Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
Iwoke to the firm grasp of fingers to my throat and the scent of oak and cinders filling my senses.
My eyes flew open, the Void tearing from me in a torrent and slamming into my attacker.
Two red eyes glared down at me, becoming all the darker until they were an abyss of purest ebony.
Those eyes had haunted me in my nightmares but this felt too real. Too impossibly tangible to deny.
But I had to deny it. Because this wasn’t really happening. It had to be another dream wrapping me in its unforgiving hold, never letting me forget him.
Then he spoke, and there was no hiding from reality. It shattered something within me, the devastation of my failure to kill this Fae a crushing blow to my soul. But then the broken pieces found a way back together, remaking me anew.
I tried to deny the rush of relief that took me hostage, but it wouldn’t let go. He was alive. Kaiser Brimtheon. My tormentor in the flesh. Somehow, he was here despite the blade I’d driven under his ribs and into his heart. Had I really missed?
My brain was catching up too slowly to the reality that I was in grave danger. He'd come to kill me, to seize his revenge. But in the face of it, I could only do one thing and that was to utter the desperate question searing my tongue.
“How did I fail?” I exhaled and for reasons I couldn’t fathom, reasons I wouldn’t dare let myself look at, I felt a tear slip from my eye and trail down into my hair.
He caressed my throat, his thumb brushing my pulse point as his grip eased. “You didn’t,” he growled and the sound of his voice made some part of me ache. I hated him as fiercely as any other day I’d stared him in the eye, but it hurt to hate him too.
“I was killed well and true,” he said with grit. “But I was reborn. Thanks to you.”
I pushed up from the bed and he retreated, his hand falling from my throat as he sat beside me and we came face to face. Too close. As if we were a breath away from a kiss. But I should only ever wish to lay my mouth on his if it was laced with poison.
“What does that mean?” I demanded, heat rising in my skin like molten fire.
I should have cast an ice blade in my grip.
I should have finished what I hadn’t before.
But instead I sat there, unable to drag my eyes from his.
The man who had haunted my dreams and written himself into the essence of my skin, impossibly here on the White Mare in my cabin.
He was the monster I’d thought I’d slain and I had craved him ever since.
Like a starved beast, I fed on tainted meat, knowing it would only destroy me to do so. But I was unable to stop.
“It means the power of the Void freed me from the dark and barren cage I have long been a captive to. There was a spell on me that held my emotions in a trap. I could not feel a thing. Not until I met you. Your Void unleashed me from time to time until, at last, it broke the bars in totality. Now I am a new man. A man that knows nothing of who he is or what he wants. Nothing except the knowledge that I had to find you again so that I might understand why, when I look at you, I feel so many things. Some that eat at me until my insides are raw, others that twist until I cannot breathe, and a few that make me feel as though I am bleeding on the inside. But then there are those that soothe, a balm to the wounds you cause me. Those are the ones that confuse me most. The ones I cannot identify as hate or ire. Perhaps you can name them for me?”
I stared at him with no words coming to my lips, processing all he had told me.
If his story was true then this Fae was not the heartless heathen I’d known before.
He was a stranger, but in ways, perhaps he wasn’t.
I’d seen him in the depths of his rage; I’d felt the power of his wrath.
Yes, I knew some of the real Kaiser. And that should make me far more afraid than I felt.
Because with him looking at me the way he was, as if I held his bloody, beating heart in my palm, I only felt lost.
“I cannot,” I said, my voice a dry rasp as my thoughts tumbled into each other. “Have you come to kill me?”
Kaiser rose from the bed, turning from me and stepping deeper into the shadows of my cabin.
He slinked through the darkness like a wraith and it suited him well.
I could only see part of his face as he glanced my way, his brows drawn low, his dark hair falling forward towards his eyes.
I could almost taste his inner turmoil, how he was trying to hold himself in check and I didn’t know what he might do in the next moment.
Ice slid over my right palm but I didn’t cast a blade. Not yet.
“You think I would not have slit your throat while you slept if that was what I was here for?” he barked, the loudness of his voice making my heart jolt sharply. No sounds came from out on the deck, no footsteps running to my aid. He must have cast a silencing shield.
Calcifiend caught my eye as he flew from a shelf and landed on Kaiser’s shoulder, his glowing tail lighting up the anger lining my enemy’s face.
I shoved out of bed, everything falling together too fast, abruptly knocking my senses back into me.
“You’ve been spying on me,” I accused in a gasp.
All this time. All this fucking time I’d had Calcifiend with me, assuming Kaiser could no longer watch me through his eyes. But he had been. He had never lost his connection to the Sayer Dragon.
“Yes,” Kaiser snarled, turning to me again, seeming caught in a violent rage. “And you have tormented me every time I saw you through his eyes.” He grabbed a chair beside the desk and hurled it against the wall, smashing it to pieces.
I cast a blade of ice in my hand, raising it at him as I bared my teeth in warning. “You’ve lost your mind.”
“Yes, it is well and truly lost,” he spat then he laughed and it was a cold, merciless thing. “Will you kill me again, silka la vin? You’ll be needing this, surely?”
He produced my dagger from his belt, offering it to me with a mocking sneer. “It has my name engraved upon its hilt. It was always intended for my death. So here.” He tossed it onto the bed beside me, and I snatched it, wielding it in my left hand while I gripped the ice blade in my right.
“Why did you come here?” I demanded, still holding back on attacking him for reasons I couldn’t name. My pulse was rioting uncontrollably, the tension mounting towards something calamitous.
“I told you. I came for you.”
My shoulders tensed, my Order form bristling with the urge to come out. “You’re not taking me anywhere. I killed you once, Fury, I’ll do it again.”
“See? That’s the problem, isn’t it?” He shook his head at me, pacing from one side of the room to the other, not seeming to care about offering me his back even though I could have driven a blade into it.
“We’re enemies. It’s written by the hand of fate itself.
Don’t you think I haven’t realised that?
” He turned to me, tapping his temple. “But something in here is arguing with that.” He thumped his fist to his chest. “Or maybe it’s in here.
” He yanked his shirt up, showing the jagged, risen scar that marred his ribs from where I’d stabbed him.
It was struck through by the diagonal scar I’d given him years ago, running from his shoulder down to his hip.
My throat thickened, something about seeing the scars I’d placed on him feeling oddly bitter. But there was validation in it too. I’d done that. I had cut down the monstrous Fury.
Yet here he still stood.
“You’re making a canvas out of me, silka la vin,” he said, his voice gravelly and wrought with hatred. “But why is it that I’ve grown fond of these marks? Why is it that your eyes upon them makes me want to pin you to that bed and sink my teeth into you?”
Heat blazed up my spine and no words came to my lips as I pictured that very thing. Him towering over me, pushing me down and tearing my clothes from my body. His teeth leaving marks on me in penance for the marks I’d left on him.
I cleared my throat and hurled abuse at him to shut down the errant thoughts. “Because you’re fucked in the head,” I hissed. “You’re confused. Maybe your emotions are darting all over the place uncontrollably. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“It means everything!” he bellowed, lurching toward me, and I raised my dagger to point at his heart, exactly where I’d aimed to kill him before.
He didn’t slow, letting the tip of my blade press to his chest while his eyes never left mine, and Calcifiend took off from his shoulder to land on mine instead, clicking his little tongue like he was trying to calm us down.
But I couldn’t pay him any mind. He was a traitor just as he always had been.
“I am torn between hatred and something far more wretched which wants me to commit every sin to claim you as my own,” he said in a hiss that was as wicked as a serpent’s.
“I feel none of this towards any other Fae but you. There is no confusion in that. But I do not yet know if I wish to kill you more than I wish to kiss you.”
An inhale jammed in my throat, that admission ringing out a truth in my own soul.
Because it was the same taboo confliction I’d denied to myself.
But he was my enemy and he was clearly lost to madness.
I couldn’t trust a word he said. And even if I dared admit this forbidden want in me, I would never, ever give in to it.
“You killed my mother,” I said with vitriol, grounding myself in that knowledge and the hatred it invoked in me.
“I did,” he agreed and I couldn’t read what he felt about that from the dark pits of his eyes. “And your father killed my family.”
“I played no part in that,” I growled. “Your hatred doesn’t equal mine. I despise you, Kaiser Brimtheon. I will never feel anything other than abhorrence towards you. The fact that you still breathe is a burden to my soul. I won’t rest until I put you in your grave for good.”
“Then do it,” he purred, his voice softening to a wicked taunt. “See if you can.”
I dissolved my ice blade and turned it to a violent blast of water, sending him flying backwards, smashing through the door and out onto the deck beyond. I ran after him, launching myself onto him with a cry of anguished rage as I straddled him and raised my dagger high above his heart.
He smiled at me. Fuck. His smile was a twisted riddle I couldn’t unravel.
My cry fell still in my throat. My blade came down too slow.
His hands coiled around my wrists and he yanked me close, my body pressed to his, my face lowering so our mouths were just a breath apart and my hair fell down in a spill of curls around us.
“No,” I exhaled, but it was so weak. Like I might as well have said yes.
Every nerve ending in my body was alight and blazing as his fingers knotted tighter around my wrists and my dagger rested uselessly between us.
My lips grazed his and all I wanted was to betray my own flesh and taste the twisted wants of my enemy.
No, I wasn’t going to do this. I wasn’t going to let him take that sinful bite of me. But maybe I was.
A thump of footsteps came at me in a blur and strong hands hauled me off of Kaiser. I looked up to find my father there, his eyes widening at the sight of the Fury laying on the deck.
“You’re The Matriarch’s boy,” Father spat in recognition.
Kaiser lunged from the floor with a roar of utter hatred pouring from him, the sound cracking apart something in my chest as he tried to get his hands around my father’s throat.
Father snared him in chains of ice and more restraints were added by the warriors running to his aid, forcing Kaiser back to the deck on his knees. Father sneered down at him, pushing me behind him.
“Is he Voided?” He spoke to me and the quiet stretched as I stared down at Kaiser, warring with the confliction of my soul.
“Everest?” Father prompted.
“Yes,” I breathed and Kaiser’s eyes whipped to mine, narrowing like I’d betrayed him before a bellow of anger left him.
“I’ll kill you, Rake,” he snarled at my father, his muscles straining against his tethers and a look of merciless violence in his dark eyes.
Father released a dismissive breath through his nose. “Take him to the brig and lock him up with the other prisoners.”
Kaiser was dragged away and I stared after him in confused anguish, feeling Calcifiend slip into my hair as he let out a low grunt of sadness. The Fury was shoved roughly down the stairs below deck and jeers filled the air.
I could barely hear the words my father spoke to me next.
“Good job, my child.” He laid a hand on my shoulder. “We’ll have him squealing the location of The Matriarch by dawn through a mouthful of blood.”
With that, he strode away to follow his captive below deck and all I could feel in my heart was fear, so deeply tangled with my blood that I had no doubt Kaiser was feeling every ounce of it too.