61. Syneca #2
He brushed away another tear on my cheek, and though I wanted to fight him, I couldn’t turn away. Couldn’t swallow past the lump in my throat. I couldn’t let go. Even through the pain. “Silas, please.”
He pushed. “Break it. It changes nothing. When the bargain is gone, when every law and every scrap of magic that ever tied us together has turned to dust, there will still be me, choosing you. There will always be me choosing you. In every life, in every world, with every piece of my soul I have left to give. You were never something I was forced to love. You’re the only thing I’ve ever chosen. ”
I sobbed, still clinging to his shirt as rock and ice rained down on us, as spell after spell hit and the net’s noose grew tighter, choking me. “If I say it I have to leave you and I can’t—”
“Don’t make me watch this take you. I am asking you for the one thing I’ve never asked you for. Tell me, and let me get you out the only way I’ve got left.” He waited a beat and when I didn’t answer, he spoke words that would damn us both. “Tell me how you feel and then get to Dez… please.”
“No!” I gritted my teeth against the pain of denying him as something hit me and blood began to run. The net wrenched. The world vanished and for a second there was nothing but panic. Nothing but pain and panic where the world had been.
But under it, the truth I’d been outrunning.
I’d loved him before I ever knew the word for it, back when he was the only thing at my side I couldn’t explain away.
I’d loved him quietly, in all the spaces I refused to look at.
I’d loved him while I hated him, when he stood there and made me be more than I’d ever wanted to be, when he refused to let me stay small and safe and hidden.
I’d called it anger because anger was allowed and the other thing wasn’t.
I’d loved him without permission. Without noticing.
I’d loved him through every wall I built precisely so I’d never have to.
It was the only thing left when everything else tore away.
I was nearly gone. The only thing that kept me there was him.
“I love you.” It came out shattered and certain and far too quiet for something I’d held that long. “I love you.”
The bond broke.
It went all at once, a wrenching, hollowing tear straight through the center of me, and I felt the exact moment it left.
I felt him leave, the constant dark weight of him I’d carried so long I’d stopped knowing it was there.
The emptiness that rushed in behind it was so total it stole the breath I had left.
Silas’s eyes locked on mine and I watched it hit him too.
Watched those blue eyes go wide and stricken as the same sensation tore through him, as he felt me go quiet on the other end of a thread that wasn’t there anymore.
For one second neither of us moved.
Then the ‘please’ bargain took hold and he didn’t hesitate.
He shoved against every ounce of magic holding him pinned down to move to his feet and haul me up with him, yanking me to him as he poured every single confession and lost moment into a kiss that tasted like goodbye.
And then, upon the laceration of my heart, he shoved me away.
I fought it. Dug in against the bargain with everything I had left. Because I could not leave him here. But our bargain didn’t care about what I wanted. It turned me toward safety one staggering step at a time.
Past him, the witches and hunters were clear of the city and far too close. I couldn’t see Wickett, but I could see Dez, still coming at us from behind them.
The spells were still coming. And what reached me wasn’t fire or stone. The collar of my coat cinched against my throat with no hand near it. A cold crawled in behind my eyes first then filled my veins.
I reached for my fire to throw it back but I staggered. The gold was gone.
The gold that had always been laced with my purple flame, that I’d never once thought to question.
Gone with him, because it had always been the part that was his.
But gold was not a demon’s color. Demons were dark.
Demons were the black I’d always felt in him underneath.
But his trace of power wasn’t black, wasn’t dark, wasn’t demon at all.
It was bright. It was gold.
It was that of a Fury.
That was why no demon could read him. Why he held power he claimed no demon should hold. Why he’d never once told me what he was. He wasn’t only a demon. He was half of something else, and I had that gold in my fire and never knew I was carrying the proof.
I opened my mouth to say it. To ask him.
“You’re a—” I couldn’t finish it. The bargain dragged me back another step and the word stayed in my throat.
He’d dropped to one knee, straining against whatever the witches had hit him with, his breath coming hard, and his eyes had fallen to my side, to the wound there, the one I’d stopped feeling somewhere in all of it, and something in his face broke at the sight.
“I am a demon, Syneca, and I have one more bargain to close. You gave me the words, said you love me and in return, I give you my power. Everything I have left. It’s yours. Freely given. Now run!”
“No—”
Too late. It poured into me. All of him, every dark and terrible thing he’d kept hidden since the king’s chamber and long before, flooding the cavern the broken bond had carved, not threaded through a tie anymore, just given, made mine, mine to keep.
Because he knew. He knew that breaking the bond saved my life but left me a stripped-down version of myself.
I was walking into a battle against Wickett with only the fire I’d begun my life with, and he would not send me out of here less than I’d come in. So he emptied himself into me through his cage, the last thing a caught man could do for the woman the net had let go.
“Take it back.” I was screaming, fighting the steps that dragged me away from him. “Take it back, damn you. You’ll have nothing. They’ll have you and you’ll have nothing to fight with. Silas.”
“Can’t.” He was smiling. On his knees and smiling past the tear that fell down his cheek. “It’s already yours.”
And something in me changed.
The grief was still there as I was forced away, the bargain hauling me back from the only thing I wanted. But underneath it now was something colder and far steadier, and it had a name, and the name was Wickett fucking Veyne.
All of this was his fault. Every piece of it traced back to one man.
The witches with their empty faces and their dark magic were his, bound and driven because of him.
The hunters were his. The net strangling the life out of Silas had been cast by hands Wickett owned.
And now he thought he was going to stand back and watch a coven tear apart the man I loved, and call it a good day’s work.
Not fucking happening.
I stopped fighting the bargain.
Because the bargain wanted me to go. Be safe, and I finally understood there was only one place in any world that was safe for me, and it was a world with Wickett Veyne dead.
I had Silas’s power now. All of it, gold and dark, hot and cool and everything no court could name, burning in a body built to carry a Phoenix. I had more than I had ever held in my life.
And I knew exactly where I was going to aim it.