Chapter 42
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
kaius
Acelynn’s voice still echoed in my head, broken through the phone, raw with panic.
I’d heard screams, confessions, lies, and begging in my lifetime, but this had cut straight through me like a razor.
She hadn’t sounded like Acelynn, not the sharp-tongued, fire-eyed woman I knew. She’d sounded small. Shattered. Afraid.
The desert night was quiet when I pulled up to Acelynn’s place. Too damn quiet. The air pressed down heavily. Even the crickets were silent, as if the whole stretch of neighborhood knew something was wrong before I did.
I killed the engine and stepped out, gravel crunching under my boots. My hand went instinctively to the gun holstered in the back of my waistband. Habit. Preparedness. Paranoia. Call it what you want.
The house loomed dark, one window glowing faintly where the curtain didn’t quite shut. The front door was cracked open, tilting on its hinge like someone had forced their way in. I pushed it with two fingers, the wood creaking as the shadows inside swallowed me whole.
The smell hit me first.
Blood. The iron tang coated my nostrils before I even spotted the source. It tangled with something else—sharp, bitter, poisonous. A scent I was all too familiar with. Hemlock.
I stepped inside slowly and deliberately, letting my eyes adjust to the wreckage laid bare under the moonlight filtering through the blinds.
The place was chaos incarnate—chairs overturned, drawers gutted and scattered, the coffee table split down the middle like it had taken a boot to the spine.
A vase lay shattered against the wall, its water soaking into the rug, petals trampled underfoot.
It looked like a struggle, but it was too neat in its destruction. The kind of scene you’d set if you wanted people to think you’d fought tooth and nail for your life. I filed that thought away, teeth grinding against each other as I crossed the room.
And then I saw her.
Acelynn was crumpled against the far wall, a mess of tangled hair, torn clothes, and fresh bruises already blossoming across her face and arms. Her skin glistened with sweat, streaked with blood that looked half dried, and half smeared from her touch.
She was shaking, shoulders curled inward like she was trying to fold herself small enough to disappear.
A few feet to her right lay a body.
Alaric.
A knife wound under his ribs was visible even where I stood, crimson pooling thick beneath him in large puddles.
His hand lay outstretched in broken glass, hemlock vials shattered around him, the acrid stench of the poison biting at the back of my throat.
The old Knight’s eyes stared wide and glassy at the ceiling, fixed on the nothingness of death.
My jaw locked. A hundred thoughts surged and rattled in my skull, but I shoved them down into silence.
“Acelynn,” I said, voice low, flat, carrying across the room like a knife dragged on stone.
Her head jerked up. Her eyes were swollen, red-rimmed, brimming with tears that clung stubbornly before spilling over. The look on her face nearly made me pause—terror, relief, desperation all bleeding together in one wreck of expression.
“Kaius…” Her voice cracked, raw as her body shuddered. She pushed herself up and stumbled across the chaos until she collapsed against me, her sobs breaking loose as if she’d held them back just for this moment. “Kaius…I didn’t mean…he came at me. I didn’t know what to do.”
Her words twisted, choking out half-sentences and shredded fragments of excuses. Her fists clutched at my shirt, smearing blood across the black fabric as if marking me with it, binding me to the scene.
My arms went around her, almost against my will. The instinct was older than reason—hold, steady, protect. Her pulse thrashed against my wrist where her throat brushed it, wild and unsteady, the beat of someone on the edge of collapse.
But my mind never stopped moving.
Alaric. Here. Dead.
Her story—an attack, a break-in, a fight for her life.
The wreckage matched the tale well enough, but there was something in it that sat too neatly. No overturned bloodstains in places they shouldn’t be. No spatter where there should’ve been panic. Everything angled just so, every break plausible.
It was staged. I’d bet my life on it.
But when I tilted her chin up, forcing her eyes to meet mine, what stared back was chaos of a different kind. Her gaze swam with tears, wide and frantic, pleading with me not to look too closely. Not faked. Or at least not all of it.
“Breathe,” I ordered, low and sharp, trying to cut through her hysteria. “Start from the beginning.”
Her lips trembled. “He broke in. I was alone, and he knew that. I think he knew about me—” Acelynn’s words broke off, panic flaring before she caught herself, biting down on the rest like it had burned her tongue. Her eyes flicked away too fast. A lie. Or at least, not the whole truth.
My grip tightened on her chin, forcing her gaze back to mine. The softness in me burned away, leaving nothing but iron. “No skipping. No pretty lies. Sit.”
She froze, confusion and dread fighting on her face. When I pointed toward the overturned chair by the table, my tone allowed no argument. “Now.”
Her legs wobbled under her as she staggered toward it, the scrape of wood against tile loud in the silence as she righted it and sank down against the cushioned top. She clutched her hands together in her lap, knuckles white, eyes darting anywhere but my gaze.
I stayed standing, a shadow over her. “From the top, Acelynn. Every detail. If you hesitate, if you feed me some half-truth, I’ll know. And then the Knights will know.”
Acelynn’s chest rose and fell too fast, panic stealing the air from her lungs. “Kaius, please, I didn’t—”
“Don’t.” My voice cracked like a whip. She flinched. “This isn’t about begging. This is about survival. Yours depends on how you answer me.”
Her throat bobbed as she swallowed, tears welling again. “He came at me. He knew my name. He said…he said something about owing blood. I grabbed the knife. I didn’t think, I just—”
Her voice splintered, trembling into sobs.
I watched her every twitch, every pause, the way her eyes flickered left when she lied to me.
Fear radiated off her in waves, but not all of it was from Alaric’s attack.
Some of it was directed toward me. The thought of what I might do if I didn’t like her answers consumed her.
And maybe that was exactly what she needed to feel.
Acelynn had gotten too comfortable in the club. Thought some pretty little tears and blood-covered white lies would just be swept under the rug. But not this time. This time, she had to answer not only to me but to the Knights for her crimes against one of our own.
“Enough,” I snapped, letting the silence around us hang. I stepped forward, bending at the knee to look her in the eye. “You’re safe now. He can’t touch you.”
But even as I said it, I stared past her at Alaric’s body, unease burrowing into my gut. Safe from him, maybe. But what about being safe from her? The little bit of doubt that I had earlier on the sand dune was beginning to crawl back to the surface.
Her small frame shook against the back of the chair.
My hand reached out, catching her jaw in my hand.
Tilting her face to meet my eyes, her tears stilled.
For just a heartbeat, her breath hitched between us.
So close I could feel the heat of it, could almost taste the salt of her tears.
A flash of anger glinted in her eye, and in that moment, I knew she was more dangerous than Alaric had ever been.
The elder Knight had known something about her past, and she had slaughtered him to keep the secret.
But the small voice in the back of my head told me that it wasn’t true, that Alaric had attacked her in a crazed moment, thinking she was a ghost from his past. It wouldn’t have been the first time something like that had occurred, but Vince had always been fast enough to stop him.
I leaned closer, letting her see the cold in my eyes, letting it cut through her hysteria like the truth she couldn’t dodge. My voice dropped to a near-whisper, each word a knife pressed to her throat.
“You have Knight blood on your hands.” I let the weight of it hang there, iron and final. “Now you have to pay that debt.”
The silence that followed was heavy, suffocating. Her tears stilled. Her breath caught sharply. The blood between us—Alaric’s, hers, mine by proxy—sealed the moment like a pact.
And for the first time, I realized just how far gone we both already were.