Chapter 12 Bronwen
Bronwen
“Oops,” I mumbled to myself, taking in the wreckage I’d left in my wake.
August’s clothes were strewn haphazardly across the floor, torn from his armoires.
The once-elegant curtains now lay in shreds, dangling limply from their rods.
I had screamed, hurled objects until they shattered, torn down everything within reach.
Then, I had stood in the middle of the wreckage, breathing hard, weighing my options: storm through the castle and track down whatever crypt August had buried himself in to finish our fight?
Scale the towering window—which, I now realized, was far too high—and run for my life?
Or use the magic I’d hoarded from Lavina and August and reduce this castle to a smoldering ruin?
I’d conjured twin flames in my hands, ready to start with the bed. One spark, and it would all burn.
But I stopped myself.
Because it wouldn’t stop Carrow.
So here I waited, numb and motionless, for Jane and the seamstresses to arrive and prepare me. My hands sat folded in my lap like they belonged to someone else.
I had been as calm and submissive as I possibly could since we arrived.
Only defending myself. I wasn’t sure why.
Maybe I hoped August would change his mind if he saw how we could work together.
Maybe I wanted to believe the version of him I saw in fleeting moments—the one who spoke gently, the one who looked at me like I was more than a weapon or a pawn.
But he didn’t change.
He went off the fucking deep end.
I heard the door handle twist before I saw him. A gust of cold air swept in ahead of him, curling around me like a warning. My breath caught. Somehow, I already knew it would be him.
Then, the doors swung open, slamming against the walls with a force that made me flinch. I jumped to my feet, my fingers instinctively trying to smooth the folds of my dress, even as my heart began to hammer in my chest.
August stepped in, the dark fabric of his coat catching the candlelight as he fumbled with something in his hand.
His expression was unreadable as he glanced around at the mess until his eyes met mine—and then, for the briefest breath, something shifted.
The cold mask slipped. He looked like the August who had shown me where his mother used to take him. He looked as if he might say something.
This was it. He regretted it—he was changing his mind.
I waited.
But whatever war was being waged inside him ended just as quickly. The emptiness returned to his gaze, and he adjusted his coat, jaw tight, eyes averted.
Like he had done every time.
He started to walk out the door again. Maybe I could stay calm and reason with him.
“August, I really don’t know if I can do this. The binding. It’s irreversible which means I could never bind myself to another.”
He stilled and turned back to me.
“You think this changes anything?” he asked, voice low and dangerous. “You were mine the moment you let me mark you. The moment you let me touch you. There will be no one else.”
My hands curled into fists, nails biting into my palms. Don’t show him anything. Not fear. Not anger. Not even hate.
And still, I met his gaze, steady and unyielding. “If you think that, then you don’t know me at all.”
August laughed—a soft, broken thing that sounded almost like pain.
“Oh, I know you,” he said. “Better than anyone ever wanted to.”
For half a second, I let myself believe he meant to fix it. That he’d come to tell me none of this would happen—that we could still find a way out. That he still felt what I felt.
But then he opened his mouth, and I remembered who I was dealing with.
I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I didn’t like how he thought he had something over me.
I hesitated, searching for the cruelest truth I could wield. “I thought the mark meant something. That it meant something about us. But it was just a trick. I see that now.”
His expression didn’t move, so I pushed harder.
“I hate you for letting me believe it could’ve been real. And I hate myself for wanting it to be. You ruined my life!”
Then something inside him snapped. The veins around his eyes pulsed with anger, his face twisted with rage.
“Ask me how I felt about you.”
His voice didn’t sound like a command this time. It sounded like a man dangling off a ledge who needed me to let go. Like he needed to say it out loud so he could stop feeling it.
“What? Why?”
“Ask me.”
I swallowed hard. My fingers curled tightly around the fabric at my sides. “How did you feel about me?”
“At first, there was a part of me that woke up thinking about you,” he said.
“And no matter how hard I tried to fight it, I couldn’t get you out of my mind.
I thought it was just bloodlust. That’s what I told myself.
But then I’d think about your eyes, your hair, the way your nose scrunched when I aggravated you.
Or how you would tap your thumb and fingers together when you were about to break.
I don’t think you even know you do it. But you were doing it a moment ago. That’s how I knew to keep pushing.”
He let out a bitter, broken kind of laugh.
“But when I was trying to get to you before you saw your parents—I realized it wasn’t just that. The panic I felt… the way I thought I might shatter if you saw what they’d done. All I wanted to do was protect you. I l—”
“Don’t say it.”
He stared at me, a storm raging behind his eyes. “I loved you.”
He said it like it hurt. Like the words had to be torn out of him. For a man who had lived hundreds of years, I wondered if I was the first person he’d ever said that to. And now it would never be said again.
The words hit like a blade through my ribs. My breath hitched. I had tried not to think about my feelings toward August—how tangled and impossible they were. But I’d seen it in him before, in the way he started to look at me. And maybe, just maybe, I’d felt it too.
Maybe I still did.
How else could I explain why I never killed him? Why I stepped between him and Adar?
Because I did. I loved him too.
He stepped closer. “Ask me how I feel about you now.”
His voice had changed. Flat. Dead.
I could see it in his eyes. The warmth that had been there was gone.
“No,” I whispered, backing away.
He advanced, closing the distance between us in a single, quiet step. He leaned in, his breath cold at my ear.
“I feel nothing.”
He pulled back just enough to look into my eyes, his gaze sharp as glass.
“It’s crazy. In my three hundred years, I never felt anything close to love for someone other than my mother. And I knew you for what? A month? And you ripped that away in a night.”
My vision blurred.
“So do what you want here. I do not care. Fuck the whole lot of them if that’s what it takes to fill the empty void you have.
But you will be at every dinner, every party, and everything else I must endure—because you chose my fate.
” He stepped closer again, his eyes hard as obsidian.
“And now you’ll live in it with me. Not because I love you. But because I don’t.”
A tear slipped down my cheek.
“You’re mine, forever. And I’ll never touch you again. So keep hating me, and never stop.”
Jane and the seamstresses stepped in and August smiled as he looked down at me.
“Time to get ready, Winnie.” His tone was flat, almost mocking, before he turned on his heel and strode out the door.
* * *
I stood at the doors that I was escorted to, a veil covering me. I was too stunned by August to process how I felt.
My feet barely moved. My body floated, disconnected. I felt like a ghost in a gown. Like something already buried, now being paraded back to the surface to wed the thing that had killed it.
The doors swung open and my breath caught.
The cathedral hidden deep in the castle stretched upward like the inside of a stone throat, vast and cold.
Soaring buttresses loomed overhead, ribs of blackened bone reaching toward a vaulted ceiling lost in shadow.
Candlelight flickered along massive stone columns carved with grotesques—vampires feeding, witches burning, saints with hollow eyes.
A guard nudged me forward, and my legs obeyed before my mind did, carrying me slowly down the aisle. The aisle was lined with blood-red roses, petals dark and wilting. The scent of them mingled with wax and incense, hanging like fog in the air.
At the far end stood August, savoring every eye upon him.
He wore black from throat to boots. His coat was tailored close, sharp at the shoulders and adorned with thin silver thread that curled like ash down his sleeves.
A high collar framed his pale throat, and around his neck hung a single onyx pendant.
Atop his head sat a dark iron crown, thorned and cruel.
He looked like something out of a nightmare—beautiful in the way wildfires are beautiful. Devastating. Consuming. This spectacle was crafted for him, and he basked in it—relishing the attention, savoring the power—as if to prove every fear I had ever tried to bury was true.
He didn’t want me.
He needed me.
Halston stood next to him, cloaked in black, a leather-bound tome resting in his hands.
The siblings stood on either side. Lavina’s gaze flicked to me like a blade.
If she remembered the last time I nearly burned her alive—and I knew she did—she gave no sign of it.
But her posture was too rigid, too poised.
She was ready for a show. Simon, as always, looked amused.
His lips curved into the faintest smirk, eyes dancing as if he’d been waiting for this moment just to see how much I would unravel.
And Benedict’s hands were folded neatly in front of him, his gaze fixed somewhere in the distance, jaw tight.