Chapter 22 #3
“Violet, you were drugged last night.” I kept my voice level, reasonable, even as frustration clawed at my restraint like a caged animal.
“You cannot possibly expect me to stay silent about this. I will not tell your father, but I sure as hell will not allow you to walk back into that place tonight, or any night.”
We still had hours before her next shift at Oubliette.
Hours I fully intended to use to convince her this path was madness.
But the stubborn set of Violet’s jaw, the way her chin tilted up in defiance even as disappointment curved her spine, told me I wouldn’t be able to convince her without laying some truths bare.
Truths I wasn’t certain I was ready to expose. Truths that might shatter whatever fragile trust we’d so recently built between us.
“Violet, listen. I do not understand why you are so determined to return there. If money is truly your goal, then surely there is a coffee shop nearby where you could apply. A bookstore. Hell, a boutique in the shopping district below us. Anywhere that does not involve a club full of—"
I caught myself before saying too much.
She shook her head as she said, “I have to be there.” Her breathing quickened, shallow and tight. Her heart rate increased. I heard it rabbiting against her ribs, feeding the predator inside of me and urging me to circle closer.
Her physiological changes led me to my next question, spoken with a calm I absolutely did not feel. My own heart hammered in my chest, but I forced my voice to remain level, gentle.
“Violet, what exactly is in Oubliette that you cannot find anywhere else?” I reached for her hand where it fisted in the white sheets, and covered it with my own.
Her skin was warm, no longer feverish but still carrying heat.
I remembered her confession from last night, about being coerced, about touch being a minefield of triggers and trauma.
This was safe ground. Permitted contact. “Please. I need to understand.”
A shadow crossed her face like a cloud passing over the sun, and it pained me to feel so powerless against whatever demons haunted her.
In the morning light streaming through the windows, illuminating every detail in brutal clarity, I watched her body go taut with tension.
Every muscle coiled like rope about to snap, her spine straightening against the ligneous headboard, her free hand clenching and unclenching in the bedsheets in an unconscious rhythm.
Whatever this is, it goes far beyond my fears for her safety.
She teetered on some invisible edge, and I recognized the haunted look in her eyes from my previous life—that same look of those fools who’d ventured beyond the furthest edges of the Wastelands and into the Chittering Dark.
I squeezed her hand, feeling the delicate bones beneath warm skin. “I am here for you, Violet. Let me help you.”
Her mouth opened, then closed. Her throat worked as she swallowed.
For a long moment, she simply stared at me with those hazel eyes that shifted colors in the changing light—more gold now, less green, like autumn leaves before they fell.
I watched the exact second resignation crossed her features.
Her shoulders dropped, the tension bleeding out of them.
Her jaw unclenched. Something fundamental shifted in her posture, as if she’d been holding herself together through sheer force of will and had finally decided to let go.
“Alright.” The word came out barely above a whisper.
The fluttering anxiety in my chest eased slightly. Thank fuck.
She looked into my eyes and said, “I’m hunting a man.”
My cock twitched despite the gravity of the moment. Well, that’s oddly promising.
I waited for her to continue, keeping my expression carefully neutral. I’d learned in my first life that people revealed more when you gave them silence to fill. Her brow pinched when I didn’t react as she’d apparently expected—no shock, no horror, no attempt to talk her out of it.
“You don’t have anything to say to that?” Suspicion colored her voice.
I shook my head. “You have never given me reason to doubt you, Violet.”
Disbelief flickered across her face, quickly followed by something that looked dangerously close to affection. She narrowed her eyes into a scowl that didn’t quite hide the softness beneath. “Why are you so perfect, Rowan?”
“Oh, please.” I couldn’t stop the dry smile that tugged at my mouth. “We both know how ‘perfect’ we are around each other. Let us skip the charades.”
She gave a conceding nod and, to my disappointment, pulled her hand away from mine to put on the spare shirt.
The loss of contact felt more significant than it should have.
She hugged her knees to her chest, ice packs now forgotten, curling into herself and looking smaller.
Younger. More fragile than the fierce creature who’d danced on that stage, who’d ground against me last night while I whispered in her ear.
“He’s someone who hurt me.” Her voice came out steady despite the tremor I could see running through her hands. “No—he broke me in ways I can’t explain. Ways I’m not ready to explain.”
Her hazel eyes found mine, holding my gaze with an intensity that felt like a physical touch.
I held her stare, admiring the way morning light lit her caramel skin, catching gold in the undertones and painting her in warmth.
The way those hazel eyes sparked with flecks of amber and green and something that looked like barely contained rage.
“Is he the one you fight in your nightmares?” Surprise and shame danced across her face as she turned away quickly. I waited for a moment before I prompted her. “Answer my question, Violet.”
She let out a long sigh. “Yes.”
So he dies. “Then I will kill him for you.” The words came out in an exhale, purging the anxiety that had been coiled in my chest since she’d first mentioned Oubliette.
Startled eyes opened to meet mine as relief washed through me, cool and sweet as spring melt. Her demon is mortal. A man. Just a man.
Men, I could hunt. Men I could track through cities and across state lines. Men I could corner in dark alleys or expensive penthouses. Men I could string up and bleed dry without losing a single second of sleep.
If it had been a vampyre lord with centuries of accumulated power, or a petty god lounging in divine indifference—that would have been infinitely more complicated.
That would have required planning, resources, and knowledge I was still gathering about this timeline’s supernatural hierarchies.
Regardless of the length of time, I would have burned covens and hunted demons for her.
But a man? A man who’d hurt her? That was as easy as breathing.
She made a disgruntled sound, somewhere between a laugh and a scoff. “Don’t act like you’ve killed before. Besides. . . it’s not that easy, otherwise I would’ve done it already.”
Oh, volchok, if you only knew.
She shifted against the headboard, the wood creaking softly under the redistribution of weight, and sighed.
The sound carried exhaustion and frustration in equal measure.
She closed her eyes, dark lashes creating crescents against cheeks still faintly flushed from last night’s fever.
“I don’t need you to fix my problems, Rowan.
I’ve had enough of men doing what they think is best for me. ”
Dangerous words from such a fierce volchok. Words that would have sent most men scrambling to prove themselves, to assert their dominance, to override her clearly stated boundary.
I am not most men.
I scooted closer, angling my body so I had to look up at her.
Rested my head in the crook of my arm, deliberately making myself smaller, less threatening—not an easy feat given I was six-foot-five, and two hundred ten pounds of muscle, but body language mattered.
Perception mattered. One of her complaints she’d voiced before, in sharper moments, was feeling overpowered by my presence.
“Violet, you told me this man hurt you. . . but is there more?” I waited, and I knew the answer when she stilled.
“So this man touched you without your consent.” It was not a question.
My voice came out calmer than I felt, but beneath that manufactured quiet, possession and anger simmered like magma under the earth.
Waiting. Building pressure. “That is enough for me. You may be under my protection, but you are still your own woman. You are my equal in all ways, and I value your input.” I stopped, letting the words sink between us.
“Violet, you are free to hunt him in the way you think is best. I am simply here to remind you that your current approach is flawed.”
She cracked open one eye and peeked down at me, her gaze assessing. “Oh, really?”
I nodded, fighting back a smile. “A little humility is an important skill to learn.”
She laughed then, genuine and warm and completely unexpected. The sound filled the quiet bedroom like light filling darkness, chasing shadows into corners. “And you have so much of it, Rowan.”
My breath caught in my chest, trapped somewhere between my lungs and my throat. I loved the way her laughter sounded. In my room. In my bed. With me. The intimacy of it, the casual domesticity, felt more dangerous than anything that had happened last night.
Fuck.
I looked towards the wall behind her, focusing on the dark television screen mounted there, willing myself to breathe steadily against the returning hardness in my sweats.
My cock had barely softened since last night, and her proximity—the scent of her skin combined with the memory of her body arching into mine—was doing absolutely nothing to help.
“I am yours to use, Violet.” I forced the words out past the tightness in my throat, meaning every syllable with a ferocity that surprised even me. “If you do not want me to tell your father or Charlie what is happening, then you need to trust me. Let me help you hunt this man properly.”
She fisted the sheet tighter, her knuckles going white with pressure. The tendons in her hand stood out in sharp relief against her skin. After a long moment where I could practically hear her internal debate, she gave a tight nod.
“It’s complicated, but I’ll do my best.”
I shifted to sit beside her, both of us leaning back against the wooden headboard that was still faintly warm from where our bodies had pressed against it hours before.
We stared at the opposite wall where the darkened television screen reflected our images back at us—two figures side by side in rumpled white sheets, our breathing the only sound breaking the heavy silence.
The quiet between us was not uncomfortable, but weighted with things unsaid.
I heard the building settling around us, the faint hum of the heating system, and distant traffic from the street below.
My heightened hearing picked up her elevated heart rate, the slight hitch in her breathing that suggested she was gathering courage for something.
“There’s something else I need to tell you.
Something that’s happened to me,” she started, her voice smaller than I’d ever heard it.
Uncertain in a way that Violet never was.
“And it’s going to sound. . . impossible.
Insane, maybe. You’re probably going to think I’m delusional or need psychiatric help or—”
“Violet—” I tried to interrupt, to reassure her.
“Just listen, okay?” She cut me off, still not looking at me. Her gaze remained fixed on some point across the room, as if meeting my eyes would steal whatever courage she’d scraped together. “Let me get it out before you react. Before you decide I’m crazy.”
I nodded, even though she wasn’t watching. “I am listening.”
She took a deep breath. Her hands twisted in the sheets, wringing the expensive cotton like she was trying to strangle it. Whatever secret she carried, I could tell it was heavy.
My mind immediately spiraled through possibilities, each scenario worse than the last. She has discovered the supernatural world on her own.
She has been attacked by a vampyre in some dark corner of campus.
Hunted by a werewolf who caught her scent.
Seduced by a siren who tried to drown her in promises.
Marked by something ancient and hungry that I cannot protect her from.
The thoughts crashed through my skull like an avalanche, burying rational thought beneath layers of protective instinct and mounting dread.
“I’m not just the twenty year old Violet you grew up with,” she said. “I am her. But I’m also. . . older. With memories from a different life.”
The world opened beneath me.
I felt the actual physical sensation of freefall, of solid ground dissolving into void, of everything I thought I understood about reality restructuring itself into impossible new configurations that my mind struggled to map.
My heart stopped. Actually stopped for one horrible second before slamming back to life with enough force to make my ribs ache. I knew—with the bone-deep certainty born from my own impossible experience—that she was telling the truth.
We are the same.
The realization detonated in my chest like a bomb, scattering every thought I’d been trying to hold together. Whatever fears I’d harbored before—the supernatural world reaching out to grasp at her from beyond the veil—this was so much worse.