Chapter Nineteen #2
Another man stumbles forward, tearing at his collar.
His breathing comes ragged and harsh, his pupils blown so wide his eyes look black.
He catches the arm of a passing server, a girl half his age in a white uniform, and she melts into him.
Her tray crashes. Crystal scatters. Neither of them notice.
“Oh,” I breathe, watching it spread. “There it is.”
Rot finds the soft places first. That’s how the Nightkin’s power moves through the crowd. It splits each hidden pocket open, dragging out each person’s secret: all the wanting they learned to dress up and lock away beneath good breeding and good taste.
A woman in an emerald gown drops to her knees in front of her husband, pressing her mouth against his crotch through the fabric. His hand finds her hair and yanks her closer as his head falls back.
Moans layer over moans, bouncing off arches until the whole hall hums with it. Somewhere near the fountain, a cluster of bodies has collapsed together, limbs tangled so thoroughly I can’t tell where one ends and another begins.
Slick, obscene noise pours through the hall, slipping between groans and the slap of skin.
Sweat, spit, and sex coat my tongue.
The Nightkin’s power doesn’t stop at flesh.
It digs deeper, past the skin and the wanting, into the rotting places where people shove the things they can’t live with. The things that fester in the dark.
A Lord in gold-trimmed velvet has his face buried in a serving girl’s neck, his hips jerking forward. When his mouth opens against her throat, words spill out like vomit.
“I killed him.” His voice breaks on a moan. “My brother. I put ground glass in his evening meal. Watched him bleed from the inside for three days before he stopped screaming.”
The serving girl doesn’t hear him. She’s too far gone, her head thrown back, her fingers tangled in his hair. But I hear it.
I hear all of it.
Another woman digs her nails into her own throat, carving crescents into pale skin.
“My daughter,” she gasps between giggles, blood on her teeth now. “I told everyone she ran away. I buried her in the garden. She cried so much. So much.”
The bone walls groan as hairline fractures spider across the pale surface, like something inside the architecture is struggling to breathe.
“Beautiful,” the Nightkin exhales. “This is what they are underneath. This is what they’ve always been.”
On the dais, Legend hasn’t moved.
But his body is failing him. He blinks slowly, as if he’s struggling to make sense of reality as every second passes.
The fake bond between him and Arabella must be screaming.
I can see it in the way his chest hitches, in the way his hand twitches toward his sternum like he wants to claw something out.
It glitches and flickers: a bond that was never supposed to exist trying to hold together against a force that eats lies for breakfast.
Come on, fate, you stubborn bitch. Help a girl out.
Arabella’s fingers dig into his arm hard enough to leave bruises, tiny cracks spreading through her porcelain composure like the ones climbing the bone walls. Her lips move, whispering something I can’t hear over the chaos—something desperate, something commanding.
It’s not working.
Zev hasn’t moved from my side. His hand stays firm on my waist, his breathing even, his eyes clear. Whatever the Nightkin is pouring into this room, it slides off Zev like water off stone.
“You good?” he asks, voice low, breath grazing my neck. I swear to God if Legend doesn’t come fast, I’m gonna pounce on Zev.
“Never better.”
Above, the dragons shriek.
It’s not their battle cry, but a frequency that vibrates through the windows and settles in my marrow. It’s anger and rage and amusement. The glass rattles in its frames. The sound feeds the chaos, amplifies it, sends another wave of bodies crashing together in the center of the room.
Chaos. It tastes like fucking chaos with the subtle powering notes of…calm.
I stand perfectly still at the center of it all, Zev warm at my back, taking it all in.
Legend’s growl moves through me like poison, and my eyes almost roll back. “Haide…”
“Mmm?” I ask, a smile deep on my face.
“Spread it further,” the Nightkin purrs, his voice sliding through my blood like warm honey. “To her. The little light witch standing so perfect in her white dress.”
My stomach clenches.
I watch Legend’s throat work, and something in my chest cracks open. He’s looking at me like I’m a stranger. Like I’m the thing he should have killed the moment he found me on that island.
“He already hates me,” I think back, the words bitter even in my own mind. “If I do this, if I touch her with this and it doesn’t work…there’s no coming back from it.”
“He doesn’t hate you, Hellpet. He doesn’t know how to feel what he actually feels. Now trust me, but more than that, trust yourself.”
My jaw tightens.
Trust. Such a simple word for something that tears you apart when it breaks. I trusted Legend. I trusted the bond. I trusted that what I felt was real, and he ripped it all away in front of everyone who mattered.
Now I’m supposed to trust the demon living in my chest.
A laugh bubbles up my throat, sharp and humorless.
Fine.
I let the power shift. It’s a small thing, barely a redirection, but I feel it move through me. The chaos bends and curves, sliding through the writhing bodies on the floor, past the sounds of skin and desperation—straight toward Arabella.
The moment it touches her, her spine arches.
Her lips part on a gasp that has nothing to do with fear. Her fingers twitch at her sides, and I watch them curl, watch her nails dig into her own palms hard enough to leave crescents.
“Haide,” Legend snarls, almost enough to snap me out of my self-induced chaos.
I cackle under my breath.
Arabella’s glassy eyes find mine, her pupils blown wide enough that the blue is barely a ring around all that black.
She looks hungry.
She looks exactly like what she is underneath all that light—under all that pretense.
“Stop,” Legend grinds out, but his voice is strained, fists trembling at his side. I can see the tension in his shoulders, the way his whole body is fighting against something he doesn’t want to name.
“Stop what?” I ask, all innocence. “Like what part?”
Arabella’s shaky hand reaches toward the nearest body—a guard who’s already on his knees, his mouth hanging open as he stares at her like she’s the food he’s been starved of.
“Legend,” she whimpers. Interesting. He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t so much as shift his focus from me.
I take the first step. “Your mate looks distressed, Lege.”
His lip curls, but he doesn’t disengage. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Another step, head tilting. “Maybe you should check on her?” I heighten my voice, all sweet like.
The Nightkin chuckles. “He sees you, Hellpet. You’re doing so good.”
My smile spreads.
Knight hasn’t moved. He stands at the edge of the dais, arms crossed, amusement curves his mouth, subtle but there.
London’s whole body vibrates with the effort of keeping her laugh contained.
Sinner lingers in the shadows near one of the bone arches, tracking every movement. Chaos spreads across his face, like he’s calculating exactly how to add his own piece to this game.
None of them stop me, but then again, why would they? They know what they did, and I’m the only one who can fix their mistakes.
Legend rises to his full height.
Everything else keeps moving around us, bodies and noise bleeding together into nothing. To me, there’s just him and the bond to him that doesn’t exist burning through my brain.
He takes one step forward.
Then another.
I don’t move. I don’t breathe. I just stand there with Zev and the Nightkin laughing low in my chest, waiting for whatever comes next.
His eyes drop to my mouth.
Then lower, to where Zev’s fingers splay across my abdomen. Something flashes across his face. It’s quick and brutal, and it looks almost like grief.
“Haide,” he says again, but softer this time.
My heart hammers against my ribs.
“Now,” the Nightkin whispers, “this is the part you’re not gonna like.”
“What?” I whisper back to the Nightkin.
Legend’s stare sharpens.
I gulp.
“This is the part he breaks.”
Arabella crumbles.
Her knees buckle as a raw sound tears from her throat, half sob, half moan, bouncing off the dais walls. The Argent light that always clings to her skin flickers and dies, leaving her pale and gasping in its absence.
Silence spreads outward from her in a wave, the chaos around us stuttering to a halt. Every head turns toward the woman who demanded my execution, who spoke of divine right and proper bonds, now reduced to a shuddering mess of need on the marble floor.
Her fingers claw at the stone. Her spine arches, mouth opening on another sound—this one is pure desperation.
“Legend.” His name breaks on her tongue.
He doesn’t move.
He stands frozen above her, his face a war I can read in every twitch of his jaw and every flutter of his pulse. Confusion. Because he’s watching something he should care about, something he should feel, and there’s nothing there but hollow habit.
“There it is,” the Nightkin whispers, satisfaction thick in my blood. “Watch him break.”
“How?”
“We are strong. Hellpet,” he reminds me. “Don’t think. Demand what is yours. Fate waits to answer your cries.”
“I don’t cry.”
“Do it, mate. He is yours, is he not?”
My power hits Legend before I even intend it.
It slams into his chest like a fist made of everything I am—everything I’ve become since he ripped our bond apart and left me bleeding on foreign soil.
His shoulders jerk back, hands rising slightly, like he’s trying to catch something invisible, and black smoke pours from his skin without his permission.
Fuck you. I hate you and her and how could you—
“Hellpet. Control yourself.”
The tendrils drift toward me through the wreckage. They curl through the air like fingers across the space between us like they know exactly where they belong.
The walls crack.