54. Chapter 54
54
Graysen
A storm of hatred weaved across Nelle’s features and burned bright. She needed space, and so did I.
With every step distancing us from my family and the other Houses, I could feel her temper clawing beneath my skin dissipating. “It’s okay,” she sighed, drawing to a halt, stopping me too. I let go, flexing my fingers and trying to loosen that electric feeling fizzing through my blood from merely touching her wrist.
She arched her elegant throat sideways and massaged the back of her neck where my hand had squeezed the vulnerable expanse of skin before shooting me a curious look.
Pincering her there, at the nape, was a primal move, animalistic and dominant, usually enforced with fangs. I needed her to submit to me, not to whatever it was inside her.
I gritted my teeth, shoving one hand in my pocket while rubbing my chin with the other. Shit, she had lost control in front of my aunt and they hadn’t exchanged a single word. My family had crowded around her. Not that she’d realized it ?and if she did, she probably assumed they were boxing her in, rather than what they were actually doing—not allowing anyone else to see what was happening in our inner circle.
Back here, where we’d disappeared behind the temple, we were alone. Though there was space between the temple and the thickly knotted tree line, it was as if the forest couldn’t resist the ancient structure. The gnarled boughs buffeted by the winds stretched over its roof, and the bare limbs scratched at the pitted stone. I took a couple of steps across the cobblestone studded with lichen and weeds that poked through cracks. Tonight had me worried. Part of me understood Byron. Why he’d perhaps had one cognac too many. Tonight’s blessing was unavoidable. There was no way he could excuse Nelle’s presence without suspicion being cast in his direction.
Nelle had bowed her head and was smoothing the tips of her fingers under the arch of an eyebrow. “I couldn’t…” Her lashes fluttered wider as she glanced at me sideways. A strange mixture of contrition and utterly unrepentant for her reaction to Aunt Valarie shone in her gaze. “I couldn’t look at her without seeing what she’d done to you—”
“Leave it,” I bit back with more anger than intended.
She flinched, then straightened to face me fully, her hand slackening to her side. Once again, I felt like an asshole, but she needed to hear this. “Keep that temper on a short leash,” I growled, shoving a finger at her. Wychthorn princess or not, by disrespecting my aunt, she was brandishing a red flag. Plain and simple.
And here, amongst all the Houses, had all rational thought fled?
What was it? That thing hidden beneath her flesh?
Were her emotions so entwined with it, she had no control when she ignited with fury? Or was it simply her—a fearless girl incapable of concealing how she felt?
Nelle propped her hand on her hip, looking at me incredulously. “How can you stand her? How can you not hate her for what she did?”
“I don’t hate her.”
“What she did—”
“Leave. It. Alone!” I barked.
Storming off, I heard a burst of motion, the clattering of heels, and suddenly she was right in front of me, blocking my path. She crossed her arms, one foot slightly forward so she could rap her toe on the flagstone in an irritated pattern. “You need to apologize.”
I glared at her, a little astounded by her demand, but also not. Cocking my head, I hissed low. “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed this about me, but I don’t apologize for anything.”
Her gaze narrowed and her mouth pinched. “You were cruel and vicious and I shouldn’t trust you after what you said and did to me last night.”
And that struck home, like a fist to the guts. I briefly closed my eyes, cursing myself. Gods, she really shouldn’t trust me.
When I squinted through one eye, I found her glare had gotten meaner. She tossed up a flattened palm. “Why couldn’t you have just told me the truth? Or at the very least, tell me it wasn’t any of my business?”
“It. Is. None. Of. Your business.” I snarled, matching her ire .
“Stop being such a stubborn ass and apologize!” she shrieked, both hands balled into fists, and when she stamped one foot, I swore I felt the earth shudder.
“Not gonna happen!” I roared back.
The air held moisture, but as yet, the heavens hadn’t unleashed. A crack of blinding-white lightning bleached the color from the trees and the freckles from her honeyed skin, cutting everything into sharp contrast.
Turning her image for a split second into a wrathful goddess.
Ethereal.
Untouchable and remote.
And full of righteous fire. She looked like she wanted to smite me down.
Do it —a sick part of me roared, wishing for one stupid moment to unburden myself from this heaviness pressing upon my bones, crowding out my very breath. The responsibility and unfairness battled against the incessant need to be near her all the time. To do anything for her, to please her, simply to tease out a smile within her silvery-gray eyes, curve her lips into a crooked grin, and make her burst into that hearty laugh that warmed my soul. And her fire, gods, I adored her fire, how she warred with me and refused to put up with my personal brand of jerkass. She was wicked-mean and I craved it from her, as much as I desired her sweetness too.
Lightning died.
Darkness plunged.
A grumble of thunder followed.
And as my eyes swiftly adjusted to the gloomy night, she was just a girl standing in front of me. A simple girl shaking with fury and indignation, made perfectly for me.
And that sudden realization pitched my stomach into a freefall.
How am I going to do everything that needs to be done?
Her anger dissolved and her expression crumbled as a pent-up breath left her body. She gnawed her bottom lip, darting a worried look at me. Stepping closer, she raised her chin, those light eyebrows quirking upward. I listened as my little bird said softly, “I know you’re keeping something from me. I know there’s more you don’t want me to know.”
Guilt was a cold greasy feeling sickening my insides.
She spread her fingers a hairsbreadth from my throat, the adamere beads adorning her wrist, chinking like wind chimes as resolve strengthened her voice. “But hear this, Graysen Crowther. I’ll steal your secret sooner or later.”
We stared silently in challenge, my heartbeat a shameful thud in my empty chest, and I prayed to Zrenyth she wouldn’t see my truth.
As always, it seemed when it came to her, I buckled first.
Spinning away, I stalked along the broken cobblestones crusted with moss until I was dead center at the back of the temple. My shoulders rounded forward as I toed the stone beneath my feet, crushing blades of grass where they poked free. A thick swell of loss and resentment choked up my throat, and it took a long moment to regain control, to remind myself that Nelle was not for me.
Nelle’s distinctive fragrance swept ahead of her before quick, clipped steps brought her to stand in front of me. I squared my shoulders and knotted my arms across my chest. Perhaps it seemed an aggressive gesture but it was also defensive.
Her eyes were glacial and her mouth petulant. “I don’t want to stand with you and your family—”
“Tough, you’re with us tonight. You don’t want to be up there with your family. Not at that altar. Nor standing beside the Horned Gods.”
That was why we couldn’t let her near the altar.
Faced with the tithe she’d comforted at the tithe prison, with the sacrifice about to happen and the seductive power resonating from the Horned Gods, it could make her slip. The best we could do was keep her as far away from the dais as possible and the simplest way to do that was for Nelle to stand amongst us. She was unraveling. Today she’d proven that with her rage and lack of self-control.
A shudder rippled through her slight figure, and her complexion paled. Soft blue light from the wildfyre glanced along the sharp lines of her cheeks. Anxious eyes flitted away, and she absentmindedly scratched her fingernails against her upper arm as she stared at the temple. At the lichen creeping over weather-worn grooves that curved into a monstrous wingtip. “With everything going on between us… I hadn’t time to think about the ceremony.” She instinctively shifted closer. Her shoulder, an inch from my arm, caused all the fine hair on my body to rise. My heartbeat kicked up a notch to match hers. “I don’t come here very often,” she whispered. “I’ve rarely been inside… I haven’t witnessed this kind of ceremony before.”
It was going to be brutal tonight.
Urstlo was one of the three Horned Gods who would perform the blessing. It wasn’t anything I wished for her to meet. Sirro, of course, would attend, but as for the identity of the third Horned God, I didn’t know who or what it would be.
Who the hells knew how Nelle would react?
But Marissa understood my father’s veiled offer disguised as demand. Despite those pills clouding her mind and emotions, Marissa knew how dangerous it was for her daughter to be standing at the altar beside the Horned Gods, with that innocent death performed right in front of her and nowhere else to look. The Crowthers were the only ones who could shield Nelle without raising suspicion.
And perhaps she agreed so readily with my father because of what she’d shared with me last night. She suspected her husband was capable of doing anything to keep himself as the Head of the Great House, even taking his own daughter’s life, which was why she wanted Nelle as far away from Byron as possible.
Nelle’s eyebrows slanted upward. “The sacrifice…? Is that why you pushed for me to join your family?”
Push? It was more a curt demand. One Byron had to give in to.
I nodded, relieved I could at least be honest about that. Tucking my hands into my pockets, I rocked back on my heels. “No— thanks— Wychthorn?”
“You first,” she shot tartly, flashing a grin.
I let out an exasperated huff I only half felt. I was suffocating under the weight of us, and yet she continued to delight me with her ability to both charm me and piss me off at the same time.
My gaze drifted to the relief sculpture that took up the entire length of the back wall. It slowly came into focus as I untangled myself from thoughts of her.
A wyrm.
Maybe it was me, the fact that I’d inherited the black eyes from my ancestors that tamed wyrms, but I’d always admired the sleekness of the serpentine body, wings extended, horned head similarly shaped to a dragon—a mortal myth and not in any way real—with a ridge of plated spikes down its spine, and the design of its webbed feet made for digging through dirt. Wyrms didn’t have lairs in caves; they dug burrows beneath the earth and kept their offspring deep underground until they’d crossed adolescence.
A proud smile threatened to expose itself. Of those families gathered here, House Crowther was the oldest. Our lineage went right back, well past the Final War, to the age shrouded in mist and hidden from mortal knowledge, when Zrenyth gave life to the Horned Gods.
And once, long ago, we’d had an earlier version of this temple on our own lands.
Nelle noticed what I was looking at. Her expression smoothed into wonderment as she stared wide-eyed at the relief sculpture of the wyrm.
Pinching her skirt between her fingers, she lifted its length while ascending the steps. The soles of her high heels cracked against the stone porch that wrapped around the building. Wildfyre torches blazed, shadows dancing over the carved wall and pillars and creeping dead ivy, and cast her in an icy blue light that was reminiscent of those ancient glaciers up north. I trailed behind, drawn to her like a moth to a naked flame, unheedful of the danger.
Gods, why can’t I stay away?
Her body weaved from side-to-side as she took in the wyrm’s rendering. “Greedy. Obsessive. Territorial,” she murmured so quietly that I knew she was talking to herself.
“Easily offended. Cunning and shrewd. Stubborn as all Nine Hells,” I added, shifting my weight to one hip. “Volatile too.” I gave her a sly look, unable to resist adding, “Like someone else I know.”
She’d been craning her neck to stare up at the roofline of the wall where the tips of the wyrm’s wings were extended. Surprised, she whipped her head to mine. Gray eyes sparkled with amusement. “Volatile indeed,” she scoffed. Reaching out, she hesitated briefly before touching the ancient pockmarked stone. Her delicate fingers traced a curve of a leathery wing, just as she’d done last night to the wyrm branded above my heart. “Draxxon,” she said softly, reverently.
I made a humming noise in confirmation. The rendering of the wyrm wasn’t quite right, though.
Anyone looking at me would only see boredom and simmering aggravation to be stuck in her company, but inside…I couldn’t help the excitement fizzing through my veins. Out of anyone I knew within the Houses, she was the only one who would appreciate our families’ vast history. I couldn’t wait to see her reaction when she came face to face with Draxxon at our home, his gigantic body lining the wall of our Great Hall.
Weather-roughened stone prickled my palm as I ran my hand over the wyrm’s head. Draxxon’s horns resembled antelopes, more graceful than what was captured here, thick and gnarled and ram-like. “He basked in sunshine. Wyrmfire, pure sunlight. He brought mountains to their knees.”
Those eyes of hers, lashes darkened with mascara, seemed so much larger as she slowly blinked, taking in what I knew. Her focus dipped to my mouth, and with the languid swipe of her gaze, a tangible caress sparked against my lips and fired a straight line of heat down to my cock.
“Let me guess, Draxxon was tamed by a Crowther.”
I bunched my fingers into fists at my sides and told my stiffening shaft to back the hells down, or else I was going to do something stupid like clench my hands in her pale hair and claim her in a searing kiss.
Gods, I want her .
A notch formed between her brows, and I suddenly realized, rather belatedly, she was waiting for an answer. I could only swallow and nod in reply with a rasp. “Hamon.”
She couldn’t help herself. She was a curious little thing. Heaving a sigh, she reluctantly asked, as if she wished there was someone, anyone else, besides me, to provide her with an answer. “How do you tame a wyrm?”
“Charm the fuck out of them.”
Her brows shot up in surprise. Then she threw her head back to laugh skyward, giving a full body shake of laughter, the infectious kind that enticed you to join in. It peeled from her, bright and radiant, each note rich with exuberance.
The sound wrapped around my body and infused me with her sunshine.
It was the second-best sound I’d ever heard, the first being those delicious hitched gasps she made right before she came and the godsdamn scream as she detonated. The erotic sounds vibrating along my bones almost had me wishing to fall upon her to claim entirely.
Nelle spun around to slump against the temple, clutching her stomach. Her laughter died down to broken chuckles, and she swiveled sideways to brace her shoulder against the wall, her eyes bright with joy. “How do you do that?”
I arched a brow because I didn’t know what she was asking.
“How do you manage to simultaneously piss me off and make me laugh at the same time?”
I shrugged, taming the grin. Because I’d asked myself the same question about her only minutes ago.
She pushed off the temple, turning back to Draxxon’s image, still smiling. Her gaze scoured the serpentine body. At the scales flanking its form that were harder than adamere. “Did your ancestors ride wyrms?”
I snorted. “Hells no. You can’t constrict wyrms with harnesses.” Draxxon was the most powerful wyrm of all time. Because of the deep bond with Hamon, he battled by my ancestor’s side in the Final War.
“Draxxon and Hamon were the only ones between the Horned Gods and the army of mortals,” she said, her forehead creased in thought, obviously running through the last war and the Houses’ history.
I shot her a sidelong glance, finishing the history lesson but adding a few more details she wouldn’t know. “Clever motherfuckers had aligned themselves with Children of the Harbinger, created a legion of others, and used them against us.” A few treasonous Horned Gods had betrayed us, too. “Hamon was killed. Draxxon wounded. Without Hamon, Draxxon was freed.” I spread my legs wider, crossed my arms, and absentmindedly rubbed my fingertips back and forth along my jawline while taking in the flames of the wyrmfire blazing from Draxxon’s snarled mouth. “He could have turned feral and left the battlefield, but he fought on until he was brought down by wyrm-harpoons. But his sacrifice allowed the few of us that survived the slaughter to scatter.”
She blinked, confusion tightening her features. Her gaze bounced from me to the wyrm and back again. “How do you know all of that? I didn’t even know about wyrm-harpoons.”
That knowledge, along with many others, had disappeared from the lessons we’d been taught growing up, along with the names of the first and most ancient Houses that succumbed to treachery when new Houses arose.
“Our family library.”
For a moment, her gray eyes lit up with excitement and she bounced on the balls of her feet.
Her own family’s library only went back so far in history. I could see her mind churning, what she thought she might learn in those ancient tomes of ours. A ghost of a smile danced across her lips.
Then she remembered herself.
That look of delight melted away a frosted lawn meeting sunshine. Darkness swept over her features. She stepped closer to the temple to tap her forefinger against the stone, frowning as she fixed her gaze on the movement. “I don’t know if I can stand near your aunt without saying anything.”
The sudden reminder of our reality, what I was to her, and her to me—had me falling from a great height, slamming into pavement with a jolt that shook through me.
“You will. You have to.” I rubbed my hand across my face. Gods, I’d completely fucked everything up. “Shit, Wychthorn. I should never have told you any of that.”
Her tongue darted out to wet her lips as she turned to face me. Those eyes, more silver in the dim light, snagged on my mouth, and heat scorched through my veins, then froze to ice as soon as her words registered. “I…I didn’t know for the longest time about your mother…her dying.”
Dying. Guilt churned my stomach.
And for a moment I had to close my eyes to hide myself from her as another image burst unbidden into my mind. The last memory I had of my mother was her crouched over my shattered body, her terror as tangible as the blood splattered all over her face. The bright red flecks thinned by tears, washing down her cheeks in watery streaks .
I’d reached for her, three of my fingers broken and bent awkwardly—
She screamed—
And then she was gone.
I still didn’t open my eyes, my throat thick and burning, when Nelle said quietly, “But I remember her, I think, from when the Houses came together and my father allowed me to attend. I have faint recollections. She had a smile and laugh that warmed the soul.”
She did. My mother did.
Green eyes, bright and full of mirth, and hair spun gold.
“I think I have one memory of her. She’d made my mother smile. Back when she smiled and laughed a lot.” Opening my eyes, I found Nelle staring down at her fingers rotating through her adamere beads. “Not so much anymore.” Her gaze lifted and she seemed faraway in thought. “She crouched down to tap me on the nose.” Her brows nudged together as she gave me a sidelong glance, contemplative. “You were there too. I don’t know why I couldn’t stop looking at you. You were a curiosity, but I also resented you too. I never understood why I couldn’t look away whenever you were nearby. I never had to search to see where you stood. I could feel it. Feel you looking back at me, trying to understand it yourself.”
You never did stop.
Neither could I.
Her chest expanded with a sudden rush of air and she blinked rapidly, as if coming back to herself. “She said I was something special. I thought she just meant what grownups liked to say to make a small child proud. But that wasn’t what she meant at all. Was it?” Her gray eyes sharpened on mine. “She knew what I was, or suspected at the very least.”
Panic erupted, and I could feel tiny beads of sweat coating my palms. I hooked a finger through my dampened shirt collar where the necktie seemed to have suddenly gripped me in a stranglehold.
Nelle took a step toward me. “The Horned Gods killed your mother.”
Hearing those words fall from that innocent mouth, I was pretty sure being run over by an eighteen-wheeler and backed over several more times for good measure wouldn’t have hurt as much.
A thief, a death-dealer, a spinner of deceit.
The Uzrek’s proclamation rang true. I was all of those things. The last, I hated with every inch of my being. But it was true. I was a spinner of deceit.
“I was locked in a tithe prison the same year you endured that punishment. ”
She took a step closer—I took one back.
“My mother changed overnight, a shadow of her former self.”
Two more steps and she’d backed me up against the wall. Cold, uneven stone jabbed against my spine.
“When your family claimed me, we’d hardly ever spoken directly before. But when we spoke in the aviary before signing the Alverac, you’d acted as if you knew me and had already passed judgment, and you didn’t like me.” She tilted her head back, worry glistening in her eyes. “So what is it, Graysen? What have I done to you to make you resent me this way?”
She was close, so close to discovering the truth.
What good would it do but terrify her?
I wasn’t sure I was breathing, and terror ripped at my insides with razor-sharp talons. It wouldn’t take long for that clever mind to piece it together.
Her gaze lowered to her hands fiddling with the adamere bracelet, fingers distractedly rotating the beads. Her voice dropped to a whisper, and I could hear the fear laced through the words. “Because I can’t help but think that I have something to do with those whip marks on your back. That I was responsible for it.” She drew in a deep breath and she slowly raised those big wide eyes to stare at me again. She was determined, but her bottom lip trembled and she was trying to hide her anxiety from me by rolling her lip into her mouth. “You need to tell me what I’ve done.”
Even if it will break you?
Frighten you?
Her thick eyelashes fluttered even wider as she waited, her chest rising and falling with a shallow breath, and her knuckles turned white around the bracelet from their forceful grip.
Gods, Nelle, what I’m going to do to you?
As a child, she’d mesmerized me. I’d protected her, and she’d never known that fact. Then everything changed between us. One night on a dark country road when my world, the heart of our family, my mother was hunted in her place. Someone had given up my mother to save her . And it was me . If only I hadn’t breathed a word, sat in the gloomy recesses of the limousine, and held my tongue. My mother would still be with us and I wouldn’t be standing here with the girl who I saved through my reckless choice.
She’d have been killed or stolen—
But I’d still have my mother and my back wouldn’t have been ruined with slashes of the whip .
What could I tell her?
The truth?
The truth was raw glass that would flay her soul.
But wasn’t that what I’d wanted all along? Hadn’t I wanted her to hurt as much as I had been?
Gods, I’d waited for this moment for years—to cut Nelle down and make her pay. Watch the life drain out of those vibrant gray eyes and pure terror erupt instead.
But deep down, I knew my truth.
I cared for her. I always had. Even when I’d denied it, refused to acknowledge it—lied to myself about it.
Nelle waited nervously, the fierce spirit that lived and breathed in her gaze dulled with dread, while condemnation scorched through my veins with the ruthlessness of wildfyre, leaving nothing behind but shame and self-loathing.
Nelle or my mother?
Every cell in my body rebelled against me as I fought against the need burning inside. To confess. To fall on my knees and beg forgiveness for something that had yet to pass.
Nelle thought she was the monster.
It couldn’t be further from the truth.
I was.
I was the monster that lurked in a shadowed crack, preying on her, silent and still and waiting with infinite patience for her to pluck a silken strand so I could strike. I’d drag her into my lair and feast on everything good inside of her. Bleed her dry until she was a husk of hate.
And it was there, a monstrous chain around my heart, weighing me down and binding my soul in a barbed wire embrace, almost about to roll off my tongue, my confession, the truth of the Alverac. My mouth parted—
The abrupt sound of hurried footsteps jolted us apart.
Someone who smelled of honey and orange blossoms rounded the temple and saved my ass.
Mela V?duva.