” The words were fierce, and I meant them with everything I had.
“I shouldn’t believe you, but I think I do.”
Kissing her forehead, I pulled her more securely to my chest.
She was everything to me.
Eventually, she would be as confident about that as I was.
But for the moment, I’d wait as long as I needed to.