Chapter 34
EVANDER
I WAKE UP to cold sheets.
Of course, Bryony bailed as soon as the fever dimmed, and I managed to fall asleep. Who could blame her? I’ve been fucking her all night, touching her in ways I have no right to, saying too much in my half-mad delirium.
You look like someone I’d keep.
And I need her underneath me again.
Her scent pulls me to the gardens. The stars bleed light across the sky, the aetherlight casting everything in shades of teal. Thousands of stars fall like rain.
My skin is too hot now. The rut-fever is burning through my veins after the reprieve, a relentless drumbeat—need, want, take. Need, want, take. Drowning out everything else.
Her scent catches me halfway down the path—jasmine and dark spice, the lingering traces of sex. My magic is saturated in her skin. When rut has me in its grip, everything is primal, and last night, I wanted to mark her up all over. Claim her as mine.
I round the corner and stop.
She perches on a crumbling wall, one leg dangling over the edge, the other tucked under her. That sheer slip she’s wearing is practically useless. I can see the bite marks on her throat and the bruises I sucked onto her collarbone—handiwork I couldn’t bring myself to heal just yet.
I watch her. Doesn’t matter how many times I see this girl, the same thing always happens: it’s like a knife to the chest every time.
She shouldn’t matter to me. To an Eternal, mortals are ephemeral. But Bryony Devaliant? She’s shrapnel. She’s nails and broken glass, and I can’t dig her out of me, no matter how deep I cut. Some girls, once under your skin, can never be carved out. Not without taking pieces of you with them.
“You planning to stand there all night?” she asks, still studying the colors dancing above us.
“Depends.” I walk closer, crossing my arms. “You planning to sit out here all night and expect me to keep my hands to myself?”
She gives a little huff. “I just needed air. To think.”
“About?”
“Some demis in Caelestis were gossiping about trouble in Hellevig. I woke up worrying about my sister.” Bryony drags a hand through her hair. “What if Theo tried to take the throne? What if she—” She stops and swallows, rubbing her hands on her thighs. “She didn’t say anything in her letters.”
I snort. “Well, if your sister knocked Idris off his throne, I’d call it an improvement.”
“Yes,” she says quietly. “He hasn’t been right since losing his daughter. And Theo keeps trying to fix everything. She always does.”
“Amara will get answers.”
“I know. I just…” She catches her lower lip between her teeth. “I hate not knowing if she’s okay. Sorry about abandoning you like that.”
“Worrying about siblings?” I shrug. “I get it.”
Honestly, her family dysfunction has nothing on mine. If Bas follows his pattern from the last two Aethertides, there’s a village in Vartena that’s about to learn what it means to be in the path of a god who’s lost his humanity. My brother hasn’t fucked in centuries. Now he just kills.
“The Blade is your brother, right?” she asks. “You never talk about him.”
I give her a tight smile. “Nothing to talk about. We don’t see each other much.” Not anymore. For three hundred years, he’s been a stranger. “You and I have unfinished business, and you’re not going to get out of it by bringing up Bastien.”
“Is that so?” she asks, plucking at her chemise.
“Don’t play coy. You didn’t tell me I was your first.”
“It didn’t seem relevant.”
I swear, she’s the most deliberately obtuse creature I’ve ever met.
“Devaliant. I was half out of my mind from rut. I could’ve hurt you.”
“Please.” She rolls her eyes. “Amara’s broken practically every bone in my body daily for the last five weeks. And you’ve never cared about collateral damage before.”
“I’ve never fucked a virgin sacrifice before, either.” I drag a hand down my face, frustration spiking. “Forgive me for trying out this novel concept called giving a shit.”
She lets out an incredulous laugh. “Oh, so now that the post-coital glow has faded, you care? How many times were you inside me last night, again?”
I’m not answering that question. I lost count. The only reason she’s still able to move is because I keep healing her so I can have her again.
“If I’d confessed, would it have slowed you down?” she presses. “Altered your angle of approach? Or just inspired you to find a more convenient surface to bend me over?”
My cock twitches at the memory. I actually have to clench my hands into fists to keep from grabbing her. But this is a game, a careful balance of want and patience and conquest.
“I would’ve fucked you on any surface I could get.
Floor, wall, tree—didn’t matter as long as I got to hear you scream my name.
” I step closer, watching her pupils dilate and her chest move a little faster.
“But yeah, maybe I wouldn’t have spanked that disobedient ass the first time.
The chase through the woods? That would’ve been later. ”
“I don’t need soft,” she says with a withering glare.
“Wasn’t offering it.”
“I don’t want rose petals and silk sheets. I wanted—”
“To be devoured, I know. And I don’t deny myself the things I crave. Especially the dangerous, chaotic ones.”
“Of course not. Usually, you just gnaw on them until they stop twitching. Must have been refreshing to have something fight back for once.”
Oh, I like her mouthy. I like her mean. This is the woman who’s scratched her name into my soul with bloody fingernails. The one who cuts with her words and fucks like she’s fighting.
“Careful, sweetheart. You keep up that bratty attitude, and I’ll have to spank you again.”
Bryony swallows hard, squirming a little, but says nothing.
“But from now on,” I say, “when we play? I expect honesty. No holding back. No lies of omission. Are we clear?”
“You want honesty? Fine.” She lets out a hard exhale.
“Nothing in Vartena was ever mine. My body, my time, my choices—all of it belonged to other people. My virginity was just another commodity to be traded. Another thing they could take from me. So last night, for the first time in my life, I chose. I wanted you, so I took you. I won’t apologize for that. ”
I see it with a sudden, stark clarity—a girl broken for her realm, doomed to be chewed up and spat out by a world intent on using her up.
Sacrificed on a god’s altar and expected to smile as she’s stripped of agency.
All those people with their hands on her, deciding her fate and bartering her away piece by piece.
Her uncle trying to kill her was just the final insult. The real violence was every day they told her she belonged to everyone but herself.
She shouldn’t have handed me this. Shouldn’t have pressed the shape of her hurts into my palm and expected me not to squeeze until the world fractures. Because now all I want is to peel the skin off every arrogant fuck who thought to collar her, starting with Alexios.
Bryony slants me a look. “Stop.”
“Stop what?”
“That thing you’re doing with your face. The brooding. Men only brood for two reasons: they’re planning something stupid or angsting about their feelings. So which is it? Murder or manpain?”
“I scheme, vicious girl. I plot and plan and sharpen my claws. I dream up new and interesting ways to make people suffer.”
She arches an eyebrow. “What’s the difference?”
“Brooding is for poets and lovesick fools. Scheming is for monsters.”
“A semantic argument at best.”
I grin slowly. “Want me to lay the bodies of your enemies at your feet? Stack their skulls in a monument to your glory?”
What? Destruction has always been my love language, and Bryony Devaliant is a dark and hungry god shaped like a woman. I want to worship at her altar.
A reluctant smile tugs at her lips. “That’s horrifying, dramatic, and unnecessary, but sweet.
I’ll pass on the corpse pile, though.” Bryony hops down from the wall and closes the distance between us.
The aetherlight filters through her thin chemise, silhouetting the graceful curve of her hips.
“You say the loveliest things for a male who claims to loathe me.”
“You make me feel a lot of things. Most of them vaguely homicidal.”
“And the other things?”
Everything I have no right to feel, not for anyone. Especially not for you.
“Irritated. Frustrated. Occasionally murderously possessive,” I say instead. “Right now? So ravenous I can barely see straight.”
I reach for her, ghosting my fingertips up her body. Skimming over her ribs, beneath the curve of her breast. Her breathing goes a little ragged.
“How much of this is Aethertide?” she asks. “Were you like this with Arcadia?”
The question is guarded. There’s a subtle tension in her shoulders, as if she’s bracing herself.
I move closer, until we’re breathing in the same air. “Jealous, nemesis?”
“No.”
“Liar.” I lean in and graze my teeth up her throat. “What if I touched her exactly like this, fucked her the way I fucked you? Made her scream and beg so pretty—”
Her hand shoots out, wrapping around my throat and digging her nails in.
“Mmm.” I give a laugh. “That feels an awful lot like jealousy.”
“When we’re together, you don’t think about anyone else. Understand?” Her voice is almost a snarl, fingers tightening until she’s digging into my pulse.
Then her mouth is on mine, greedy and artless.
I sink into it with a groan. She tugs at my hair, fingernails a sweet sting against my scalp as she presses closer.
Her scent fills my head—that intoxicating combination of midnight blooms and arousal, and I think, Oh.
This. This is what madness must feel like.
Wanting the woman most likely to destroy me, and not caring anyway.
I break the kiss and whisper against her mouth, “Jealousy tastes good on you.”
“Shut up.”