CHAPTER TWELVE #2
I shoved the doors open and inhaled a plume of dust. My lungs seized, then tried to expel everything in them.
I choked on the cough for long enough to get my shirt up and buried a hacking fit in it as I stumbled back.
Once it passed, I panted on the ground and waited for those damned guards to come find me.
After a couple minutes of silence pressing against my ears, I tiptoed back through the doors.
A shiver trailed down my spine. Every surface in the room was blanketed in a thick coating of dust. The mattress lay naked, vases empty of even those bland flowers that tried and failed to spruce up the fortress.
I swallowed hard. This place had been forgotten.
Abandoned. The hollowness pressed on me from every corner of the room.
I shivered again and darted to the door, my footprints the only disturbance in the dust; not even the mice ventured here. I mashed my ear against the cool wood. Only silence greeted me.
I darted out of the room and into the first hallway I passed. The cold of the stone seeped through my clothes as I leaned against it, my heart yammering a steady stream of objections. But still—silence. I glanced back into the hallway. The doors stared back like tombstones.
I jerked back around the corner and released a slow breath. “Just get to the first floor,” I whispered into the quiet. It was the only logical place for a record’s hall big enough to hold ten thousand years of history. I hoped. I took a deep breath and ran.
I only made it a handful of corridors before I slumped against a wall, my ragged breaths sawing out of me loud enough to wake the damned dead.
My head fell back against the wall, my eyes fluttering shut as I forced my breathing to calm.
When I opened them, they fell on a vase brimming with irises of such a deep purple they were almost black.
I plucked a handful out of the vase and divested them of their petals.
“To get here I made…” I thought back through my brief flight from the ghost-hall.
“One right, then a left and…another right.” I crept to the end of the hall.
One of the iris petals slipped off my lightly shaking fingers and fluttered to the floor, blending seamlessly with the dark stone.
My fist clenched around the rest. I shoved off the wall.
My too-loud breaths echoed through the barren halls as I flung myself down random corridors and every staircase I found. The petals I dropped at the corners of each blazed a trail through the maze that was Falcos, a lifeline back to the room I would never find on my own.
I flung a petal on the ground and peeked around a corner, then darted into yet another long, empty corridor.
A quiet but heated discussion reached me from around a corner at the end of the hall.
I cursed and threw myself through an archway to my right and down another flight of steps.
I pressed myself into the wall as their voices filtered down the dark stairwell beside me, and then faded to silence.
A glance out a window revealed I had finally made it to the bottom floor. I sighed and dropped to the ground at the first door.
My knees were one more trip to the stone away from full-on revolt, my nerves a frazzled mess, when I finally peered under a door that greeted me with the smell of old leather and ink.
Books upon books upon books huddled in the dimly lit chamber, the circular walls barely visible through a cluster of shelves.
I dropped my forehead to the cold ground, my exhausted lids fluttering shut. “Please let those be records, and not a library full of fucking fairytales and fiction.”
I inched to my feet, feeling about ninety instead of the cusp of thirty, and groaned at the notion of bending to retrieve all the petals. I turned to leave, my eyes bleary and mind a vacant vessel accepting only dreams or oblivion as payment for the past thirty-six hours.
Or, apparently, music.
My head snapped up as the sound of a piano poured into the hallway.
The violent cacophony, both abrasive and beautiful at once, slipped a hook into my chest and tugged me forward, my heart synching with the explosive pace.
I drifted down the hall, my feet taking me toward the music without permission from my head.
The last of the petals slipped out of my limp hand as I turned the last corner, the music pulsing out of an open door at the end of a short hallway. I tiptoed to the side of the doorframe and peered inside.
Griffon hunched over a magnificent, glossy black piano set before a bank of windows that flooded the room with moonlight.
His back was to me, a thin shirt clinging to every rigid muscle that flexed with his furious movements.
His tousled, midnight hair brushed the nape of his neck with every rise and fall of his broad shoulders.
And his song. I clutched the doorframe. My fingernails dug into the rough wood as I stared at him and surrendered to the tempest that crashed over me in waves.
The jarring notes and deep tones screamed of grief and loss.
But this wasn’t acceptance, or even recognition, of those invisible scars. It was denial.
A declaration of war.
And gods be damned if my body didn’t betray me with a visceral reaction as I watched this beautiful monster create something so exquisitely tragic. My belly clenched as I stared and drank in the battle cry that beckoned to every primal, fucked-up shred of my being.
The music halted on a discordant note that jolted me from my trance. “I know you’re there,” he growled, his voice rough as it rumbled through my chest in the absence of his music.
I stood frozen, barely daring to breathe. He swiveled on the bench. A grin cracked his face, the malice in that small gesture matched only by that raging in his eyes. I took a step back.
He rose smoothly and stalked toward me, his strides long.
Predatory. His nostrils flared when he got close to me, that wicked grin only growing wider.
“So insistent on your hatred,” he cooed.
“And yet there you stand, weeping your desire at the very sight of me.” He followed me into the hallway, but I drew up short at his words.
My stomach hit the floor and then clenched like iron.
My cheeks heated and I cursed my body, but it was him knowing that sent my temper hurtling off a cliff.
“I’m consumed by hatred, you beast, not blinded by it.
” White-hot anger drove me right into his space.
My navel brushed something hard. The discovery brought a smile every bit as cruel to my lips as I rose up on my toes, dragging my body over his straining breeches as I went.
A ragged moan tumbled out of him. “Shocking,” I drawled, and glanced down between us, “that ‘fucking hypocrite’ is on the list of vile traits.”
I was trying to vex him, but damn if I wasn’t playing with a fire that blew back and burned me, too.
His rigid features cast in shadow; the cut muscles visible through that sweat-soaked shirt; his cock digging into my hip.
They drove me wild. If he were anyone else, I would have climbed him right then.
I snorted and stepped back, instead. “So yes, my control over my body might be as shitty as yours, but I would fuck a flaming godsdamned dagger before I ever lowered myself onto you. And you are just another stupid man with no control over his own mind, if you think this is ending in anything but one of us dead.” I smirked and tapped the side of my skull. “Perhaps Lakur—”
His hand clamped around my throat and he drove me into the wall. The sharp crack of my splitting skull rang through the hallway. “My entire life is Lakuro,” he snarled.
I clawed at his hand, his fingers digging deeper with every passing second. I dragged in a ragged breath but lost it halfway through as he closed off my windpipe.
“Every fucking moment of every oath-cursed day!” He dragged me forward and slammed me back again.
My head rebounded off the wall. Stars exploded in my vision as I stared at him, madness dancing behind his furious eyes.
Pressure mounted in my head, blood pounding against my skull like a sledgehammer.
I jabbed my fingers toward his face, but he stepped out of my reach, his eyes growing hooded as he watched me die beneath his iron grasp.
I raked my fingers down his arm instead.
Skin curled up under my nails and crimson stained his flesh, but his arm turned to stone, his control over the shift impeccable.
“Without that fucking fire, you are just a weak, helpless human, and I could end you like the insignificant, temporary thing you are.”
My fingers slipped off his bloodied arm and fell limply to my side. Black crept in along the edges of my vision. Griffon’s jaw clenched, his muscles standing in sharp relief against his neck. At least the last thing I’d see was pretty, even if his face was twisted with something like agony.
He sucked in a wild breath and his eyes popped wide. His hand vanished from my neck. I fell in a heap on the floor, a tattered breath sawing down my throat.
Griffon stumbled back as I hunched over, my hand flying to my throat. I raised burning eyes to him. Each ragged gasp that filled the corridor was an empty echo of the music that had rebounded off these walls only moments ago.
Griffon stared down at me, gasping on the ground at his feet. His mouth opened and closed. But no sound came out. He turned his back and left, those predatory steps now quick and jumbled.
I counted thirty. Thirty breaths, each burning more than the last. And then I fled.