Chapter 11
ELEVEN
The room they’d been given was little more than a storage closet that had been hastily cleared and furnished with a single mattress and a wooden crate that served as a table.
The walls were the same reinforced metal plating Nadi had seen throughout the warehouse, welded together with crude efficiency rather than any concern for aesthetics.
It wasn’t luxury. But it was shelter. And it locked from the inside, which was key. It meant they could both sleep at the same time without having to take shifts.
A meal waited for them on the makeshift table—two bowls of what appeared to be mashed turnips, gray and lumpy, alongside portions of something that might charitably be called stew.
The meat in it was dark and stringy, with an earthy smell that suggested it had come from one of the Wild’s less appetizing inhabitants.
Nadi picked at her bowl with the provided spoon, a bent piece of metal that had probably been salvaged from shipwreck debris. “Well.” She smirked, stirring the turnips into something approaching edibility. “This is nostalgic.”
Raziel, to her surprise, had already finished half his portion and was methodically working through the rest without complaint.
No grimace of distaste, no commentary on the quality or presentation.
He ate like a man who’d known hunger and understood the value of sustenance regardless of its form.
She knew this kind of food didn’t really sustain him—he was a vampire, after all.
A curious thought that she ignored for the time being. It didn’t matter. “I’m sure none of this meets your standards.”
He paused, spoon halfway to his mouth, and gave her a look that was both amused and slightly predatory. “Were you expecting me to throw a tantrum? Demand silk sheets and vintage bloodwine?”
“Maybe not a tantrum, but at least some snide jokes.” She gestured at the sparse room around them. “You’re used to having rather more luxurious surroundings. Crystal goblets, servants, actual furniture.”
Raziel set down his spoon and leaned back against the metal wall. “Do you remember the story I told you about my mother and the fountain?” His voice was conversational, but there was something sharp beneath it.
She did remember. And she had seen her order him to strip naked and eat off the floor like a dog. “How could I forget?”
“That wasn’t an isolated incident.” He picked up his spoon again, continuing to eat as if discussing the weather.
“My mother had very specific ideas about discipline. About teaching lessons that would… stick. The kind that involved spending months at a time chained in the basement of my own home when I refused to obey.”
Her stomach churned at the idea. Or maybe that was the bug meat she was eating.
His tone remained level, almost clinical. “No furniture, no company, no comfort. Scraps pushed through a slot in the door when she remembered I existed. Walled up like I was already entombed. No blood to sustain me. Sometimes, a year would pass before she decided I’d learned my lesson.”
The casual way he said it—a year. She’d known his family were cruel, had seen glimpses of the psychological warfare they waged against each other. But this was something else entirely. This was systematic torture. “Raziel…”
“The point,” he continued, taking another bite of the stewed meat, “is that material goods are simply a sign of comfort. Of power. To be enjoyed when they are earned and deserved.” He met her gaze, his red eyes reflecting the dim light from the single bulb overhead.
“Right now, we have none, because we deserve none. We lost.”
There was no self-pity in his voice, no anger at their current circumstances. Just a matter-of-fact acceptance that made her chest ache in ways she didn’t want to examine.
“We’ll have to fight to regain everything we once had.” He jabbed his spoon back into the bowl of food. “We take it all back by force. And when we do, when we’ve earned it through blood and cunning and sheer refusal to die, then we’ll deserve luxury again.”
She studied his face in the uncertain light. “That’s a very pragmatic way to see defeat.”
“It’s the only way to see it and remain sane. If that’s what I am.” He scraped the last of the stew from his bowl. “My mother taught me many things, Nadi. Most of them were lessons in pain. But she also taught me that pining over past comfort is the fastest way to ensure you never reclaim it.”
The silence stretched between them, filled only by the distant sounds of the warehouse settling around them. Somewhere beyond their makeshift walls, she could hear the low murmur of voices, the occasional footstep on metal flooring.
“There’s something I need to ask you,” she said finally.
“Only one thing? How refreshingly brief.”
She ignored his jab and rolled her eyes. “When you spoke to Kassa today. You told her that from a purely practical standpoint, you were an improvement over Mael and Lana.”
“I did. I am.”
“You let her assume you’d changed your mind about enslaving the fae. Or killing them all.” She set down her spoon, giving him her full attention. “Have you?”
Raziel’s smile was slow, but sharp. “Changed my mind? No, little murderer. I haven’t.”
The admission should have shocked her. Instead, she felt only a familiar weariness. More games. More manipulation. “So you lied to them.”
“I didn’t lie. I let Kassa assume whatever she wanted to assume.
” Raziel’s tone was perfectly reasonable.
“I told her the truth—I am an improvement over my siblings. I don’t want all fae dead.
” He paused, tilting his head. “I don’t think Mael does either, for that matter.
Dead slaves produce no labor, after all. ”
“But you’re happy to let the Iltanis believe what they want to believe.”
“Of course.” He seemed genuinely puzzled by her concern. “They needed to hear that I wasn’t planning their immediate extermination. I needed their cooperation. Everyone got what they wanted.”
“Everyone except the truth.”
“The truth,” Raziel said through a long sigh, “is that I intend to rule this world. Everything else are simply… details to be negotiated later.”
She felt the familiar knot of concern forming in her stomach. This was the Raziel she’d first encountered—the one who saw people as chess pieces, who could justify any deception if it served his larger goals. “You’re playing them.”
“Yes. And so should you. You can’t trust them.”
At least he wasn’t pretending otherwise.
Seeing her expression, he set aside his empty bowl and moved closer to her on the narrow mattress. His hands were gentle as he cupped her face, thumbs tracing the line of her cheekbones. “Nadi. Look at me.”
Reluctantly, she met his gaze.
“Did you mean your words earlier? When you told me you loved me?”
The question caught her off guard. “Yes. I meant them.”
“And I meant mine.” His voice was soft, intimate in a way that made her chest tight. “I love you, Nadi. More than I thought possible. More than I ever wanted to.”
“Then why—”
“Because we cannot trust them.” His grip on her face became firmer, more insistent. “Any of them. Not Ebiti, not the Iltanis, not a single fae in this moons-forsaken place. They are not your people anymore, little murderer. They haven’t been for a long time.”
She knew her expression had gone hard. “And whose fault is that?”
“I know.” He showed no remorse. “And I won’t apologize.”
She nodded slowly. She didn’t expect him to be sorry. Didn’t want him to be, if she was honest with herself.
“The fae aren’t your people,” he continued, his thumbs still tracing patterns on her skin. “And the Nostroms are no longer mine. They never have been.”
They were both outcasts now, exiled from the families and peoples that had shaped them. Alone except for each other. And maybe that had always been the case. It just had taken them both eighty years to realize it.
“It’s us against the world, Nadi.” His voice was barely above a whisper. “We will have nothing unless we take it together. Just you and me and whatever we can carve out of this mess with our bare hands.”
She closed her eyes, leaning into his touch. The warmth of his palms against her cheeks was the only real comfort in this cold, metal box they’d been given. “That’s a terrifying way to live.”
“It’s the only way.” He pressed his forehead against hers. “But we will survive, little murderer. We’ll take what we want, destroy what stands in our way, and build something new from the ashes of the old world.”
“Something with you ruling it.”
“Something with us ruling it,” he corrected.
She opened her eyes to find him watching her with an intensity that made her breath catch.
There was love in his gaze, yes, but also something darker.
A possessiveness that should have frightened her but, instead, made her feel anchored, and strangely claimed in a way that… should have alarmed her, but didn’t.
“The others won’t understand,” she said. “When they realize what you really are, what you really want…”
“It will be too late.” His smile was all predator. “But until then, we play our parts. We give them what they need to hear, take what we need from them, and position ourselves for whatever comes next.”
“And if they find out you’re lying?”
“Then I’ll kill everyone in this warehouse except you and walk away.” He said it so casually, as if discussing plans for dinner. “But I don’t think it will come to that. People have a remarkable capacity for believing what they want to believe.”
He was discussing the mass murder of her people. It twisted something in her. She knew he was right—but the fae were her people. They had to be.
Eighty years. Eighty years of her life she had spent waiting to get revenge on his family. In return for all that the vampires had done to the fae.