Chapter 4
The leather saddle dug into my thighs, a welcome distraction from the ache bleeding down our bond. My gaze bored into the back of the Issaraeth’s head, only a horse-length in front of me, and yet he was a thousand—a million—miles away. He was a hollow shell atop his stallion.
Tormented with no visible scars.
Broken beneath a surface smooth as glass.
Good.
Yet the hatred, the righteous fury, didn’t storm like it had when I’d snapped back to the present.
No matter how hard I tried to redirect my thoughts, the image of that bronze-threaded needle digging into my mate’s flesh wouldn’t leave. The horror that had devoured me. The agony that had shredded our connection. The memory lived in my body, clearer than any vision I’d ever had.
Even after everything he’d done, he’d still protected me. He could have fought harder. He could have let them hurt me to prevent his magic from being locked away forever.
And yet, he chose my safety.
Again.
As he always had.
It made it entirely too difficult to loathe him the way I wanted to.
When we stopped for the evening, Maelsar grabbed my mate’s arm, a frown on his lips. He murmured something too low for me to hear. But the Issaraeth merely shrugged him off and stalked away.
A harsh yank in my chest forced my feet forward, and I stumbled like the opening steps to a Vaela? number I hadn’t rehearsed. This chain connecting us protested our separation, as it had so many times before. And I was not accustomed to resisting it as I had been before he claimed me.
With gritted teeth and a hand pressed to my sternum, I jogged after him, weaving between soldiers setting up camp among the massive trees. Whether he sensed me following him through our bond, I couldn’t tell. He merely kept his head down and crushed every fern in his path.
Finally, he reached a tent, the sigil of House R?viel stamped on the side of the canvas. Without looking back, he ducked inside. The ache abated with our proximity. I didn’t need to be any closer to him—this distance was tolerable.
Yet I found myself creeping forward anyway. I should have let him suffer alone. I should have savored his pain after how much he’d caused me.
Instead, I slipped between the flaps, blinking as my eyes adjusted to the dim light.
“Leave me,” he rasped. The Issaraeth leaned against the central pole, head tipped back. He didn’t move. Neither did I.
“You have nothing left to say to me, remember?” he spit, his tone acidic.
I crossed my arms and glared at him. He’d flung my words back to me, the way I’d done countless times to him. Mine had been aimed to wound. His were…defeated. Hopeless.
The bond twisted tight in my chest, begging me to drop to my knees beside him. To comfort him in a way I suspected he’d never been offered—not in centuries.
But I didn’t. Because my body remembered the violence of being yanked into the future after believing I was safe from Seeing again.
“Why are you here?” he pressed.
A conflict, far greater than the Angel-Demon war, battled in my heart and mind.
“I couldn’t not come,” I whispered, pressing my hand over where my magic coiled.
His scoff echoed in the tent. “Of course.” From a pocket inside his leathers, he pulled out a vial and downed the contents.
He threw the cork and glass away, both smacking against the canvas wall before falling into the shadows.
The motion drew a wince, and he rubbed the scars over his heart. “I want to be alone.”
I didn’t move, merely watched as he worked off the straps of the armor he’d worn during the trial by light—the same protection they’d stripped from him before holding him down and humiliating him.
“Go, Sylaira,” he barked through gritted teeth, at last letting his gaze meet mine.
“Let me see it,” I murmured, drifting closer.
His hands fell to the ground. “Why, so you can revel in the fact that I can never force you to do anything again? That I am finally powerless? That I can do nothing other than fall on my sword? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Rid of me at last.”
His chest heaved hard and fast. The barrier around his mind cracked, and through it leaked flashes of that same male I’d seen when Herr Elyriane’s magic had choked him.
“I should, but no,” I admitted, voice scarcely louder than a breath. Hot salt pricked my eyes as I settled across from him, knees tucked up to my chest. “I hate that you lied to me. I hate that you’re in pain. I hate seeing you helpless as much as I hate being helpless myself.”
I’d expected him to melt, even the tiniest bit. But all his hard edges remained.
He looked away, a muscle feathering in his jaw. “I’m a failure. I’ve never been able to protect the people I love. This is a fitting punishment. Losing my power. Losing you.”
Silence stretched between us. I didn’t reassure him. Didn’t correct him.
“Who is the male you remembered during the trial?” I asked instead.
“My father,” he gritted out. Every muscle in his body tensed, like he was fighting for restraint. He looked away. At the canvas overhead. At his hands. “He did…things to me. That forced me to change.”
My lips parted in a small gasp. Because what I’d glimpsed was far more than a mere childhood spanking. It looked more like torture.
“I’ll never be able to be anything else. It was foolish of me to believe otherwise.”
The way he spoke—cold, distant, cruel—jolted fear straight into my heart. All the softness I’d witnessed from Vaeron had vanished. In his place sat the Issaraeth, the Mindbreaker, the male bound to his duty.
I rose on unsteady legs.
The fragments he’d shared about his father before surged back.
How the former Herr had realized during the attack on their home, my mate had swallowed a Demon’s blood as he killed him.
How he’d carved DUTY ABOVE ALL over his son’s heart.
But this reaction, the feelings of failure, all of it had to come from something far deeper than one act of violence.
How long had he been a child trapped beneath a tyrant?
“Far too long.” The Issaraeth’s voice slid into the silence, low and predatory.
Terror gripped me. I’d spent all day building this barrier, only for it to drop in a moment of intimacy, like my mind and heart hadn’t aligned in what we wanted. I slammed it up again before the Issaraeth glimpsed anything else.
“The former Herr R?viel would bind me in his magic and force me to use mine to free myself. If I didn’t do it fast enough, he’d cut me. Beat me. Use his magic to force me to do things I did not want.”
Horror wrapped around my ribs and squeezed as the words poured out of this broken, haunted version of my mate.
“I dreamed of the day I could do the same to him. Command him to remain still while I carved up his flesh. Sit back while his blood spilled over the ground.”
Air fled my lungs as his carefully crafted mask dropped. With it, he ripped open his side of the bond, filling me with all the wicked delight he took, even now, at the idea of it.
But beneath it, I sensed his spiral. The way he fell backward, into the visage of himself who had survived beneath the yoke of his familial obligations. His embrace of the cold darkness, the ice that once encased his heart.
Control might have been rising amid the madness, but the hairs on the back of my neck still rose.
“You always knew I was a monster, little fugitive. Now you know where I came from.” The Issaraeth fractured, splintered; I couldn’t be here when he broke. Heart hammering my ribs, I backed toward the opening, but he didn’t move to follow me.
His haunted words halted me at the threshold, captivating even without his Command.
“Go ahead and sleep elsewhere. No one ever chooses me. And no one ever will. Especially not now.”