Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Your Honor, I assure you I knew nothing about this emergency filing. My client never raised his concerns to me,” I said while staring Judge Sullivan in the eyes as I stood in the middle of his chambers.
The call had come that Robbie had filed a petition to vacate the final divorce decree.
He alleged that he had gone through with the hearings under extreme duress from his counsel—namely me—claiming I had advised him to move forward under false pretenses.
Specifically, I had grossly misrepresented aspects of the case so that I could ultimately fuck his wife.
Clarissa definitely wouldn’t have been worth all that effort.
It was fucking bullshit. Robbie had repeatedly made it clear that he wanted to take his wife for every penny that she had swindled from him. Yet here I was, defending my integrity and my license to practice law.
“Mr. Nightvale, I understand your position. However, you can understand why I am hesitant to dismiss this as frivolous when it says right here—” he flipped a page in the document and tapped a line about halfway down the page, “—that you ‘engaged in immoral and unethical sexual relations with the former Mrs. Hershford directly after the final divorce hearing.’”
He looked at me with his eyes peering over the top of his bifocals before adding, “and ‘said conduct transpired in courthouse men’s restroom.’”
Removing his glasses, he set them down on the filing and leaned back in the large leather chair. Despite the withering look he pinned me with, I remained statue-still with my hands clasped in front of me.
“This goes one of two ways,” he said while steepling his fingers thoughtfully in front of him. “I can pull courthouse security footage and have these claims formally investigated. The official complaint will remain on record.”
He paused.
“Or?” I prompted.
Drawing a deep breath, he slowly exhaled before responding. “Or you have a lengthy and serious talk with your client. I suggest one that involves groveling of the highest order, including an intensely personal vow not to approach his ex-wife under any circumstances ever again.”
Like I’d hit that ever again. Compared to Char—
I shut down the thought immediately, refusing to examine the uncomfortable truth in how being with my Heartspite stained my blood. Unforgivably so.
Curtly, I nodded. “Understood, Your Honor. I will reach out to Mr. Hershford on this matter and clear up any… misunderstandings.”
The judge’s shoulders lost their tension, and relief melted away the stern facade. “See that you do, Mr. Nightvale.”
Twenty minutes and a stop at the liquor store later, I pulled up to my estate. Seeing Charlee’s pickup still parked out front, I growled beneath my breath. I had specifically told Jamie I wanted it moved into the garage, out of sight, before I returned.
No matter. Once I reconsider his request for time off tomorrow, maybe then he’ll be more prompt with carrying out his tasks.
I parked behind her truck and stepped out of my latest automobile acquisition, a limited-edition sports car from a small town in Italy that was a half-day’s ferry ride away from the picturesque Ionian Islands of Greece.
I cast a sidelong glance at the water fountain.
Mother looked particularly displeased today, despite her face being cast in the same stony expression that hadn’t changed for years.
Something about the way the sunlight avoided hitting her eyes and the aggressive flow of water suggested a mood fouler than the River Styx.
Safe to assume she disapproved of my guest of honor on the second floor.
She never did take kindly to disturbances amongst the shadows of my pandemonium.
Charlee was certainly a disruptive spark of light, one that I had attempted to place inside a prism.
If I could refract her energy, not destroy it, then maybe she’d be more like me—privy to the damage colliding hearts could inflict.
“Don’t look at me like that.” My tone came out clipped and maybe a touch petulant before I added in a grumbled concession, “I’ll take care of it.”
I headed inside, and the door shut behind me, the only sound in a house that was deceptively quiet. Under normal circumstances, I’d have welcomed it. Today? It was borderline oppressive.
After depositing my fifth of scotch on the obsidian console table near the doorway, I peered up the grand staircase. Torn between leaving my Heartspite in isolation to protect my inner chaos or tempering Mother’s blatant disapproval, I hovered at the bottom of the steps.
Thud.
My hand gripped the banister hard enough to make the wood groan under my palm. Initially, my brain wanted to rationalize the sound away. Nothing more than Jamie being a clumsy twit—except he wasn’t clumsy and rarely a twit. Charlee pitching a fit? Too quiet.
Fuck.
Taking the steps two at a time, I made my way to my Heartspite’s room. Pushing the door open, I had been prepared to unleash a barrage of verbal admonishments. However, the scene before me rendered all words dead in my throat.
Jamie was chained to the bedpost, silenced by a patch of duct tape over his mouth. His eyes met mine before he pointedly looked to his right. I followed his gaze, and what little remained unmarred of my heart was set ablaze with fury.
There on the floor, unmoving, was Charlee. My Heartspite was as still as the dead, and hovering over her?
“Rob?” Confusion swept across my face.
Laughter erupted from him, sinister and crackling, dryer than decaying bones. The image of him shimmered like a mirage until his true identity was revealed, like wiping away a foggy mirror. Patrick, no longer Rob, stood before me. The god of deception.
“Hello, brother,” he greeted me with a crooked grin.
“I believe you’re intimately familiar with my wife, Zelena.
” He gestured to the woman standing behind him.
The same one I had fucked in the courthouse bathroom, whom I had known as Clarissa.
Now, I recognized her as the goddess of jealousy and envy.
It was like a puzzle coming together to unlock multiple chokepoints at once. Every click slid home with startling clarity. I had been played. Blinded by my own reckless chaos, I had failed to see beyond the veils they had placed right in front of me.
Stepping over Charlee’s prone form, Zelena’s hideous smile displayed too many teeth, crooked with petty indifference to the goddess lying at her feet.
“So nice to see you again, Eryx,” she purred while eyeing me from head to toe. “I’ve been looking forward to a repeat of our last rendezvous.”
Ignoring her presence, my eyes remained on my brother. What I had mistaken for disapproval from Mother had been a stern warning of what had awaited me here.
Another flick of my eyes to where Charlee remained, the faint warmth of her aura of immortality was the only reason I didn’t inflict apocalyptic discord upon the earth.
Instead, the room rattled like an earthquake around us, my feet steady on the floor despite the vibrations rocking it. My fraying self-control mirrored the destruction of our surroundings. Dust rained down from the ceiling from cracked drywall.
My voice dropped low, filled with trembling rage. “Your deceit will cost you, brother. No one touches what is mine, not even those I share blood with.”
Yet Patrick stood there looking unrepentant. “Oh, but where’s the fun in playing by the rules? It was all in good fun, wasn’t it sweetums?” He looked at Zelena, who merely hummed with approval as her foot nudged one of Charlee’s limp hands.
I snapped.
The lights cut out in the room, pitching us all into darkness thicker than Mother’s domain could ever be.
A delightful cacophony followed. Crashes of furniture moving on my command, the crunch of bones as Zelena’s body suffered under the violent force of a dresser.
Swords that had been wielded by the ancients, unsheathed from their wall mounts, found a new home in Patrick’s flesh.
Wet gasps of pain echoed in the black depths of this room. A shame that none of it was fatal, but the message had been delivered. I’d allow them to suffer while I tended what I feared losing most.
Moving without needing to see, I closed the distance between my Heartspite and me. Dropping to a knee, I reached down and laid one hand on the side of her face, my thumb brushing a few strands of hair away from her cheek.
“Consequences come for us all, Heartspite,” I vowed, my voice thick with regret.
My hand lingered on the delicate surface of her skin before I rose to my feet again.
“Patrick and Zelena, as the god of discord, I am hereby binding you to an existence of your own doing.”
A pained chuckle came from my brother, and a pathetic whimper from his wife.
“It was all fun and games, brother. Please,” Patrick grunted out. “A little mercy—”
I cut his plea short, no longer wishing to entertain his appeal for leniency. With a single snap of my finger that cracked like thunder in the room, his presence vanished. Let him rot in a special pocket of reality where even he couldn’t deceive himself.
It wouldn’t hold him forever, but it guaranteed a lesson well served.
As for Zelena, she remained struggling under the weight of a dresser that unnaturally kept her pinned under my control.
“There is something to be said for you.” My words came out cold and dispassionate. “What was it that you hoped to accomplish? Was this all a way for you to feed off of a sibling rivalry? Or was it all because you could not bear that I did not become a slave to your affections?”
Her labored breaths continued to struggle as she gasped out words with agonizing effort. “No… I needed… wanted… to restore balance.”
My fingers were poised, ready to snap her off into a similar fate as Patrick, but the words piqued my curiosity.
“Restore balance?” I tilted my head, betraying the interest in that proffered explanation.
She groaned out a noise of something that sounded like an affirmation. Several shuddering breaths later, she strained to further explain. “You chose something soft… and weak.”
Clenching my jaw until my teeth ached, the thought that anyone would call my Heartspite soft or weak rekindled the embers of my wrath.
Charlee’s guidance over hearts and desires might be mistaken as a fragile existence, but as my Heartspite?
She possessed the perseverance to endure my jagged edges and the tenacity to withstand every cut I had inflicted upon her heart.
“You see weakness, Zelena. However, when I look at your commitment to envy as your religion, all I see is hollow devotion to your own shortcomings.” I straightened and inflicted my judgment on her with a damning snap of my fingers.
Enjoy a hell where jealousy eats at you from within until you cave in on yourself.
The two of them deserved far more than I had inflicted upon them. Come the day that my hold on their punishment was released, if they crossed my path again, they’d understand how much restraint I had shown in not wrapping my discord in Mother’s shadows.
Light flooded the room, illuminating the wreckage as the space remained in disarray. Fixtures were covered in drywall dust, furniture was tipped over, and bloodied swords were in a violent pile on the floor.
The only unbroken thing I saw remaining was her.