Chapter 35
EVER
Ihate to interrupt this memorable moment, Everielle, but you owe me your essence.”
My mother’s lifeless obsidian eyes crush my soul. Her neck is bruised purple with my fingermarks. She’s only feet away with a knife in each hand, both Eli’s and neither the one I took. “I don’t owe you shit. You’re not even—”
Eli’s rocking halts, and he pulls out, cutting me off with his callous words at the same time. “You want her? Give me a minute, and I’ll be done with the slut. I told Zandrite I would need at least an hour before he sent you down here for her body.”
He can’t mean that. I look up at him, waiting for a quick glance, a soft touch—any sign that he’s bluffing—because I was finally starting to trust this man again. It has to be an act. But it’s not okay. “What in the immortal asshole fuck is wrong with you?”
“Shut up. Your mouth is as loose as your pussy.” He tightens his hand around my throat.
Suddenly I feel everything I couldn’t before.
The cold, hard stone against my back. The fingernail cuts on my chest. The weight of him on top of me.
But even though his dark aura surrounds me like an endless drop into blackness, his lightness pushes through with the scent of morning dew.
I’m pushed and pulled, caught in the gray.
And I don’t know if it’s an act or not. I only know my mother is here to kill me. And I want to scream. I want to curse. I want to tell her exactly what I think of her.
And I can’t.
Not with how tight he holds me, just enough slack to let a whistle of air through.
The Centress mumbles, looking between us. “You’re working with Zandrite? He did say I should wait a while.” She holds the knives steady, maintaining the upper hand.
“And you can’t fucking listen,” Eli scolds.
“What do you think I’m here for? Someone has to finish the job if he’s so damn incapable of taking a simple life.
You should be grateful for all I’ve done.
Who do you think arranged your rescue from Milo’s house?
Who made sure Zandrite would partner with you?
Who left knives for you in the passage?”
“I should have put the pieces together.” Her disgust appears as faint wrinkles on her nose.
If he’s faking, he’s got her believing every damn word. If not… then his balls are going to end up in a bloody sack.
“You should have,” Eli says. “But you’ve doubted my loyalty from the day you asked me to take her away from her cell.
All I’ve ever done is play the part you wanted, even if it meant pretending to be against you to keep your secrets safe.
I delivered every damn time. You know we want the same thing.
The least you could do is stick to the plan. ”
“I am still the Centress,” she snaps at Eli, flipping her long hair back with a blade, as if she were important.
“And I’m a being from the beginning of time,” he says. “Would you like to fight someone who can’t die—or wait for me to finish fucking your daughter before you kill her?”
“Hand her over,” she says.
My soul flattens. She’s so casual about it.
I try to think how to take her down. How to fight.
If I had any role at all in the collapse of the pit, the shaking and breaking of the earth, if I can do that, then I can do more.
But without plants, without dirt, I’m left with the raw stone floor and the water.
I have no idea how this works or with what, but I try anyway, calling to the springs, to the cascades down the walls, the stone under my hands.
Do something. Give me a wave to distract her.
Crack open the ground and swallow her up.
Drown her. Anything. But it all ignores me. The water is calm, the stone undamaged.
“Do I have to ask you again for a godsdamn minute?” Eli gestures to our naked bodies. “You could at least turn around.”
“I’m not an idiot,” she hisses.
Eli’s jaw clenches. He tilts his head as if trying to calm his rage, then releases my throat and pushes off me with a rough hand on my chest.
I inhale the steamy air and clutch my throat. “Why?” I rasp. I don’t scream. I don’t cry. I don’t even threaten his balls. My heart is sobbing too hard.
He looks down at me, lying flat on my back on the stone. And I still only see coldness in his eyes, sharp and traitorous. My mother peruses his body… his hard length, still shiny with moisture.
But it gets worse.
“Go ahead. She’s all yours,” he says, stepping back from me.
My body finally catches up with my heart. I rise to my knees, lean forward and slam my hands onto his bare thighs, pushing all the pain I can conjure into him.
“Shit!” He stumbles back.
“I don’t know what to believe anymore!” I turn and face the Centress, putting my back to Eli. Only briefly do I wonder if that’s a bad idea.
“I can make this quick,” she says, as though killing me were no more severe than ripping a bandage from my elbow, a motherly act.
“It’s the least you could do.” I try to sound fierce, but my voice is hoarse and shaky.
Her face softens for the two seconds she lets herself feel, then ices over to that expressionless look I’ve come to know so well.
She moves closer, cautiously at first, eyeing Eli, then in a blur, diving for me with both knives raised. I unfold my legs and kick the sole of my foot into her shin before she reaches me. Her leg gives out, and she falls forward, smashing her knees into the stone floor.
I’d love to finish what I started and take her neck in my hands with a grin on my face, but with the two knives in her grasp and how unbothered she is by the pain I cause, I prioritize escape.
I roll away, but she pushes herself up onto her hands and injured knees without even a wince and goes after me, stabbing anywhere within reach.
My bare skin slips on the stone. I can’t move fast enough, can’t avoid the piercing blade. It passes straight through my arm, metal mangling muscle.
I shriek.
But it’s not the only unsettling sound.
I clamp my hand over my opposite arm and flip around. The Centress cackles. Eli has her hair wrapped around his wrist and her head wrenched back. He shoves her flat to the floor. Both knives slip from her hands and skid across the marble in my direction.
Whose side is he on?
“Get away while you still can, Everielle. He’ll leave you. Men never stick around,” she says through clenched teeth.
He jabs a knee firmly into her spine. “I will never leave her.”
I’m not sure if his conviction or the steady flow of blood down my arm shocks me more. I find her black eyes. “It’s you I want to get away from.”
The Centress’ dress is hitched up her thigh, and the sight of his naked body on top of her makes his come sizzle in my stomach acid. I stand and step on the handle of one of the knives then snatch the other up with my non-injured arm, waving it wildly in front of me.
“Give me the knife.” Eli stretches his arm out toward me.
“No.” Shallow breaths come faster and faster.
“You have terrible taste in men,” my mother says with her cheek smashed against the slippery floor.
“Shut her up!” I point the blade at them, my hand trembling. “If you care at all, shut her the fuck up and prove it!”
“Everything’s okay now. Hand me the knife,” Eli says.
“It’s not okay.” I shake my head, woozy and tired. Blood drains from the hole in my arm, puddling around my feet. I don’t feel the pain, at least nothing physical.
“Get in the water to stop the bleeding,” he says, still calm.
A lump forms in my throat, growing with every thought. “You planned all of this?”
“Who even knows anymore? All he does is lie,” the Centress hisses.
“No. Never, listen—”
“I needed my voice!” As hard as it is to say it, he needs to know. “You-you silenced me.”
His eyes swarm with regret. “I needed her to believe long enough to take her down.”
“Did you? Or is this just another one of your lies, and you’re working with her? Is that why I can’t love you? Because if I did, it would make it harder to watch me die?”
“That’s the last thing I want.” He answers much too quickly.
I drop my arm, my adrenaline fizzling, pain sneaking back. “Well fuck you too.”
“That’s not what I meant. Get in the damn water before you pass out.”
“Then what did you mean?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” my mother drawls.
“Godsdamn, you’re as annoying as Kelter.” Eli yanks her hair back even farther and lets go. Her face slams into the stone with a gratifying crack. Then his stern eyes are back on me. “In the water. Now, or I’ll force you.”
And the fact that he could, or would, doesn’t bother me.
It’s that I’m losing the leverage I thought I had, and realizing there’s no sense in standing here with a knife pointed at him.
Even if everything he said earlier is true.
Even if he wants me dead. Because he could control my hand and drive the steel blade through my chest in an instant.
“Tell me, and I’ll get in.”
He takes command of my legs and moves me a step back, then another.
But the look on my face, conquered and crushed, must be enough for him to reconsider.
He relinquishes control. “I meant”—he glances at my open wound, glossy desperation in his eyes—“that you not being able to love me is the last thing I want.”
“How could—”
“Water.” He tips his head toward the healing pool of minerals.
Damn him. I drag myself to the ledge and slide in. The pain dissipates. Warmth surrounds me, a vibrating hug in the form of bloodied pink water. “How could that be when you clearly don’t want me to?”
“I—” he stops, begging with every miserable muscle on his face not to continue.
Any remaining patience disintegrates. “You what?”
“I won’t let you love me.” He cringes.
“Yeah, I got that already.”
He retrieves the other knife and approaches the ledge of the spring, dragging the Centress by her hair. She moans, a nasally sound from the blood clotting in her nose, but it’s nowhere near how she would be bawling if she weren’t so accustomed to pain.
Then he slashes her biceps in two mindless swipes, rendering her arms useless, and returns his knee to her back.
Blood spills over the ledge and into the water.
She simply grinds her teeth and grunts while he wipes the knife on her dress with a sideways look at me.
“Your body is not the only thing I can control.”
I shoot him a vicious glare. “What are you saying?”
“Ever, love,” my mother rasps, “don’t let him kill me.”
Her pathetic figure is flopped along the edge of the spring, her hair draped over her shoulder and dipping into the darkening water. I feel no mercy. None. Not even pity.
Only bitterness. And pain.
I point the knife at her, the metal handle cold in my palm despite the steam-filled room.
“It should have been enough that you let Mallace tie me to a table and rip me open in search of magic. Or that you drugged babies and sent them to Caldera. Or sent me away because you couldn’t keep a god satisfied enough to stick around.
Or that you ordered Eli and Kelter to be killed and tried to take my memories.
” I gather my unraveling heartstrings and suck in a long breath.
“But no, you had to plan to hand me off to my father’s enemy to be used at his leisure and killed.
That’s what it took for me to truly let go of the mother I so badly wanted you to be. ”
“You ungrateful child, you see everything backward. Killing you for your essence would have been my greatest accomplishment.”
I catch her black eyes, the emptiness in them. “What broke you?”
“Love,” she whispers, clearly aware of the death that awaits her. Her body relaxes.
I stick the blade into her upper arm like she did to me, above the slice Eli left behind. She barely flinches. It pushes through her skin easily, freeing a fresh stream of ruby red blood. But not enough—I want it to gush.
I hold the knife over her neck next, poised for a quick side entry. But I can’t do it. My hand is immobile. I pinch my eyes shut, thinking of all the reasons she should die before I reopen them. “Make me, Eli.”
“No.”
I press the tip of the blade closer. “Control me. Do it. Take control of my hand and kill her.”
“I can’t.”
My hand wavers, my voice too. “I need help.”
Still kneeling on her back, he reaches out and tips my chin up, finding my eyes. “She’s your mother.”
I pull my head away. “She doesn’t want me!”
“Then kill her.”
“I’m trying!”
The Centress lifts her head from the stone, her face bloody and molded into features of pure hatred. “It shouldn’t be that hard. After seeing the coward you are, at least I know I was right to give you up. You’re worthless.”
The number of holes that drill through my heart is staggering.
My hand glides the knife into her neck, the motion involuntary.
Warm blood robes my rings in red. I leave the blade in place, entranced by every escaped drop, the life that pulsed through her now only red liquid.
It flows into the spring, a rivulet running from her neck to the surface. It’s… lovely.