59
KYLO
I t equally melted and crushed my heart to see that Evie had dressed herself in one of my shirts. It was unbelievably shitty of me to have left her here, alone, for nearly twenty-four hours after rough play and feeding. I hadn’t given her a modicum of aftercare, and now she was crashing. Hard .
Alone. When it would’ve been a simple order to have a healer check in on her, or an attendant to cook her food and make sure she was drinking fluids.
She didn’t want me to feel guilty about it, but that was exactly what I felt the moment her feverish forehead touched mine, her petite form swallowed by my clothing.
The truth was, the past day had been more fever dream than reality. I’d had no concept of time passing. No concept of how I felt in my body or what was outside my immediate field of perception. I gave order after order, met with commanders and decided how much I wanted to tell and to whom. I’d interrogated and tortured two born, one of which had absolutely no idea about anything more than his own useless existence. Yet I slaughtered him ruthlessly if only to feel better.
It had offered little relief.
No one outside my closest inner circle knew what had happened yet. And they wouldn’t know. Not until we’d patched up this gaping, devastating power vacuum Princeton had left in his wake.
Here with Evie, I struggled not to let my mind wander, to spin and work and question.
Harmony had all but forced me to go home, to break until morning. I wasn’t going to listen to her. But then she told me what time it was, and I’d listened to how hard and slow Evie’s fragile heart was pumping through the bond. I left immediately.
Evie pulled back, and a weight lifted off my chest when I saw that more color had returned to her cheeks. Her skin had been a frighteningly sickly pallor when I’d first arrived. My love for her and my guilt over failing her was more than enough to keep me here, at least until tomorrow.
“You can’t bear the weight of the world, Kylo.” Her small hand traced my jaw, concern etched in her beautifully empathetic features.
I felt unworthy of such softness in the wreckage of my enormous failures.
And of course, in this haze of threatening emotions, fears, and pressure—my first instinct was to go to my mentor for help. To get my head screwed back on straight.
My chest tightened. I stared into nothingness, blinking away the rising panic.
“If not me, then who?” I asked dryly.
I needed distraction. My shadows were mourning, straining against my veins. They wanted to rot an entire born neighborhood from the inside out.
Before Evie could answer, I kissed her briefly and lifted her off my lap. “Lay down for me, angel,” I sighed. The shakiness in my breath disgusted me.
I couldn’t mourn, not yet. Not until we’d patched up the breach. Not until my clan was secure again.
Not until vengeance had been served.
Evie lay on the couch, and I reached for the healing salve I’d fetched from the kitchen.
“I’m going to tend to your bites. Then you’re going to eat for me.”
I tentatively lifted the baggy shirt, exposing her bite-covered body. The sight would’ve ordinarily brought me immense pleasure, seeing the way she’d been marked and claimed. But now, I could only think of how I’d left her to care for these wounds herself. Not only while she’d been coming down from feeding and rough sex, but also after she’d been traumatized.
I fucking hated that she’d seen Princeton like that. All in an effort to protect and comfort me.
I grimaced, spreading the salve on one of the bites to her thigh.
“Only if you eat too,” Evie said. “It’s a big sandwich. I can share.”
Sweet girl. Her blood last night had been more than enough to sustain me. Mortal food wasn’t necessary.
I smiled in a way that I knew didn’t reach my exhausted eyes. “Deal.”
In one of our deliberation rooms, my inner circle sat together around a long wooden table.
Evie and I had slept tangled up together last night. If she’d had a nightmare, she hadn’t voiced it. Just like I hadn’t said anything about mine.
She said she didn’t want company today, but I’d urged her to use her linked journal to write to me if she changed her mind and needed a healer, emotional or physical. She’d scoffed, shaking her head resolutely.
Guilt had become a second source of torment to distract me from my loss. Because I knew how much her home meant to her—her land, her plants, her magick, and her family. I had her completely isolated.
But there was no alternative. I needed her surrounded by the clan at all times if I wasn’t with her.
Not out in the open, vulnerable to the snakes who had yet to be beheaded.
Not when Evie was exactly who they’d want to kill next.
Wrath was its own poltergeist, the lights frequently flickering or going out entirely as I spoke with my comrades.
“This whole fucking clan runs on his magick,” Phineas said, staring bitterly at the loose paper and pens in front of him as the lights flickered again.
“What’s already been created will hold unless tampered with,” I repeated for what felt like the hundredth time.
The conversation was the same with each new person we brought into the fold. And it was starting to make me murderously impatient.
I wasn’t used to such feelings, as I tended to attribute them to weaker men.
But I was staring down the sharp point of a sword that inched closer to my face each hour that passed.
“Here’s the plain truth,” Phineas said. “We need a new witch. Someone who is bound to the clan. Someone we can control, whose fate is intertwined with ours. One of them chaos ones who can work with shadows. Someone powerful.”
All eyes moved to me before quickly looking elsewhere. My knuckles were white from clenching so hard.
Phineas didn’t know the nature of Evie’s magick. No one did, in its entirety, including me. But especially not those on the outskirts of my circle, who had attributed all strange happenings to Princeton. Who had no idea that Evie had been the one who had conjured a cyclone of power in our neighborhood, or storms over Etherdale.
Blade and Harmony were the only two who hadn’t subverted their gazes from my rigid, enraged form.
“The trouble is, I reckon those types don’t take too kindly to brute force, coercion, or blackmail,” Phineas continued, oblivious to the unspoken exchange happening between me and my closest friends. “Which means they’d require softer methods of control. Shared enemies. Loyalty. Enough to form the kinds of bonds that we had with Princeton through our sigils—ensuring mutual protection or death by shadow.”
“Kylo,” Harmony started.
“ No ,” I bellowed, the table rattling against the floor. I stood. “I need everyone except Harmony and Blade to take their leave. We will reconvene shortly.”
Phineas was finally paying attention, his snake eyes narrowing on my stance before scanning my highest-ranking comrades. He nodded in subservience, regardless, leaving with the others.
As soon as they were gone, I took a deep breath.
“Kylo,” Harmony said again. “Your instincts are never wrong, remember? You always know what the clan needs before we do. What this revolution needs .”
“It needs her ,” Blade said, crossing his tree-trunk arms over his broad chest.
I shook my head. “My intuition about Evie was not about her usefulness,” I said, hushed despite the eavesdropping protection wards. As if my love for Evie was akin to treason. “It was about who she is and what she means to me.”
“Why can’t both be true?” Harmony asked softly.
I turned away from them, studying the dark magenta vines that crawled up the walls. “Because all Evie has ever known is abuse, manipulation, and selfishness. From the moment she was born, her parents sought to use her instead of love her. To tithe her as a child bride to some born elite rather than protect her.”
I turned back to them, my gaze burning as it met each of my friends’. I needed them to understand—I needed them to understand why they couldn’t ask this of me, and why I could never ask such a thing of her.
“She has just finally started to open up, after a decade on the run. To learn how to do something as simple as trust someone other than her brother or her grandmother. She dedicated her entire existence to protecting someone else, and she’s only now beginning to live for herself. She would never want this life, and I would never force it on her. That precious girl deserves to feel safe. Not to become the new most coveted kill of all born demons and King Earle himself.”
Harmony smiled sadly. “Don’t we all deserve to feel safe?”
Blade sighed. “None of us asked for this life. Yes, we chose it. But it chose us just as much.” He paused. “I hear you, Kylo. I do. There is no good solution, not under this kind of pressure. There’s live or die .”
Harmony’s gaze was unyielding and intense as she lifted her chin. “She might surprise you.”