Chapter 37
Nelle
The lash cut through the charged night air.
A rageful slashing sound of vicious hate.
I screamed.
My fingers clenched the talon handles, my entire body locking rigid as I braced for my flesh to be ripped apart and set on fire with mind-shattering agony.
Except—
I felt nothing.
Instead, I heard a deep grunt edged with pain.
And felt warmth.
I darted a startled glance over my shoulder and sucked in a shocked gasp.
Graysen hissed between his teeth, his mouth a hard line. He had placed himself behind me—his powerful chest pressed to my back, warming my skin with strength and reassurance as he shielded me with his body, taking the brunt of my savage punishment.
He scrambled for my wrists, trying to undo the coils binding me to the handles. But the rope wouldn’t come free. They wouldn’t budge.
“LET HER GO!” he roared at his aunt.
But the whip came down—
CRACK.
The wicked lash, spitting with dark magic, tore across his back and made him stumble. He bit back a groan as agony shuddered through him.
“Remove yourself!” Valarie screamed, her hysterical voice lost to madness.
“NO!”
And the whip kept coming, faster, faster, faster—
CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.
A volley of strikes.
Rapid gunfire in the form of merciless leather.
CRACK. CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.
Graysen crowded his body against mine, covering me, protecting me. His head bowed, lips brushing the shell of my ear. “I’ve got you, Nelle,” he rasped, his shaking hands slipping over mine as he threaded our fingers together and held tight against the unleashed brutality.
“Don’t!” I cried, trying to tell him—Not for me. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
But the lash whistled through the air again, cracking down, shredding armor and flesh.
Valarie shrieked, demanding he stand aside. She wasn’t punishing him—she was trying to drive him away so she could reach me.
CRACK. CRACK. CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.
He staggered, barely stifling a bark of torturous pain, jolting with every strike. Terror quaked through me at the stench of smoldering flesh. I twisted my head just as the whip came down again, catching him on the shoulder, blood spraying across my face.
A metallic tang slid over my tongue as I screamed for him, for what he was enduring.
His eyes were squeezed shut. Crimson blood streaked the side of his face, stark against the strain of his features. He pushed himself sluggishly upright, but his weight slumped against my smaller frame.
“Please! Please! Not for me!” I begged. It was my fault. I’d destroyed his beloved mother’s painting, triggering his aunt’s madness.
Oh gods!
The strikes were barbaric.
Every time they came down, raining like a vicious tempest, I realized he was saying something. Even when one of his legs buckled and he staggered, his breaths ragged heat against my cheek, he kept rasping the same words.
But I couldn’t hear him. Not over the cutting lash or my panicked heartbeat as I tugged frantically at the ropes, screaming at Valarie, “Stop, please stop!”
A different cry came next—a girl’s.
When the lash whistling through the air slowed, the tip sliding across the black night like a fading ribbon and the spark of dark magic guttered, I finally heard what he’d said to me with every whip strike.
His heaving breath washed against my cheek as he spoke the words in a voice breaking with agony. “I love you.”
Graysen swayed sluggishly, and his shaking hands slipped from mine as he collapsed behind me.
The ropes binding my wrists untangled like wriggling vines, and I was suddenly free. I twisted around, stunned by his confession and utterly terrified of what I’d find.
Graysen knelt at my feet, shaking and silent.
Sound and movement churned in the background, but I noted them distantly as if the world had narrowed to just the two of us.
His confession replayed in my mind, over and over, in that gravelly voice tight with torment. But I couldn’t understand it. Confusion tugged my brows together.
Sweat glistened on his forehead. Blood splattered his neck, dripping beneath the collar of his armor, and all those faint freckles stood out sharply against his blanched complexion. A light breeze stirred the shredded strips of his adamere jacket.
He loves me?
Graysen leaned forward, panting, one hand splayed on the cobblestones to support his trembling body. His dark hair slid forward as he ducked his head, perhaps because he couldn’t bear to look at me.
He was exactly where I’d wanted him all those weeks ago, when I’d first walked into the Keep, enshrouded within its ruthless shadows. I’d sworn I would have him bloodied, broken, and begging at my feet.
And there he was.
But there was a regalness to the way he bowed at my feet. A fallen prince.
When he pushed off the cobbles, grimacing and straightening his tortured spine to raise his head and look back at me, wariness flickered in his gaze. Vulnerability too. And hope. Gods, hope shone from his black eyes like a pale glint of sunlight on a bleak, desolate day.
How I’d longed to be loved and cherished by another. I love you.