Chapter 21 Evander #2
Zephyr handles them reverently. “I’ll give Alexios my report.
I’m still following leads on more missing demis.
If I have any new information, we may need to act fast. They’ll be more careful after this.
Elias? With me.” She glances at me and Arcadia, her expression softening a fraction. “Get some rest.”
Arcadia and I watch them launch into the sky. Their silhouettes shine against the stars for a moment before they disappear into the night.
“Are you okay?” she asks, silver wings rustling.
“I’ll heal.”
“Not what I meant.”
There’s worry in those mercury eyes. Understanding. Arcadia lost her brothers in the Devouring; she knows how it feels to lose part of yourself. We all do.
“No,” I say quietly. “I’m really fucking not.”
Her hand finds my forearm. “What do you need?”
You, I want to say. Make me feel something.
Arcadia would let me lose myself in her if I asked.
I could stay at the palace and fuck her until my thoughts go quiet—I’ve done it a hundred times before.
I know how to shatter her and put her back together, how to make her scream in pleasure.
It would be easy to let her numb the hurt for a little while.
But when I picture the female beneath me in my bed, it’s not Arcadia I see.
It’s the Devaliant, staring up at me with those defiant violet eyes. Her silvery hair spread across my sheets. Her body moving against mine.
And she’s a reminder of every damn thing that happened to my realm.
I’m so disgusted with myself that I can’t even look at Arcadia. “Go home. I’ll deal with it.”
* * *
Memories batter against the inside of my mind as I stride down the hall of my tower.
Butchered bodies. Feathers removed and stacked. Rhosyn delivered. Twice confirmed with BC contact.
Turning the corner, I jerk to a halt. No. Fuck, no.
The Devaliant lingers outside the one door I warned her never to approach. Her fingertips ghost over the obsidian seal in the center, tracing the edges gone soft with age.
I move in a blink, slamming my hands against the wood on either side of her, my lips at her ear. “Devaliant. I believe I made myself crystal fucking clear about this door. It. Stays. Shut.”
She inhales sharply, a subtle tremor rolling through her. “I wasn’t going to open it. I was just… curious.”
“Well, fuck me, she speaks,” I say with a bitter laugh. “A whole damn month of the silent treatment, and now she’s found her voice.”
A muscle tics in her jaw. Oh, I’ve pissed her off now. Good. She can give me exactly what I need to numb myself tonight.
Burn hotter, vicious girl. Let me taste your fury.
“I want to negotiate—”
“No.” She’s always pushing, testing boundaries. Trying to negotiate. “No throwing knives. No bartering. No deals, Devaliant. Not tonight.”
Not when I’m one wrong breath away from coming out of my skin entirely. Not when she belongs to the family responsible for every festering hurt, every memory. All the ways I’m cracked and broken until I became this.
Slowly, the Devaliant twists to face me. Those violet eyes flick over my gore-splattered and dusty clothes. Quick. Assessing. As if she’s trying to get a read on me. Trying to find the broken bits she can press on until something fractures for her.
“This is how you come home every night, isn’t it?” she asks softly. “After killing oathbreakers?”
That’s where she thinks I’ve been. Stacking bodies.
Slitting the throats of more precious Vartenans.
And why wouldn’t she? That’s all I am to her—the killer, the monster, the nightmare they tell stories about.
She has no clue what I saw tonight. Because why would it even occur to her that her people have been butchering and consuming us for centuries?
That while she considers the war a distant past, some of us are still sifting through the wreckage and finding corpses to bury?
And why correct her? Why tell her the truth when the lie is so much more useful?
“That’s right, Princess. Every damn night.” I flash a vicious grin. “Sometimes I don’t even wash the blood off before dinner. Sometimes I let it dry on my skin because I like how it feels.”
I track the shallow rise and fall of her chest, the pulse in her throat. I could sink my teeth into that spot and taste her terror. Could press my fingers there until she begged me to let her breathe.
What an easy target she is tonight. Such a perfect distraction.
Tough luck, Devaliant. You’re the only thing in reach, and I’m all out of mercy.
“You want to know how killing them feels?” I ask, voice low.
“Righteous. Like I was made for it. Shaped for it. It makes me feel alive when everything else is static. And when it’s over, I’m just hungry.
For the next. And the next. And the next and the next.
No fucking bottom. I could slaughter every last one of you and still wake up starving. ”
“Stop it,” she whispers.
That plea only feeds the hunger. The dark, twisted part of me that wants to push until she snaps.
A cruel, mocking laugh shivers out of me. “Aw, listen to you beg just like they do. I honestly expected more from you, Princess. You’re boring me. All that promise, all that potential, and you’re just another disappointment, aren’t you?”
Boring. The word I promised would be her death sentence.
Never let it be said that I don’t know exactly which of her wounds to press on.
I want her to claw at me, wreck me, crack me open.
Dig her nails into my skin. I’ll still be here demanding more, harder, now.
Better for her to see the butcher than someone falling apart.
The effect is instantaneous. I notice the moment it registers, the way her eyes snap up, bright with rage.
Yeah, that’s it. There’s the fire. Good girl. Give it to me.
“Boring,” I say again when she doesn’t rise to the bait.
When all she does is pant in these shallow little gasps.
“Maybe Amara’s lessons didn’t teach you shit after all.
Did her goodwill finally bleed the fight out of you, huh?
Or is this what you were like on the altar?
” I ask to twist the knife that much deeper.
“Lying there so fucking obediently every time they sank that dagger in? I bet you begged then, too. I bet you cried. I bet you were pathetic.”
She explodes.
With a snarl, she slams her palms into my chest with enough force to knock the breath from my lungs. I rock back on my heels, a savage pride unfurling in me.
Finally.
“Oh, come on. I know you can do better than that,” I hiss. “Tear into me.”
She shoves me harder. “Stop it!”
“Why? This is the most honest you’ve been in weeks.” I grab the dagger from my hip and force it into her hand. “Here. You want to hurt me? Do it properly. Make it count. Carve into me so deep I feel it for days.”
Like that night in your rooms when you cut into me so deeply, I can still remember the ache.
Her anger feeds a darkness in me that’s been starving for weeks. For years. It keeps building—this storm inside my skull, fire crackling under my skin and through my veins.
I want her teeth.
She hurls the knife away, and it skitters into the shadows. “Stop it,” she says again, and there’s something ragged in her voice, too close to concern for my liking. “Just. Stop.”
“Why should I?” I grip her thighs and hoist her up, slamming her back into the door.
She twists to break free, but I press my hips forward, pinning her in place.
“Aren’t I giving you what you expect? The monster?
The villain? Well, here I am, Devaliant.
The same bastard you met in Hellevig.” I trail my lips along her jaw, not quite touching.
“You loved it that night in your room, didn’t you, vicious girl?
Cutting into me. Making me bleed. I bet it’s the only time in your pathetic life you’ve ever felt powerful.
Because Alexios bled you dry, and used you up again and again and again—”
She thrashes against me like an animal caught in a snare, feral and snarling and incandescent in her fury. And she’s so stunning, so beautiful, I can hardly breathe through it.
“There was this woman tonight,” I lie, the words spilling out before I can stop them.
Anything to keep this fire burning. Anything to make her hurt me.
“Reminded me of you, actually. Similar face, same entitled way of breathing.” I lean forward and brush my lips against her ear.
“When I was killing her, I thought about you. I imagined it was your throat under my hands. Your voice begging me to end you. Will you beg me, Devaliant? Will you plead?”
Look at me, I demand silently. Don’t you dare flinch. Not now. Hurt me. Please, please, please fucking hurt me.
And she does. Her nails score the flesh of my shoulder, leaving marks as she struggles against my hold. “Fuck you,” she growls. “You disgust me. I hate you.”
A snarl shudders out of me. “Good. Hate me more. Hate me while you’re hurting me. Hate me every moment. Make it the only thing I feel.”
Images strobe through my mind in flashes—wings and sightless eyes, gore and death. All those lives lost. The stench of pyres and the rubble and the grief so crushing that there’s nowhere to send it but out.
I can’t breathe. She’s what’s keeping me together. The only person in two realms who can destroy me the way I want. She’s jagged glass ready to cut me open until I spill out all this rot.
Her eyes snap to mine, and realization skitters across her features. There’s a gradual softening in her face—a terrible, dawning understanding.
And I’m pinned. Caught. Unable to move.
Don’t say it. Don’t you fucking say it.
Her hand curves around my nape, the touch tender. “Something went wrong tonight. You’re in pain. I can see it.” When I do nothing but stare down at her, panting hard, she whispers, “What happened, Evander? Why are you trying so hard to make me hurt you?”
The sound of my real name on her tongue is like a blade to the chest.
Oh, fuck you. Fuck you for the way you’re looking at me. Fuck you so much.
I slam my palm against the door beside her head just to watch her flinch. To get that horrible gentleness off her face.
“You want to know what gets me off more than the killing?” I say, voice ragged.
“Playing with you. Fucking with your head. Because strip away all that practiced sweetness, and you’re just as twisted as I am.
Just as hungry. Just as vicious. That’s why cutting me made you come alive.
Because for once in your miserable life, you got to be the one holding the knife.
” I meet her stare, letting her see every ugly, squirming thing inside me.
Daring her to look away. “We’re the same, Devaliant.
Both of us rotting from the inside out. The only difference is that at least I’m honest about it. ”
I drop her to the floor and wrench myself away from her, stalking down the corridor without a backward glance. I don’t stop until I’m barricaded in my room with the door slammed shut behind me. Only then do I let my shoulders sag.
Viscera clotting stone. Piles of blood-matted plumes. BC. The Bloody Court.
Something rears up in my throat. I stagger into the washroom and collapse to my knees in front of the toilet. Then I’m retching, throwing up everything in my stomach until there’s nothing left but blood and bile.