Chapter 17
T his time, I don’t have an escort as I’m shoved into the causeway. I tumble through the shadows between this realm and the next, seeing nothing and feeling everything , my own magic turning over in my gut as it reacts to that in the channel.
Until it spits me out like curdled milk, my tailbone absorbing much of the impact as I land on my ass. The pain doesn’t register. Nothing does, except for the relief in Sin’s expression as he whips around at the sound and finds me here. And then he’s reaching for me.
That registers.
Because the Black Art is too relieved to see me, his mask slipping as he scans me for damage, his eyes lingering on the painted-on bruises as if making sure there were no real ones added. Vox steps between us before Sin reaches me, fixing him with a stern look and the slightest shake of his head. The exchange is silent, but so much is communicated.
A reminder that Sin must remember our roles.
It’s then I note how close Sin is to shifting. His eyes are more yellow than green, golden fire simmering around slitted pupils. Claws have ripped free from his knuckles, and the swells and valleys of his arms tremble with the need to unleash his beast.
Vox pulls me to my feet, and I wince as the pain in my spine finally tears through the adrenaline. That sound, that tiny whimper, is enough to shatter Sin’s hold on his temper. Wrath eclipses his face, his gilded eyes darkening as his lips pull up to brandish lengthened canines.
He turns around and stalks towards the guards that hover near the waystone, the small rock now grasped in Rory’s hand. I didn’t have a chance to survey the isle as I was thrown from the causeway, to see if the five of them had been fighting, but aside from their disheveled appearances, the brothers appear to be mostly unscathed.
Torin was right. The promise that only Rory’s pulse connected the palm-sized stone to the vessel was enough to give Sin pause. But judging from the unbridled fury now vibrating off him, I’m certain I’d have landed in blood-soaked sand if Torin sent me back mere moments later.
Vox steadies me while I regain my footing, and Aldred’s hand inches towards the sword on his hip as Sin stops just a few feet away from the generals.
“See—told you she’d be returned in one piece, Your Grace,” says the brother that threw me into the causeway, a shadow of a smirk on his face. “If anything, maybe our king broke her in for you.”
It was the wrong thing to say.
The fleeting silence that follows his remark is a haunting thing. Like the moment between when lightning splits the sky and thunder rends the night. A pregnant pause—one so eerily silent.
Until it isn’t.
Sin strikes so quickly, his preternatural speed impossible to track, that it isn’t until there’s a sickening crunch in my ears that I realize what’s happened. Sin grabs the back of the general’s hair, his claws punching into his scalp while his other hand thrusts into his mouth.
That’s when he pulls .
The general’s jaw dislodges so quickly, shattering as if his bones were nothing but glass, and the sound …
That crack as Sin separates the guard’s jaw from the rest of him—his chin going one direction, his head the other—is one I’ll never forget. The general falls to the sand, his face a horrifying, bloodied, broken mess of a thing.
The sob that follows is somehow more horrifying still. Rory drops to his knees, his hands flitting around the chasm of blood that was once his brother’s face, the gaping expanse where his jaws have been permanently wrenched apart.
My own mouth drops at the gruesome sight. It’s not that I’ve blinded myself to Sin’s capacity for violence—it’s that his method was just so brutal , the strength of his beast emerging from the dark corner it had been forced to lie dormant in for so long. I know Sin has run through thousands of bodies from his time endured in both wars, but what I just witnessed has me wondering just how much blood has coated his hands.
Vox growls at my side, the sound more annoyed than angry, but it’s not enough to snap me out of my haze. Not even as he pushes past me to get to Sin, he and Aldred sharing a knowing look behind the Black Art’s back. Sin’s head-of-war makes no move to intervene as he hovers over Rory, who still stares at his brother’s unrecognizable face with horror. Even Vox stops himself before reaching Sin, though his agitation is palpable. It’s not worth trying to stop the Black Art from killing Rory, not when he has just mutilated Torin’s other general.
“What have you done?” he seethes, his hand on his brother’s chest.
When my betrothed responds, it’s in a voice that could freeze entire rivers to mirrors. “Get the fuck out of my territory, General. Take him with you”—he nudges his brother with his boot—“and show your king what happens to those that dare try to take what is mine.”
Rory doesn’t hesitate. The stone in his hand is the only magic the mundane guard possesses—to stand against the three of them would only serve to reunite him with his brother. He wraps his arms around the corpse, still clutching the stone, and the two of them vanish with a plume of blue smoke.
No one says a damn thing. Aldred stares at Vox, who stares at Sin, who… who is looking right at me.
His hair is streaked with red, more blood drying on his face and armor, but it’s the smell of it that snaps me back to the present. It’s sweet and bitter, rich and deep like cherries. I don’t want to react to it, but my mouth dries without my consent, my tongue desperate to lap it from his skin.
Neither of us speak—we don’t need to. Sin holds my eyes, and I hold his, and my heart pounds like wingbeats at the longing I glimpse there. I’ve not doubted Sin’s feelings for me, not since we agreed to give this dark obsession between us a chance at being something more, and never since he asked me to Bond with him.
But for the first time, ice-cold fear grips my heart when he looks at me. And it’s not because he just literally ripped a man apart in front of me.
It’s because he did it for me.
Because Singard Kilbreth is madly in love with me. And for as long as I tried to deny it, as much as I once wished I could stop, my heart only beats for his, as black and barbed as it may be.
If something happens to him… I don’t allow myself to finish the thought. I can’t bear it.
Perhaps Vox was right after all—love is a dangerous thing.
And far more brutal than what the dark mage has just done in the name of it.
The journey back was explosive.
Torin knew Sin was without his blessing, and the high priestess allowed us to meet with a potentially hostile king with our chests foolishly puffed out, believing we had Torin’s fear of god power to protect us, and she said nothing .
Worse is that the generals waited until I was with Torin before they revealed to Sin that they also knew his power had been stripped from him. Waited until they had that leverage before throwing it in his face that he was completely and utterly fucked.
They made him look like a fool.
And Aeverie knew.
As soon as Rory disappeared with his brother’s remains, Sin was on me, demanding to know if the king had hurt me. Aside from some soreness, courtesy of tumbling through the causeway, I was unharmed.
I told him what Torin had said about the letter, and how he believed the priestess had been the one to wield the blade.
I didn’t tell him about the bargain I made.
I was going to, but some primal warning pulsed through my veins as I was about to tell him, urging me to keep quiet for now. Until our trust with the elves is more secure, we should be careful about what we discuss in front of Vox. He is Aeverie’s second-in-command, and she wrote that letter behind all of our backs—there is no way he wasn’t aware she had done it.
As far as any of them know right now, Torin took me simply to show that he could. A warning for the Black Art. And as far as I know, that could very well be the extent of it. There is no telling if Torin suspected Sin and my ruse and simply wanted to plant a seed of doubt in the mind of the dark mage’s secret weapon. And if he wasn’t lying, and he really does have a seer at his side, she will need time to trace a psyche path to my betrothed’s collective. But just how much time does a constrictor need before it coils around and compresses the mind of its prey?
To his credit, Vox didn’t deny he knew of Aeverie’s letter. In fact, he was surprisingly calm when Sin turned his wrath on him. The commander wouldn’t supply an answer for the priestess’s deceit, insisting it was Aeverie’s story to share. Something that vexed Sin greatly, but with Aldred and my guidance, he managed to keep the worst of his temper leashed until we disembarked.
Several guards flocked to us immediately and began mooring the boat while we climbed inside the carriage already waiting. Fortunately, we were close enough to Scarwood, we only had to endure a few minutes of uncomfortable silence until we were scrambling out of the coach.
“Escort her to our rooms,” Sin says to Aldred, motioning to me with his chin.
I balk at him. “Come again?”
I quicken my steps to catch up with him as he skulks off towards the castle, Vox on his heels. Aldred calls after me, a summons I ignore completely.
“Get to our chambers,” Sin growls over his shoulder.
“And leave you and the priestess alone to kill each other?”
“The priestess will get nothing more than what she deserves.” There is no mistaking the rancor in his voice as anything but a threat. “Now go to our rooms, or I will drag you there myself.”
“I’m sorry, did you think going through that causeway transformed me into a woman who would obey such a thing?” I scoff, actually scoff, at his command. Surely, he has forgotten himself.
Sin halts and spins to face me so quickly that I run right into him.
“If only I’d be so lucky,” he says lowly. “ Now go , Wren.”
I blink at him. I’m the one that smacked face-first into the floor of the ship, but surely it’s Sin who is suffering from some kind of head injury. “You’re delusional if you think I’m going anywhere.”
He somehow fits one more step between us, his chest brushing mine as he stares down at me with unforgiving eyes, his pupils rapidly flickering between normal and slitted as he resists the impulse to shift. I try to remember how hard this is for him, the instincts warring for dominance in his body. An adult shifter caught in the hormonal monsoon that he should have learned to control in adolescence, but was forced to repress, forced to be the Hand’s noble son instead. But while he looks at me like this, as if he expects me to be subservient to him, I’m finding it difficult to feel remorse at all.
“I’m not asking,” he warns darkly.
I steel my spine. “Neither am I.
His claws punch through his knuckles, a soft hissing as they cut through his joints, and when he suddenly raises his hand, I know it’s to thread it through his unbound hair. A stressed habit the Black Art favors.
Unfortunately for all of us, Vox does not know my betrothed’s tells.
Misreading the movement, Vox throws his arm around my chest to shove me behind him, but he’s forced to halt the second he touches me, Sin’s claws stopping just short from puncturing the elf’s throat.
I have always found it difficult to interpret an elf’s emotions. The lines of their jaws are always pulled tight, their bone structure all narrow angles and hard edges.
It is how I know that I’ve never seen Vox angry before. Not truly. Because the darkness that eclipses his face now… no amount of perfect elven features could ever mask it.
The elven warrior is furious. And he is terrifying .
“I suggest you rethink that at once,” Vox bites out, the words tight, controlled.
Sin doesn’t give an inch. “You do not touch her.”
Whatever reservations I have for Vox, at least he isn’t a fucking coward. He meets the Black Art’s rage with his own, the corners of his lips twisting into something bestial. Not in the same way the transcendents do, but in a more tight-lipped, teeth-baring snarl. Almost vampiric, the blood-sucking creatures whispered around campfires in the dead of night. Almost…
Almost bloodwitch .
I cannot deny that I’ve been curious to learn more about how my kind intersects with elven ancestry as Aeverie once suggested, but I bury it away for now with a promise to indulge the interest later. At a more appropriate time. Not when my future Mate’s claws are in throat-slitting distance of the commander whose throat we need very much intact .
“Ah,” muses the elf. “Prefer the marks on her body come only from you, I see.”
I’m between them at once, not trusting Sin’s hold on his beast right now. I force my shoulder through the too-small gap between them, standing with Sin at my front and Vox my rear. It also forces Sin to lower his claws, but it does nothing to snuff out the wrath burning as wild and lethal as alchemist fire between them.
I’m in Sin’s face before he can get a word out. “The situation was misread. It need not escalate into anything more, and it would do us all good to remember that very little is getting accomplished by us standing here bickering. Just as nothing good will come from me hiding away in our chambers while the big, brave men handle the exact same shit that affects me too.
“You’re going to turn around, we’re all going to speak with Aeverie, and none of you are going to say another godsdamned thing about me like I’m not standing right fucking here. Do we all understand each other?”
Sin finally tears his stare away from the elf at my rear, who already retreated a few steps to not brush against my backside any longer than was necessary. He drags his tongue across the front of his teeth. “Do I take orders from you now?”
“If you wish for me to take anything of yours again, yes.” I flash him a smile so sickeningly sweet it could sour a honeybee’s stomach. His face betrays no reaction as he holds my stare for several moments, until the slightest of sighs escapes his lips, and he runs a hand through his hair, claws now retracted.
His eyes dart behind me a final time. “ Careful , elf,” he warns, before giving us his back.
I don’t bother glancing at Vox before I follow after him.