23. Leah #2
I’m at least a few blocks away when he finally bursts through my walls, flooding into me like a reservoir pouring through a broken dam.
He fills me up, flowing beneath my skin, pooling at my fingertips and wrapping himself around my throat.
The sensation is too much, and I duck into an alley, sliding to the ground as I gasp at the heat of his anger.
“Back to Malice. Now,” he commands, the voice all the more terrifying for how controlled it is, despite the tension quivering underneath.
I don’t fight him as he ensures I obey his order, too exhausted from holding him back for so long.
I let him draw the knife and stumble to a window.
I say nothing as he scratches runes into the brickwork with the tip and then, without a match in sight, clicks my fingers until a flame appears between them, igniting the runes.
I guess all that practice channeling his magic through me worked.
The rift flares open, and he forces my feet through it.
My body is getting used to rift travel, so I don’t feel nauseous coming through the aether.
What I do feel is Syrus’s presence leaving me the moment I set foot in Infernum, rushing out of me so fast I stumble, clutching the castle wall as the rift closes behind me.
We’re in his office, somewhere I’ve never been before.
Despite my fear, I can’t help scanning the room with interest. I take in the messy desk and high-backed chair beside it, the stack of teacups that suggest long hours sat in one spot, and a familiar-looking book poking out of an open desk drawer.
But my examination is cut short by Syrus striding toward me, crowding me until I’m backed up against the edge of his desk.
“Where did you go?” he asks. His voice is low and rough, full of carefully leashed anger.
“I needed a few hours,” I say, keeping my face defiantly blank. Whatever consequences I face for this, I won’t apologize. Not when seeing Evie was completely worth it. Now that I know she’s okay, I feel lighter—braver. I channel that bravery now to meet Syrus’s intense gaze.
“A few hours for what? What were you doing?” he demands. There’s an edge to his voice that’s more than anger. It’s almost like…fear? But that makes no sense. The Lord of Malice has no reason to be afraid of me.
I fold my arms across my chest. “I’m not telling you that. It’s none of your business. But believe me when I say you don’t need to worry about it, either.”
He drags his hand over his face, rubbing his palm along his clenched jaw. “I realize you didn’t get much of a choice in this—”
I scoff. “You can say that again. Just like you can force me to say that again, or punch myself in the face, or nearly throw myself over another fucking cliff edge.”
“I needed you, and I had to be persuasive,” he says. “I know from personal experience that sometimes death is the only thing seen as worse than working with a demon.”
I loosen my arms a little, caught off guard by his reference to his past. It’s still hard to reconcile my original image of the demonic, terrifying Lord of Malice with the reality of Syrus. I know he’s full of contradictions, but there are times when that hits me harder than usual.
Like now. He’s talking about the death of his people—a city of souls he traded his own soul to save.
Whereas what did he really do to me that day on the mountain?
Scare the fuck out of me? Yes. Definitely.
But he never actually intended to kill me.
That much is clear from how he’s been protecting me from the possession’s side effects this whole time.
“Still, you named your terms,” Syrus continues. “Terms I fully intend to uphold, and I thought we agreed to work together. Yet the first opportunity you get, you run off and refuse to tell me anything about what you’re up to. Are you deliberately trying to sabotage this?”
I could lie, of course, pretend I never made any plans to try to break the possession link. But he must already suspect something, given his question. It’s the natural conclusion after I’ve proven I can block him out, after all.
“That’s not what today was about,” I say, because that’s truthful enough. I drop my arms so there’s no barrier between us. There still a cautiousness in his eyes. Despite the fact that he towers over me, his powerful arms caging me against the desk, he looks at me like I’m a snake about to strike.
“And if I said you can walk away now?” he says. “If I offered to call off the deal, break the bond between us, and send you back to Strata?”
My eyes widen. Is he offering that?
I’ve avoided thinking even a few weeks ahead of now. After years of planning, my life was totally turned upside down in a matter of days, and since then, I’ve known better than to try to imagine what comes after I’ve gotten Syrus what he wanted—because that future was too unstable.
Maybe if Syrus made me this offer just a few hours ago, I would’ve known my answer. But seeing Evie in her safe, secure life has knocked something loose in me.
If I did go back now, what would I be going back to?
My scavenging money is gone, and I don’t regret that one bit.
I’m glad Evie had it and that it was able to help her.
But without something to keep me off the streets, I’d always be a fugitive, hiding from the wardens—and that’s assuming I never see Hathwell again, wherever he is.
I know one thing for certain. I won’t ever go and beg Ada and my father for help. I can’t go back to that house—that life—again. Once upon a time, I could stomach it, knowing it was for a greater good in the long term. Not anymore. There are some things I can’t tolerate.
And maybe it’s crazy, but it took me getting a taste of life in Infernum to change that.
Syrus is right, I did name my terms, and I need the gold he’s promised to build a new life.
Getting out of this deal might give me one type of freedom, but I’ve learned how easy it can be to trade one prison for another, and if I go back to Strata with even less than I had before, that’s what I’ll be doing.
“If you offered that, I wouldn’t take it,” I say slowly. “We made a deal, and I won’t leave Infernum until we’ve seen it through.”
He takes a sudden step back, making a frustrated scoff and turning his back on me. It seems that wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear, which I don’t understand at all.
“Don’t tell me you’re pissed about that?” I ask, bewildered.
He crosses to the window as if he needs time—a moment when he’s not looking at me—to collect his thoughts.
“Sometimes you make it very hard to trust you,” he says at last.
Well, that hardly seems fair. “Me? What about you? Forget all the ways you’ve manipulated me, you’ve not even been honest about the stuff it doesn’t matter if I know. I only found out you’re mireborn because Asterim told me. I still don’t even know what you really look like!”
He turns around, surprise written on his handsome features.
Sometimes he’s so infuriating that I manage to forget how beautiful he is, and then all it takes is a moment—an unexpected expression, a graceful movement—and it hits me all over again like a battering ram.
This is one of those times, as he tilts his head, thinking about what I’ve said.
“You know I’ve been drinking from the lake?” he asks, confirming my suspicions.
“I guessed,” I say. “I noticed no one in Malice recognized you right away, and a couple of times people have made…comments.” I can’t help but wonder if his beauty is just a mask created by the Morphos’s magic.
But he couldn’t look that different, could he?
It’s not like people couldn’t identify him at all.
“I should’ve known you’d catch that,” he says, but he doesn’t sound angry. “Would it help? Do you think you’d trust me more, if I showed you my real form?”
I don’t know why he cares so much if I trust him, but my curiosity is too strong to fight the suggestion.
“It would be a step in the right direction,” I say. “Or you could at least tell me why you’re hiding it in the first place.”
“It’s because of you,” he says quietly. “At first it was, anyway. The snares talk about humans being less willing to make deals when we wear our true faces. It’s too much of a reminder that we’re foreign and unknown—monsters not to be trusted.”
“Right. You wanted to persuade me,” I say sarcastically, using his own phrasing. “So when you came to find me on the mountain to make the deal—”
“I wanted to look…palatable,” he says. He drops his gaze for a moment, like he’s working up to something.
A self-conscious smile plays on his lips, and when he looks back at me, the red shines bright in his eyes.
“Then I realized I quite liked looking human again, being able to look in the mirror without being reminded of…certain choices I’ve made. ”