Chapter 23
BILLY
Gore says nothing as we race through the underground networks beneath Raven Ridge Manor.
Only the sound of our out of sync breathing and heavy bootsteps reverberating its way back to us, when he appears out of the shadows like the world’s cruellest coincidence.
The man whose hands are stained with my Penelope’s blood.
Balor.
Father’s number one follower, he does anything our god says, despite the fact Milus is the one that removed his tongue for blasphemy.
He’s wiping it off on an old, discoloured rag, the dark crimson, the only thing I can focus on in the low lighting of a wall sconce at his broad back.
Gore is behind me, no real space between us, and just a mere three feet away stands the man who’s hurt my girl. No one has to inform me it was him, I know it in my marrow. After all, torture is what he’s used for.
The air thickens; the silence bends the longer I look at him. His dark eyes on mine, unfeeling, cold, dead behind them, like he’s nothing more than an animated corpse.
Then something in me breaks loose.
It builds a fury in me like fire. Slow to kindle, and then suddenly, with a quick, sharp lash of accelerant, it’s red hot and burning.
I don’t think, I move.
The rage has a pulse of its own, steady and righteous, pounding in my ears louder than my own heartbeat.
I see his face and all I can think of is hers.
Imagine the tremor in her voice, the way she’d try to smile through the pain, show nothing, give nothing, and then her screams would pierce through her teeth like a hammer to glass.
It rattles around inside my head like a bull battering its way through a house of mirrors.
And suddenly, mercy feels like a language I was never taught. Whatever happens next, it isn’t justice. It’s personal. It’s prayer in the shape of violence.
I lunge forward, my hands outstretched, a knife between my fingers I didn’t pull consciously, the blade of it slashing across his throat, but nowhere near deep enough to actually hurt.
It’s superficial. But before I can fully close the scant distance between us, I’m wrenched back by the collar of my shirt, Gore’s breath ghosting down the side of my sweat slicked neck, his hand curled tightly over the blade of my knife.
“Leave it.” An order my body follows quicker than my brain, it’s how I’ve been trained as his second, Two must follow One.
Then, from the gloom, the other man steps forward.
Milus.
The light catches his face just enough to draw out the edges, calm, deliberate, dangerous in a way that doesn’t need words. For a moment, neither one of us speaks. The distance between us humming like a live wire, charged with everything left unsaid, betrayal, fear, recognition.
My unwilling submission.
He stands just behind Balor, slightly to one side of him in the tight squeeze of space, his hands in his pockets, his crisp shirt perfectly clean, his face too much like my own to make me feel any sort of ease.
He’s not a good man.
But neither am I.
The air smells of damp and iron, the taste of it heavy on the back of my tongue.
I inhale. One breath. Two.
Then I realise the truth of it, this meeting is not by chance. It’s a reckoning, long promised, and long overdue. They took their time leaving Penelope in the Sanctuary, knowing that we’d come, making sure we’d run into them first.
“She’s all yours.” Milus smiles at me, his stance casual but his body strong, imposing, too big for any one man to be, but that’s exactly what he isn’t, a man.
He’s a god.
Gore switches his hold from my shirt to my neck, cupping my nape and gripping me so tight it’s giving me toothache, but I’m grateful for it, in this moment, the pinching pressure, grounding me, keeping me sane.
I say nothing, Gore says nothing, and then the two men pass us by like a shift in the wind, carrying the weight of something unspoken. We don’t move until we can no longer hear their receding footsteps, the hollow echo of them dying.
And then we’re both running again, travelling down what should be the final tunnel, but in the dark it’s hard to tell, only oil lit wall sconces giving us any light to work with. Each one separated by too great a distance, leaving us in complete blackness for seconds at a time.
I find her by the sound of my own heartbeat, too loud, too frantic, like it’s trying to claw its way out of my chest just to reach her.
The sight of her stops me cold.
She looks so small, strung upside down in the centre of the pentagram, her naked body limp, blood slipping from her in slow, deliberate drops that hit the floor like precious seconds ticking away.
And then I see her hands.
These beautifully pale delicate little things that I so easily wrap inside of my own, heavy ancient nails forced through them.
For a moment, the world narrows to silence, not from shock, but from that terrible, surgical calm that comes after it.
My hands stay steady when they should tremble; my voice comes out even when it should break. I kneel beside her head, the stone biting into my knees, blood soaking through my jeans, and touch her cheek with a silent prayer.
She’s alive. Cold and wet. The blood on her skin gleaming dark, my jaw locking so tight it aches, a single pulse of fury trapped behind clenched teeth.
“You’re alright,” I whisper, and the lie tastes holy in my mouth, because maybe for the first time, this is a lie she needs to hear, one I need to tell.
Carefully, Gore pulls the chain, turning the circular pentagram so she’s positioned upright. Every movement is deliberate when we begin to untie her. Reverent, as if she might shatter under our touch, as if I already have.
Inside, something savage writhes, demanding I take the one who did this and make him scream for mercy he’ll never get.
But I cage it, force it down until only the ache remains.
My focus stays on her, on my Penelope, on the fragile, stuttering rhythm of her breath that feels like the only sound keeping me tethered to this world.
Her head moves, this slow, limp turn, her lashes twitch, then her eyes pinch, and she’s dragging one open, glassy and unfocused, the other too bruised, too swollen, to attempt it.
When she sees me, something faint flickers there, disbelief, relief, or maybe some fragile piece of trust that I’d come for her she hadn’t let die yet.
My thumb brushes beneath her swollen eye, a crust of dried blood and tears, my fingers combing their way into her hair, my thumb sweeping up to her temple, circling the small section of clean skin there.
“Billy?” she questions, like she doesn’t believe it, her voice not much more than a dry, cracked mumble, but she still stirs something in me I can’t name, violent and sacred, something that wants to hunt, fuck and kill.
I want to wrench her into my arms, shove my tongue down her throat and brutally ram my dick inside her cunt, and then shake her until she understands what she’s fucking done to me.
But I can’t.
I can only stand here, torn open by the sight of her, knowing that no matter what she’s done, I’d still walk through hell to bring her back to me.
“I’m here, baby girl,” I reassure her, her body getting heavier in my arms now that Gore has nearly untied all of the bindings. “I’ve got you, Nells.”
Her head drops to my shoulder, her neck freed, and her mouth brushes the side of my throat. Her lips part, a sound escaping not quite a word, a whimper, raw and wet and desperate. It slices through me cleaner than any blade, savaging my chest cavity and piercing directly through my heart.
Gore steps back, just slightly, when she’s fully untied, his deep emerald eyes on mine, waiting. When I nod, he starts hammering the nails back out.
She comes to fully then, her pain snapping her back into consciousness like nothing I’ve ever heard before.
The scream.
It’s a hymn torn apart mid-prayer; a sacred thing stripped of all its holiness. It rises, cracks, and folds in on itself, echoing around the stone room like the Sanctuary itself is weeping.
For a moment, I forget to breathe. The air feels thick, heavy with the weight of her suffering, as if every note of the sound is meant to carve itself into me.
My hands clench without command. I tell myself it’s just pain, that pain means she’s alive, physical pain is only temporary.
But even that feels like a lie. Because what if it isn’t?
What if it’s the sound of her breaking, piece by piece, and she’s already too far gone for me to stop it?
And then she’s free, flopping into my arms, I sweep her battered body up, cradling her to my chest, my eyes going to the brutal bitemark I left in her bicep.
It looks like nothing now, in comparison to everything else she’s endured in here tonight, but guilt punches me in the gut just the same as I follow Gore back out into the tunnels.
“I told you,” I murmur, pressing my mouth to her ear, blood-dampened hair between us, sticking to my lips, the taste of iron heavy on the tip of my tongue. “I will always protect you.” It should sound like comfort, but it only sounds like a failure to my own ears.
Because I didn’t keep her safe.
Couldn’t.
But we’ll keep doing this anyway.
This push and pull.
This love and hate.
Because ultimately, it’s all we have left.
Each other.
Until death, Little Lamb, until death.