33. Drystan #2
Enzo growls beside me, tension radiating off him. “Please tell me he is not admitting to what I think he is—”
I release a slow breath, but it does nothing to loosen the knot of feral hunger twisting tighter in my chest.
“There’s a leaf we need to find,” Easton continues, calm as still water. “A pretty one, with blue eyes.”
“Yes… blue and black.” Nicholas’s gaze locks onto some shadow on the ceiling, unfocused and far away. Sweat drips into his eyes, but he doesn’t blink.
“Yes. Exactly.” Easton’s tone never wavers, too calm, too controlled for the violence simmering in the room.
“I give them water,” Nicholas continues, almost reverent. “They like it.”
For fuck’s sake.
“We need to give the black and blue one some water,” Easton presses smoothly, “but we need to find her first.”
“Lawrence… He owns the leaf.” Nicholas mumbles it like a secret, then drifts into a broken, shitty song under his breath, voice cracking.
“Lawrence?” Enzo steps closer to the table, eyes narrowing. “Isn’t that your father?”
My heart slams against my ribs, the air turns thick, impossible to pull into my lungs.
My fucking father?
“He wouldn’t dare.” The words scrape out of me as I take a stumbling step back, the warehouse tilting at the edges of my vision. “He knew. He knew exactly what she means to me.”
No. He had already stolen six years of my life to save his own. He would never—
So was Archibald, my mind hisses, and he still sold his own daughter.
The thought lands like a blade between my ribs.
He killed your mother’s flowers because no one can be happy.
No.
No.
No.
Fuck.
Briar—my father.
I look up. The twins are staring at me, their expressions sharpening in the dim light.
“Drystan?” Enzo calls.
I stare at him, but the word rips out of me anyway, raw and shattered. “My father raped her.” The denial chases it immediately, louder, desperate. “No—you’re lying!”
I lunge. The distance vanishes in two strides. My wrist slams into Nicholas’s nose with a sickening crunch of cartilage and bone. Blood explodes across his face, hot and metallic on the air. He screams, high and broken, but it only feeds the roar inside me.
Easton grabs me from behind, arms locking like iron bands around my chest, hauling me back. “He fucking hates you. You know that—that fucker doesn’t care about anyone—”
I fight him, thrashing, boots scraping across the filthy floor as I try to reach the table again. Chains rattle. Nicholas whimpers. The shadows seem to pulse with my rage.
“No! It can’t be him—” My voice tears out, rough and animal.
“Why the fuck not?” Enzo demands from the other side of the table, steadying the bleeding man.
“Because that means she was raped because of me!” The words rip free, each one carving deeper. “I’m the one that got her hurt! I’m the one to blame for all of it!”
The warehouse swallows my scream, but it doesn’t stop the unraveling. Six years of starving in the dark for her—obsession, worship, ruin—and now this. My own blood had reached out and taken her.
Touched her.
Hurt her.
“Drystan—” Easton steps in front of me, blocking the table, his voice cutting through the haze. “We finish here and go after Lawrence.”
“No.” The word leaves me like a blade being sheathed.
I pull the rage back, folding it into something colder.
I straighten to my full height, wiping blood and sweat from my face with a rough swipe of my sleeve.
The fabric comes away dark. “We finish here and I go after him. He’s mine.
” My voice drops, laced with the promise of an endless night.
“I will make him suffer. No—she will. And if he killed her… I will follow him to the pits of hell and torture him for eternity.”
I lock eyes with Easton. The doubt flickers there, brief as a dying ember, but he nods.
“The hellebore.”
Easton nods and hands me the box. My fingers close around the hellebore vial—dark liquid swirling inside.
I pull it free and step past him to the table.
Nicholas is still twitching from the earlier dose, his broken nose leaking steadily, blood mixing with sweat and drool.
I force his jaw open again and pour the full lethal measure down his throat and it mingles with the coppery blood.
“We should go now, burn this place,” Easton mutters, already turning toward the door. “Leave nothing.”
I don’t move. “I need to watch it. I need to see the hellebore kill him.”
The effect comes slowly at first, then all at once.
Nicholas’s body arches against the chains, a violent convulsion ripping through him.
His eyes—still blown wide and black—roll back until only the whites show, veined with red.
A guttural gag tears from his throat, wet and choking.
He retches hard, vomiting a dark, frothy mess that splatters across the steel table and onto the concrete floor, a blood-flecked bile that smells of rot and bitter herbs.
More convulsions follow, his limbs jerking in unnatural spasms, chains rattling, sounding like funeral bells in the decaying warehouse.
Sweat pours off him in sheets, his skin flushing then paling to a sickly, mottled gray as the poison claws deeper.
I stand over him, unmoving, the moonlight slicing through the roof to paint his dying body in silver and shadow.
In my mind, the scene fractures. Briar. Where is she right now? Bound in some forgotten room, or already cold?
Did I fail her again—too late, always too late?
The thought carves a hollow through my chest, the same endless starvation I’ve carried for six years suddenly yawning into an abyss.
Her blue eyes dimming. Her voice silenced.
The one light in my black heart, snuffed out by my own father’s hands.
If she’s gone… the world can burn with me.
I’ll drag every soul responsible into the dark and make them feel what it is to starve without her.
Nicholas’s breathing turns ragged, wet gurgles escaping with every heave.
Another convulsion seizes him, harder this time, his back bowing so much the chains bite into flesh, drawing fresh blood.
He vomits again, weaker now, a thin trickle of crimson-flecked foam sliding down his chin.
His heart stutters visibly beneath sweat-soaked skin, erratic and failing.
The warehouse seems to lean in, the shadows thickening as if feeding on his agony, the air heavy with the sweet-decay perfume of hellebore and death.
A final, shuddering breath and his body goes slack against the steel altar, eyes fixed on the broken roof above. The silence that follows is absolute.
I stare at the ruin of him a moment longer, the feral need inside me only half-sated.
Now I go after my father.