25. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Finias
Fear wasn’t a concept I was experienced in handling. Hell, to be honest, I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt fear...but hearing Ama’s screams as they echoed through the capitol building grounds? My heart had turned to stone and dropped into my stomach.
Her voice was filled with pure agony. Pain coated every single aspect of it. Ama was in pain, and that concept dragged up a part of me that was so dark, I had thought it didn’t exist anymore—especially since she had come into my life.
How fucking wrong I’d been.
I had no idea if the others heard her over the roar of battle, but I didn’t even bother to check.
Instead, I slaughtered my way through the masses to a large set of stairs.
I heard her scream echo through space again and used a rune to increase my speed.
I shouldn’t have known where I was going—the capitol building wasn’t extremely familiar to me—but somehow, I knew exactly where Ama was, and her last scream before I reached her practically brought me to my knees.
My mate. My entire heart and reason for living was in such blinding pain.
It didn’t surprise me that my mother was hurting Ama.
I should have expected it, and because of that, I felt a surge of guilt that nearly toppled me.
I had tried so damned hard not to lose my shit when she had given herself over, but I’d known that Ama would want us to keep Adrien’s sister safe—which she was now—and continue the fight—which we had.
As in, we had killed each and every one of the people who’d dared come our way.
But our ability to continue fighting and pushing was probably the reason that my mother was now choosing to do this. She knew they were losing, so she was going to hurt the one person who mattered more than anything to all of us, and holy shit, was it effective.
What she didn’t expect? That the puppet strings she had pulled on for so long had completely snapped. She was the one who’d created this monster, and she was about to learn how it felt to be on the receiving end.
The soldiers tried to stop me from exiting out onto the stone balcony, and while I knew they were simply doing their job, they had allowed my mother to hurt Ama, and that was enough reason alone to kill them.
They could be thankful for my temper right now because I killed them so fast they probably hadn’t even realized they were in pain before their heads rolled off to the side, having been severed by one of the long swords I kept on me.
“Finias?” My mother’s voice was choked, and I snapped my head from where I’d finished killing the last soldier to find her crouching over Ama, a very familiar dagger in hand.
Blood pooled around my little creature, and I realized that my mother was carving letters into her back as she lay there passed out.
I saw red.
The bloodthirsty haze washed over me, and I felt as if time both sped up and suspended completely, the instincts that my own mother had honed kicking in to protect the woman I loved.
I had wanted to make my mother suffer more.
I had wanted to make her scream as much as she had made me scream, to drag out the pain to torture her. But instead, I snapped.
Taking the dagger from her was easy, and slamming her against the wall was even easier.
My knife punctured the soft skin of her stomach before cutting sideways so that she was literally spilling out of herself.
Her screams echoed louder than Ama’s had, and I found myself smiling as I let her body drop.
It was all the time I had to give to the woman who had left so many marks on my body. Right now, I needed to focus on Ama. Not my revenge.
“Finias.”
The voice had me turning my head to the side to find Drayven there, his face a bit paled.
I realized the others had arrived as well, and I could distantly hear my father shouting commands as they headed this way.
Of course, he only came once he heard my mother screaming—the man could stomach his own son being abused, but he couldn’t sit around and allow this woman who didn’t even love him to be hurt.
All he cared about was that he was losing his control of the situation.
“I need to heal Ama,” I immediately started. “My father is about to arrive through that door with his personal guard. I need time to make sure I am able to heal her fully. Can you give me that?”
“Yes.” Jace’s words were sharp, and he seemed to be the only one who seemed unfazed by the blood I was coated in.
Ama let out a small whimper of pain, and I was immediately at her side, turning her onto her side in the pool of blood to ensure that she didn’t fucking drown in her own blood. Once her head was in my lap, I activated my healing rune as I looked down at the only woman I had and would ever love.
Her face was mostly coated in her blood, but the patches that weren’t red were pale and sweaty. Her eyes fluttered in sleep as weird magic seemed to vibrate around her, and on her body were cuts made from the dagger that had hurt me for years.
I knew I didn’t have a lot of time, and that panic had my healing power surging through her like they never had before. The first thing I did, though, before any of that, was to remove her damn cuff so that she was no longer bound by anything that could control her powers.
Ama deserved to be free in all senses, and the idea of my mother—or anyone, for that matter—trying to restrict that made me furious.
I would fucking die for this woman to be able to live her life as she wanted.
I knew that without a doubt. Even if for some reason she woke up one day and said she didn’t want this relationship with me anymore.
It would break me irrevocably, but I would respect whatever she wanted in life.
I briefly heard my father and his guards arrive, but my eyes shut as every ounce of my power, attention, and ability went to fixing Ama. It was like I went into a near meditative state as I began stitching up and healing every inch of her battered body.
I felt a memory surge to the front of my consciousness, one where I’d been in a similar state, only there had been no one to heal me. No one to help me.
Why a dagger? It was something I had always wondered as I managed to drag myself to a sitting position.
I hadn’t moved from my spot on my bedroom floor for a long time after she’d left. I had tried to heal myself, but my runes were mostly useless because I didn’t even have the energy to fucking summon them for more than small amounts at a time.
Now that I was sitting in the middle of my bathroom, the scent of my own blood wrapped around me and made me almost sick to my stomach.
I reached for the medical supplies I kept on the bottom shelf of my bathroom, a weird coating of numbness wrapping around everything as I began to clean the cuts.
They were small, deep punctures, and after a few minutes, I managed to summon a surge of power, sending relief through my body…
only momentarily before the pain left. It was probably why I didn’t notice the person standing in my doorway until they cleared their throat.
“Father.”
It was the only form of greeting I could manage. A dark envelope dropped onto the bathroom floor as my father’s voice offered a cold response, “You have an assignment tonight. Hopefully, you understand better what it means to reject an assignment now.”
I had so badly wanted to tell him that I hadn’t rejected the other assignment. I’d simply asked my mother for the reason behind it, and that had resulted in her bringing a knife to my skin.
“Fine.”
It was always fine. Everything was fucking fine...even though nothing was really okay in my fucked up reality.
Amassive surge of power that vibrated the space like volcanic activity snapped me out of my meditative state, and I looked down at Ama in relief.
She was still pale, but her eyes were fluttering more, and I shifted her slightly to look at her back.
I breathed out a sigh of relief to see her skin was once again it's flawless soft texture.
I would never have allowed the atrocious words Ava had carved into her to haunt her for eternity.
Hybrid Whore.
I would have thought her the most beautiful woman I’d ever laid eyes on, even if she had scars, but I refused to have them be from my sadistic mother and her vile slander.
Blinding light filled the space around us, and I realized something epic was happening, but I couldn’t focus on anything other than the fact that Ama was waking up.
I couldn’t focus on my father edging towards us.
I couldn’t focus on the elves that were battling the other men.
I couldn’t focus on the new power that was here.
But I knew I couldn’t have blinders on in battle, so I forced my eyes to snap away from Ama for just a moment.
Ah, fuck.
Before I could respond to the massive figure now standing in the center of the balcony, creating a black hole of power that wrapped around him as massive wings extended out behind him, my father reached us.
He surged towards us, blood lust present in his gaze, and I knew it would be far too easy to kill him.
He wasn’t nearly as skilled or powerful as my mother. No, he had also been just another puppet on her strings.
It was like Ama snapped awake reflexively because she knew what was happening. One minute she was lying in my lap, and the next she had her scythe against my father’s neck as she stood over him.
I watched as she sucked the soul from his body, the glow of her power brightening as it floated out of him and disappeared into the metal of her scythe before he dropped to the ground.
I wrapped my arm around her waist, nuzzling her neck as she seemed to relax. I knew it wasn’t the time or place because of the chaos around us, but I had never felt such pure love and adoration for someone.
I worshipped this woman.
“Finias,” she breathed, turning towards me.
When a sonic blast of power rippled out, I ducked and flattened her against the stone balcony.
All at once, the capitol building grounds seemed to go silent.
I could smell death around us, and when Ama turned her head slightly, her mouth parted and shock seemed to filter through her gaze.
I didn’t want to look away from her, but as I turned my head, I had to admit that the sight was fairly shocking.
My father’s guards—no, actually, if I had to assume...
most of their military—were dead. I don’t mean normal death.
I mean skin ripped from their bodies and not even a recognizable humanoid form dead.
The other men were standing on the edges of the room, staring at the person who seemed to be the cause of the very efficient slaughter that I found myself nodding my head in respect for.
I didn’t have confirmation, but I had a feeling who this was, and I could already feel my possessive and protective urges growing. I didn’t care who this bastard thought he was, but there was nothing in the world that could convince me to let go of Ama.
I had just nearly fucking lost her. It wasn’t going to happen again—not even to the devil himself.