Chapter 16
A Man’s Guiding Hand
“Your death wish was almost granted tonight, you arrogant, reckless asshole!”
The door slammed.
Jesstin’s brief peace was ended by the rough syllables of Elloven’s charged entrance. His head felt like someone had thrown a handful of briars inside and shook him for hours. He didn’t remember crawling into the pile of blankets on the floor.
“Did you hear me? Are you mad? No, don’t answer that.
Don’t bother with some clever, snappy little answer that means nothing.
I already know you’re mad, Jesstin, utterly and irrevocably insane.
” The floorboards shifted with her stormy approach.
Her shadow slid over him like a threat. Derision blazed in her irises, her expression.
.. Even her hair was like wildfire. She was still wearing that dense, uninspired lump of tan-colored fabric, which on anyone else would have been unmemorable, but it underscored the shelf of her hips, the arc of her ass.
Jesstin saw himself running his hands down her sides, feeling the rough scratch of the canvas on his palms and memorizing the path her curves led him on.
“Are you intoxicated? Is that why you’re just staring at me?” Elloven cried. “Is it why you... Why you did that?”
He propped himself up against a chair. He’d had the spirit kicked out of him before, but this was a litany of burns and throbs he couldn’t focus on long enough to identify.
“Are you going to say something to me? Anything?” Her mouth was wide with her incredulous anger. Her hands were shaped like claws at her sides.
“Something. Anything.” Jesstin inched his elbows onto the chair to stand. Nope. Not yet.
Elloven tilted her head toward the ceiling.
“Are you really so strangled by two terrible men that you’d give them all this power over you?
You’d just let them win?” Her head swung back down.
She licked the corner of her lips with a scowl.
“Or is it just easier for you to use your fathers as an excuse to be a jerk?”
Fury got Jesstin the rest of the way to his feet. The audacity to say such a thing, to him? She should know better. “Could it be any dumber than agreeing to fly through the air, the air, with people you just met? You can’t even defend it, because it was an absolute disaster.”
She shook her head in protest.
“Or... Are you really upset because you’ll never see the stable hand again?”
Elloven cupped one hand to her throat. “You don’t understand. You only think you do.”
“No! I don’t!” Jesstin cackled. She was incredible.
How could someone so brilliant be so dense?
Who was she to poke holes in his life, to add her unwelcome analysis?
She was a whirlwind, an unmitigable hurricane he couldn’t run fast enough from.
There was no one, no one, not even his fathers, he loathed more in that moment, and just as he thought he could not loathe her more, tears tickled his eyes.
If she were a man, he’d have taken her by the neck and thrown her out the door.
He wanted her gone, gone, gone, fucking out of his face, his head, his life.
That was what he should have asked for at the labyrinth, an absolute erasure of Elloven Hawthorne from his mind.
But there were other ways to make her leave.
“Furthermore, Aelloven, you want to brand me a coward?” He didn’t pause to talk himself out of it.
Reason had never served him, and if she wasn’t so deliberately ignorant, she’d see the same was true of her own life.
“And yet you were the one who lived seven fucking years with a man who abused you and invited his friends to join, when you knew, you knew you could end it.” He laughed harder, though his heart was sick, racing out of control. “It fits you better to be the victim.”
Elloven paled. She stepped closer to a chair and gripped it.
He’d gone too far, but he couldn’t stop.
He was a loose cart raging down a steep hill with nothing to slow him.
“And you let him brand you... brand you like cattle, and he continued to breathe? I saw your thigh. That isn’t a recent wound.
It’s years old. Years old, and he had years more to keep hurting you, over and over and over, when you could have ended it. That was a choice, Elloven.”
Her gaze shifted slowly to the blankets, her eyes puckering at the sides.
His most primal urge was to kiss away every tear he’d caused, but what he most wanted was to make more fall.
The monster coursing through his blood had finally broken free, and it wasn’t nearly as terrible as he’d expected.
It was liberating... no longer having to pretend to be better than his heritage.
No more hiding behind the Azure or his reputation or even the kindness he’d tried to preserve but had only brought him more misery.
Never take back what has been said. There’s no greater deception than the lie that replaces truth.
Not Asterin’s wisdom, but Mathias’s. He’d been talking to one of his associates.
When Jesstin was still quite young, Mathias would sometimes allow him to sit quietly in the corner of his office while he worked.
Occasionally he’d even explain what he’d heard, later, when it was just the two of them.
Moments like those were few, but they were the pieces of his past hardest to relinquish.
Elloven cried silently as her fingers tapped her leg. She squeezed her eyes shut, sending more tears rolling, then wiped them and sat straighter. “Why didn’t you tell me you were a necromancer?”
I didn’t even know the damn word until we got here! is what he thought, but not what he said. “Why didn’t I tell you what I ate for breakfast two weeks ago? Or when I last enjoyed a shit?”
“Your crude equivalence is fallacy, but you know it.” Her fire returned, almost like it had never left. “How long have you been speaking with the dead, Jesstin?”
“I don’t have to tell you a damn thing.”
“Can you speak to Gen?”
The moment he’d dreaded had finally come, and he didn’t feel as panicked as he’d thought he would. Maybe it was time to tell her—to show her who he really was so she could stop pretending he wasn’t like his fathers. Sweetheart, I’m just like them.
It wasn’t for her sake he held back. He wasn’t ready to die, not in a wretched place like Rivenholde.
Jesstin smirked. “You know what I can do? I can see what’s right in front of me.”
Elloven’s hands shot to her hips. “Fine, say it. What am I not seeing, Jesstin?”
“You had to come all the way here to learn Wilder Hawthorne wasn’t your father? The man was tall and swarthy, not pale and... and redheaded like you and Gen. You’ve been looking in a mirror your whole life and couldn’t see it.”
“And why should a child question whether their parents are their own?”
“How did you miss that you weren’t Esme’s either?”
Elloven laughed. “You’re unbelievable.”
“She’s not your mother, Elloven. Esme kidnapped you and Gen when you were just children. Even she could see how dangerous these assholes are.” Jesstin shrugged with an oops gesture. “The dead told me.”
“What a lie to spill, and just to hurt me,” Elloven said.
She marched up to him, and he stepped back, the dance continuing until his back was against the wall.
The crackling fire lit half of her face, leaving the rest in darkness.
They were, both of them, living, breathing dualities.
On one side, their true natures. On the other, the ones they’d contrived.
“You’re cruel and broken, Jesstin. What could you ever offer anyone but misery? ”
Jesstin banged his head against the wall with a dark cackle. “Oh, Elloven, Elloven, Elloven. At least I can learn from my mistakes instead of racing into the same patterns over and over, thinking, ‘This time is different. This time he really loves me.’”
“You preach to me about mirrors, and you haven’t looked into one your entire life!” She slapped the wall by his shoulder.
“My deepest condolences for banishing that twat from your life. How will you ever know what to do if he’s not there to tell you?”
Her other hand joined the one pinned on the wall.
Jesstin was blocked in by a woman whose head barely reached his chin, but he couldn’t have moved if he’d wanted.
Her breath seared his neck ahead of her words.
“I asked you before, and you refused to answer, but there’s nothing holding back your hatred for me now, so tell me, Jesstin, why you’re so protective of me with Taven.
You won. They offered you anything you want, anything.
You could have asked them to break our bond, but you didn’t.
You wanted him gone more, and you will tell me why. ”
Jesstin could have pushed her away with such little effort, so why didn’t he?
Why was he instead uncomfortable and sweating, drunk on her breath, her perspiration?
“Pointing out the obvious danger he presents isn’t protecting you.
It’s stating the fucking obvious. But I can see how you might not know the difference. ”
“You could have been free of me, but you didn’t ask for that.
Why?” She lifted up, still not tall enough to meet eye-to-eye but enough to show she wasn’t backing down.
He wanted to peel his clothes off just to be free of the oppressive energy binding him in place, her pulse drumming in the wrist that brushed his shoulder in the muggy, charged air.
Her body hummed like a bird, like she might implode or take flight.
He swallowed, flinching. “You don’t... think I’m into you, do you?” The laugh that followed was hollow and unconvincing, even to his own ears, but she didn’t relent. Her mouth was near enough to the bottom of his that shifting an inch would bring them together.