Chapter 25
T he hour is late, and the halls are empty as I make my way up the stairs and to our quarters. All the staff would have retired for the night, which is why my interest piques when I hear a set of footsteps coming from farther down the wing. A steady click clack, click clack tapped from heeled shoes.
A tall, slender woman rounds the corner into view, and we both stop at the sight of the other. I recognize her—the short reddish-blonde hair, the front pieces cut to frame her chin, the speckling of freckles across her nose and cheeks… This is the shifter from the river. The one that stumbled onto Sin naked and offered him company when she didn’t realize I was there too, obscured in the shadows behind him. She knew he was betrothed, and she offered her company regardless.
She recognizes me, too. If her coming to a full stop when she sees me isn’t enough of a tell, the sudden baring of her teeth definitely is. She’s rubbing her forearm, and when we both begin walking again, I notice there is redness where she is massaging, as if she’d been grabbed. She averts her eyes when she is closer and says nothing as she passes. To her credit, she had the sense to sheathe her teeth a moment after she bared them instinctively. Good. Because I really didn’t feel like shattering them in her mouth tonight. And to my credit, I didn’t ask her why she is slipping out of my betrothed’s bedchamber.
A few moments later, I’m outside our doors, but when I reach for them, they swing open before me. Sin stands in the doorway, one arm gripping the top of the frame as he drinks me in. “I was just about to come find you,” he says lowly, voice sinister.
“No need. I’ve returned to my cell like a good little prisoner.” I push past him, half expecting him to try to stop me. Instead, he spins on his heels to track me but doesn’t move. His nostrils however, flare abruptly, and his eyes darken to liquid black. Oh, so he’s still pissed too. Wonderful.
I walk into the washing room and begin splashing water from the pitcher onto my face, my fingers rubbing circles along my cheeks. Sin follows behind me wordlessly, leaning forward in the doorway to hold the top of the frame again. He watches as I wash my face, and I note his nostrils are still flaring.
“Is your head still hurting?” I blurt out.
Surprise conceals his anger for a fleeting second, and he shakes his head quickly, either to dismiss my question, or his reaction, altogether. “My head is fine,” he growls.
I blow out a sharp exhale. “It didn’t seem fine on the ship.”
“That was then.”
“Are you having headaches frequently?”
“Does it matter?” he hisses. “I said it’s fine now, but unless you wish to give me another one, I suggest you stop asking me about them.”
I balk at him for a moment, noting the defensiveness of his tone, and how his claws now puncture into the wood along the threshold. He thinks the headaches are just another reaction to his body adjusting to the instincts he no longer suppresses. Another weakness . And suddenly, I know I will never be able to use them as a tell for when the seer is watching. Because despite everything, Sin does not trust me enough to bare his vulnerabilities, not without me prying and forcing him to reveal so much as a glimmer of exhaustion.
And that fucking hurts .
“Rather late for a woman to be leaving our quarters,” I say, unable to stop myself. It’s not that I don’t trust Sin. In fact, I’m certain he’d sooner gut himself than betray me, but I’d be lying if I said seeing a female trotting away from our bedchamber hasn’t made me… curious .
“Rather late for my intended to be returning to them,” he bites back.
“What did she want?” I ask, swiping a clean stretch of linen from the counter and patting my face dry.
He blows out a breath and lowers his hand from the doorframe to cross his arms across his chest, making the fabric of his black shirt pull tight across the muscles there. “She said since you were otherwise engaged , she thought I might desire company in my chambers. I told her if she ever so much as suggested it again, that I desire her company, or that my intended was out fucking someone else, she’d find it hard to suggest anything ever again without a tongue in her mouth.”
My mouth pops open, and I quickly close it, flinging the linen back onto the counter. It takes me a few moments longer than it should for me to collect my thoughts, to process what he just said. I clear my throat. “I was with Vox,” I admit.
His head tilts to the side in a movement that’s purely his beast, and it’s now I notice how his claws are digging into the muscle of his folded forearms. “I know,” he replies darkly. “I smell him on you.”
A chill creeps across my neck when he says that, my body sensing threat in his words even if he didn’t voice one. Explains the nostril flaring when I first walked past him. “But I certainly wasn’t fucking him.”
His head straightens and tilts again, the movement positively feral. “I can smell that too.”
I slip past him, my shoulder brushing his side since he refuses to make room for me to pass, but he doesn’t try to stop me either. Which reminds me of how the shifter was rubbing her arm when I saw her, and I suppose now I know why. I don’t think the Black Art responds well to strangers showing up uninvited to spread rumors that his betrothed is fucking an elf in the next wing over. It’s twisted, but a part of me hopes her arm bruises where he surely grabbed her, so she bears a physical reminder for days to come.
“Well, since neither of us fucked anyone else, what has your breeches in a twist?”
He follows me to the armoire but stops a few feet away from me, his arms still firmly crossed. His beast is testing him; the folded arms is always his tell. Needing to keep his hands locked closely against him so he doesn’t do something stupid. Like break a chair. Or the entire bedchamber. “You know what,” he growls.
I whip the armoire doors open and begin flipping through the nightgowns, not actually looking at any of them. “I see. So, you’re mad because I found a way to escape the cage you locked me in. Apologies, Your Grace. Maybe try stronger magic next time.” The blow is low, especially given I played a heavy role in the loss of Sin’s blessing, but I’m too furious with him to care.
“You stabbed a man in the neck.”
“I was resourceful,” I snap. “I healed him immediately after.”
“I know.”
I whirl on him. “Goddess, would you stop saying that?” I shout.
Sin widens his stance, his shoulders rolling forward slightly, assuming the posture of his creature instinctively. “Then what would you have me say? Because everything I want to say to you”—he shakes his head with a rapid, humorless laugh—“you’re not going to like.”
“Is that a threat?” I ask, jutting my weight to one hip and crossing my own arms to mirror his.
His eyes dim to shadows as he inclines his head and whispers, “It is so much more than that, little witch.”
“Out with it, then. Or should I start? I’m fucking furious with you, Singard. You knew—YOU KNEW—how being trapped in here would affect me, how it would render me helpless to protect my family, to protect you , and you still did it. You knew the consequences when you made your choice, you knew how badly it would anger me, and you did it anyway.”
“Of course I did it!” he roars, uncrossing his arms and stalking forward. He towers over me, and I take a few steps back, but he chases me, eating the space I created. “There is a power-starved king out there that wants you dead. Desperately. I don’t like this arrangement any more than you, but if him thinking you’re my captive is the only thing that’s keeping you safe, he can never know otherwise. If one of them saw you and managed to retreat, who do you think is the first person they’d run to? Spouting off that the white-haired witch was fighting alongside her oppressors. They would be back at once with reinforcements and every single one of them carrying orders to kill you.” He takes another step towards me. “I will never”—another step—"allow that to happen.”
“So, this is it, then?” I demand, spreading my arms out in front of me to indicate our arrangement. “We just spend the rest of our days hiding from him? Hiding me away from every guest, every public appearance, because someone might be a spy for Torin? How am I to live like that? How do you expect it to make me feel when?—”
“How do you think it made me feel?” he bellows, leaning over me. My shoulders bump into the wall behind me, and I quickly plant my feet, not realizing I was still retreating. “How do you think it made me feel,” he repeats much lower, voice pained, “when I woke in that temple, and they told me you had not? I thought you were going to die , Wren, because you sacrificed yourself to save me.” He trails off, averting his eyes to the wall next to me. After a moment, he says, “I cannot endure that again.”
It’s like taking a hammer to my chest, my heart fracturing at the sound of his torment. His voice is so broken, so harrowing, that I almost reach out and touch him. But I’m not ready to forgive him. Not yet.
“I will never not protect you,” I whisper. “It is not worth trying to persuade me otherwise.”
His eyes snap back to mine, and whatever tenderness was in them dissipates at once. Fury swims in them now, and my breath hitches as his hands come down on the wall on either side of my head. All the air rushes from my lungs, Sin’s presence closing in on me like a dense fog. One I’ll never be able to outrun. One I’m not sure I want to.
He leans into me slowly when he murmurs in a dark voice, “You took the words right out of my mouth.”
He’s too close to me, his lips hovering just above mine. I need to put distance between us; we cannot risk the seer choosing now to spy on Sin. Despite his tone, I believed him when he said he wasn’t suffering a headache right now, but there is no telling if the pain is instantaneous the moment the seer calls on their connection.
The scent coming off him, pepper and steel and cedar, threatens to overwhelm me, to cloud my thoughts and chase away all sense of logic. I will strength into my voice when I speak. “We could have come up with a plan. I could have stayed out of sight, just close enough to watch and intervene if someone needed me, like Eldridge did. I didn’t have to risk exposure. But you didn’t even extend me that chance. I do not always need your protection, Singard. We could have compromised.”
The wall behind my head quivers as his right hand slams into it, claws punching into the wood. “I will not compromise when it comes to your safety!”
“My safety? Look at yourself right now for goddess’s sake! The second you’re pissed off, you’re hardly in control anymore, just like Vox s—" I cut myself off, knowing it is the wrong name to bring up. I just wish I caught myself sooner because the wrath that flashes in Sin’s eyes at the mere mention of the elf turns my marrow to frost.
“Just like Vox what?” he prompts, voice tight.
“Forget it. I didn’t mean to even bring it up.”
“What did he say to you that day? On the ship?” I don’t have to ask him which time.
“It’s not important,” I say, moving to duck under his arm, but his hand drops to press against my stomach, halting my retreat.
“Don’t make me ask again, little witch.” It would be impossible to miss the warning in his voice, and that sets my fucking blood on fire.
“OR WHAT?” I demand. “You really want to know? He told me to be careful around you. That I shouldn’t trust you.”
“Because of before? He thinks I still mean to betray you after all this time?” he asks incredulously.
“No,” I spit. “Because he thinks you can’t control your own impulses right now, and he warned me you might try to rap—” The sudden shift in his expression lodges the word in my throat, and I wish I could withdraw it immediately. Anything to rid the look of sheer horror that overcomes him. I clear my throat. “He voiced concerns that certain primal needs would be very hard for you to resist, and that strong emotions are like flint to a fire for that,” I add, much quieter now.
“He told you I might rape you?” he whispers, and I hate how his voice cracks when he does. And then his eyes dart to the hand pinning me here, and he drops it at once, quickly lowering both arms to his sides and stepping away from me.
I miss him at once.
His presence was overbearing, forced down my throat when he towered over me, but as soon as he’s gone, my lungs yearn for his shadows to fill them like smoke. I move towards him, but it is he that matches my advance with a step backwards this time. Longing spears my chest, and I detest how much that little step backwards pains me. “I told him if he were to ever suggest something so vile to me again that it would be I that showed him the worst sides of both beast and man.”
Sin gives me his back and walks to the side of the bed, lingering for a moment before sitting on the edge, his head dropping into his hands. I pause, granting him some space, and watch as he drags his palms down the front of his face and then up through his hair before dropping them to dangle loosely across his thighs.
I go to him then, ignoring the warning bells that scream seer , unable to stomach the distance any longer, or forget the look on his face when I spoke words I never should have. But his pain in this moment is one rooted in his heart, not his temples, so I step between his legs and wrap my arms around his neck, tucking my face into the top of his hair. Goddess spare us and please let Sin’s headaches be an immediate tell of the seer’s presence, otherwise I have careened our ruse into shit. Several times over. My only saving grace lies in the hope that if she has glanced us cozying up to each other, she will presume it was a clever plan of the bloodwitch, to feign affections for the shifter king so she may grow near enough to slip her blade between his ribs.
He smells so good, his soap never able to fully cloak the woodsy scent that clings to him. Sin goes rigid before me, but after a moment, he parts his legs farther and wraps his arms around my waist, holding me to him. We stay like this for several minutes, him clutching my waist and my cheek pressed to the top of his head.
I don’t need to read his collective to feel his tension, his stress. His rage and his love. Because I have never needed my magic to feel him . As if he were always an extension of myself.
After another agonizingly long minute of silence, he lifts his head to look at me.
The hurt in his eyes is nearly enough to break me.
“I know I have committed egregious sins against you, my heart. Things that I will never be able to undo, hurts I will never be able to soothe, and I will spend a lifetime regretting it. It was selfish of me to ever allow myself to even hope that you would one day forgive me, and you accepting my Bond remains inconceivable to me. I do not deserve you. And I do not blame you if you are reluctant to trust me still, but I would sooner carve my own heart from my flesh before I ever forced myself upon you. If there is one thing you can find it in yourself to trust, it’s that I would never, ever hurt you. Not as beast, not as man.”
Salt stings my eyes as he speaks. Not because I ever doubted him, but because Sin once carried the burden, the fear, that he would hurt me as his mind and body adjusts to the instincts he should have been learning to control when he was a teenager and is just now allowed to explore at nearly thirty.
I shift my hands to cradle the underside of his jaw, not giving him the chance to look away. “I want to tell you something. When I gave you my heart, that night in the woods when you told me you loved me for the first time, I knew I was taking a gigantic risk. One that I knew would destroy me forever if your love turned out to be a lie. I didn’t have a choice but to take that risk because what I felt for you refused to be stifled a second longer.
“When I vowed to Bond with you, I never felt more sure of anything in my life. Whatever fate would have happen to us… I knew it was worth it.”
I turn a hand over to lightly stroke the underside of his jaw with my knuckles. “It was never you,” I whisper. “This ferocious love has always been the beast between us.”
He watches me intensely, his jaw clenched. Even now, he is working so hard to mask his feelings, to keep that veil that hides his pain pinned firmly in place.
“It is okay to feel ,” I continue, voice soft. “And it is okay to be afraid. I am, too.” More tears well in my eyes, and when I try to blink them away, they fall onto my cheeks instead. “You don’t have to hide from me.”
A shaky breath slips out of him, one I suspect he has been holding for years. His jaw flexes beneath my hands, but he doesn’t look away from me this time. “I am”—he swallows tightly—“I am struggling, love.”
I nod quickly, forcing a joyless smile. “I know,” I say softly.
His arms tighten around my waist, pinning me to him, but for once, his hold doesn’t feel possessive. It feels like a plea. One begging me not to run from him now that he’s shared this sliver of his torment. I release his jaw and thread my hands through his hair, combing it out of his eyes.
“I’m sorry for locking you away. And I’m sorry for lying to you.”
I cock my head to the side, my fingers stilling in his hair.
“As much as I wish it were the sole truth, it wasn’t just the risk of Torin’s men seeing you that motivated me to do what I did. I was terrified you would intervene to protect someone, like you did with Eldridge, and that it would get you killed. Please don’t argue with me about it,” he adds before I can get a word in. “I know you have no qualms about dying for those you care about, but you, my heart, are the only person I have ever truly loved, and that kind of love is all-consuming.”
I close my eyes for a moment and suck in a deep breath, willing my thudding heartbeat to slow.
“I want to be better for you,” he rasps. “Locking you in here was wrong, I know that, but it has never been what I would do to you that has plagued me, love. It is, and always has been, that I am terrified of what I wouldn’t do for you.”
Sin’s suffering sinks into me, filling my veins with tar and my lungs with stone. Because I remember with vivid clarity how I felt when I thought Sin died—when he did die. There was nothing I wouldn’t do to get him back, no revenge too savage for me to chase. It had not dawned on me just how deeply it affected Sin when he thought the same of me. When Aeverie confined him to his room where he was forced to remain, forced to endure day after day not knowing if I would ever wake.
We have both lost so much in this world, but I have had more than a decade to rely on my family. A family that wasn’t bound by blood, but one that chose me. Sin’s own mother abandoned him, and his father resented him for the shifter blood that ran hot in his veins. Taught him to hate what he is and modeled cruelty at every step. Sin was a monster when I met him, but not one he created on his own.
Perhaps, in a twisted way, it was always for the best that we met on the terms we did. That Cosmina came looking for me, and that Sin betrayed me. Because had he not, I would have never fled with Sera and her allies. I would have never moved to the Vale, never captured the Black Art, and I never would have fallen in love with him all over again. This Sin. The Sin that needed to be separated from the father that abused him for nearly three decades. To be separated from a life where he was a stranger to his own body, his own instincts.
I will never excuse Sin’s past behaviors, nor will I ever tolerate his cruelty in the future. But I can understand it. Be empathetic when he struggles to not slip into past patterns.
Trauma is a wicked magic. It burrows deep into your flesh, mixing with your blood until it’s a pool of black, reflecting only the worst of atrocities you were forced to experience. Healing is not a linear journey, and Sin and my relationship will not be without its trials.
But with every single beat of my heart, I know that what we have is worth fighting for.