55. Willow
Chapter 55
Willow
E mrys stalks down the tunnel at a breakneck pace. With nowhere else to go, I follow. After a few strides, he glances over his shoulder, eyes flashing. “Why are you following me?”
“Where else am I supposed to go?” I shoot back.
He continues walking, ignoring me. After a few more paces, he rips off his jacket and hurls it at me. “Go away,” he bellows.
I dodge it, fire blazing in my veins. “There’s nowhere to go!”
Torchlight catches his eyes, making them gleam with an unhinged intensity. I step back instinctively. But then he spins and keeps walking.
“Why did you save me then?” I shout after him. “You hate me so much. Why not finish on a high after humiliating me and leave me with the Nightmares?”
He doesn’t answer.
The longer we walk, the more my fever rages. Shivers wrack my body despite every inch of me burning up. Embarrassing squeaks escape as I suffocate my urges. Sweat slicks my spine. Hot need pulses between my legs. Eventually, Emrys whirls around so fast it startles me.
“How did you do it?” he demands, voice raw. “How did you manipulate the Chimera to your will?”
“What. The. Fuck are you talking about, Emrys?”
“You made it look like me.” The word ‘me’ drips with disgust. “Like you actually desire me.”
“I didn’t make it do anything. You said so yourself. It takes the form of my most erotic fantasy.”
“You only fantasized about me because I left you wanting.”
I jab my finger in his face. “For the record, that was not okay.”
“Turning your desire against you?”
“Manipulating me,” I shout. “Humiliating me. Playing with my heart!”
He smiles bitterly. “I did warn you I liked its song.”
“Fuck you,” I choke. “Just because someone hurt you once doesn’t mean you have the excuse to pass that pain onto others.”
I storm past him, leaving him in my dust. Another queen hurt him, but I refuse to be his punching bag. I have no idea where I’m going or where this tunnel leads, but I’m walking first.
He overtakes me, muttering about losing his mind.
As we stubbornly continue alongside each other, the tension between us ebbs and flows like a tide. At times, he slows his pace, allowing me to catch up. I almost think he’s doing it to check on me. Other times, he speeds up as if trying to outrun his thoughts.
“Mates,” he scoffs after a while. “Another pretty lie to chain us.”
His steps become less sure, his resolve wavering. He keeps throwing glances my way, each one lingering longer than the last. At one point, he stumbles, and I reach out to steady him. My fingers latch around his wrist—above the glove. Skin-to-skin contact. A jolt of electricity passes between us.
He jerks away as if burned, but not before I see the naked desire in his eyes—and the agony.
“Don’t,” he growls, but it sounds more like a plea than a command.
“Emrys—”
He backs away, shaking his head. “This isn’t real. It can’t be. You’re in my head, influencing me like the others.”
The pain in his voice is palpable, and I realize how deep his wounds go. This is trauma, like my fear of water. Something happened to him, and it won’t be easy to heal. After Rory died, I had five years supported by a loving family. What did he have?
“I’m sorry,” I mutter. “The pheromones are always more intense among mates, especially when I’m in heat.”
For a long moment, he stares at me, conflicted. Then, with a sound that’s half growl, half groan, he surges forward, pinning me against the moss-covered wall. The scent reminds me of Fox, and my heart breaks.
“Prove it,” Emrys clips, his lips a breath away from mine. “Prove this isn’t just another trick.”
The challenge hangs between us, charged with tension and unknowns. I look into his eyes and see a man teetering on the edge, desperately wanting to believe but terrified of being hurt again.
“I thought I was proving it,” I whisper.
“You’ve proven nothing.” He rolls to the side, revealing a door. We’re at the end of the tunnel.
He leans back, appraising me down his nose, waiting for something. He is the picture of predatory nonchalance, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Fox joked about the gods making me specifically for them. I never believed it. But as I stand here, raging inside over Emrys’s behavior and somehow still fighting my urge to rip his clothes off and lick him all over, I think Fox is right. What if we have no power in our fate?
“Where are we?” I ask. “Where does it lead?”
“The Clock Tower.”
Whispers of conversation filter through the door, coaxing me closer. I press a tentative hand against the surface. A tornado of magic burns against my skin. I gasp and pull back, stung.
Curious, brave, or perhaps foolish, I press my ear to the door. The voices whizz by, but the harder I concentrate, the easier it is to identify individual sounds: Bodin’s deep rumble, Legion’s velvety confidence, Emrys’s rasp, and more. The whirling magic steals them away again. Then I hear something that chills me to the bone.
Me. My voice when I’m younger.
I round on Emrys, and puzzle pieces start clicking into place. He never seems to have memory slips, even though he spends so much time at the palace. His seething hatred of me is because I’m yet another queen in a very long line of them. And back at the stables, when his hand dipped between my legs—unlike Bodin, he knew how to pleasure me. He knew so well that he sensed when I was close to climax and pulled away to hurt me most.
“You have your memories,” I accuse him, looking at the door. “You found them in there.”
His lips twist into a knowing smile.
Fury pumps my fever to new heights. I launch at him, slam my palms beside his head, and snarl, “How can you betray your brothers like this?”
His humor dies, replaced by something agonized. Sweat glistens on his skin, sparkling under the torchlight, but hungry desperation is on the verge of snapping in his gaze. His broad chest heaves. The black tattoos on his neck seem to writhe, to ripple in response to his inner struggle. When I glance down the length of his body, I see the evidence of his arousal bulging his breeches. I wish seeing him didn’t affect me, but I am powerless against my attraction, my need, and this close, our breaths mingle. My mouth goes dry.
I can’t tell if I want to kiss him or kill him. My hands slide down the dirty wall, and I step back.
“Through the tower is the only way out of here,” he says, voice rough.
“Why haven’t you shared this information with the rest of your hive?”
“Why do you think?”
I think about Legion’s vow, their Seventh’s death, and Bodin’s overprotective tendencies and shame over those feathers. Fox truly believed I was to be their salvation, their freedom. According to him, they all thought that. Varen sacrificed his sanity for it.
“They wanted me from day one. But you didn’t.” I glance down. “Because you think I want to control you?”
His head leans back against the wall, and he fists himself through his pants. “This is what you do to me. All I have to do is breathe the same air as you, and this happens. It sickens me. You sicken me. You are not freedom. You’re another cage.”
“I’m sorry you think that.”
His shoulders slump, and he lets go of himself. “You can either go in there, walk through all our darkest memories, risk insanity . . . or stay here and prove I’m right. But I’ll still make you crawl to me. Beg for it.”
“That’s not really a choice, is it?”
“Now you’re catching on.” His long lashes flutter, and he sighs. “There’s no point denying it. No one controls their fate. You can’t go in there any more than I can resist you out here.”
“You think I won’t do it?” I spit back at him. “You think I don’t have what it takes to go in there, witness who you all really are, and still love you afterward?”
A cruel laugh escapes him. “This is not about love. It’s not about enduring the suffering. It’s about the pain,” he says, “and the fear. You think you know us, little moth. You think you want to be with us because the gods threw us together. You have no idea what we’ve done. You have no idea what we still want to do. But if you walk through that door, you’ll see what it’s like to be with us . . . it won’t be love,” he says, his voice full of pity. “We’d destroy you, pull you apart. It is in our nature. This is what we’re made for.”
We stand there, staring at each other. He’s waiting for me to make the first move.
“Why don’t you go in first?” I suggest. “Or is this all a lie?”
“I’ve already been in.” He lifts his chin. “If I go twice, I might end up like Varen.”
I gasp. The Clock Tower, the moving castle, Varen’s insistence that the honeycombs are broken and need to be repaired . . . Emrys always telling Varen to shut up, ripping his scribblings from the walls.
“All this time,” I growl. “You knew this castle is linked to your bindings, to the seals stifling your powers. This is what Varen has been trying to tell us.”
His eyes glitter, nostrils flaring.
“Styx found out, didn’t he?” I say. “And that’s how he ended up getting turned to stone. You didn’t want him to tell everyone else, so you told Titania he knew.” My mind races, eyes darting to and fro as information bombards me. “He was confused and forgetful when he came out of the stone. But he insisted he was set up. He must have remembered recently. He dropped me near you, hoping I’d learn your secrets.”
That glitter turns into a wicked grin. “Don’t look so surprised.”
“But you haven’t broken the seal on your powers, have you?” I challenge. “Otherwise, you’d have flickered us out of the stables.”
He grinds his teeth, clenching his jaw.
His reaction tells me I’m right. Something different happened with Styx. Maybe it has something to do with being turned to stone. I have to tell the others. My hand grips the doorknob when something else occurs to me.
The Nightmares were rounded up so fast it surprised Legion. I glimpsed a Nightmare in the woods but then realized it was only Styx doing a perimeter sweep.
“Styx is at the end of your hive’s chain of command.” Disappointment leaks from my eyes. “Legion said he was a bad leader once, so he’s vowing to put his happiness last to prove you all can trust him. But you—you know Styx is afraid of you. He holds no power where all of you are concerned, and instead of making him feel safe, you used him to betray us. You’re as bad as the queens who manipulated you.”
I must hit a chord because he has no reply. Shaking my head, I turn the doorknob.
“I should warn you,” Emrys says. “It will hurt less if you stay and fuck me.”
“You think you’re the only one who’s made friends with pain?” I growl. He opens his mouth to speak, but I continue. “I’ve had to kill my friends. I’ve had to kill strangers. I’ve had to kill animals. A madman manipulated me. I’ve watched innocent people be murdered because of me. I raised an army of the dead. My magic was stripped and then used to curse me. I watched my aunt—a victim of cruelty—sacrifice herself for me. I watched the look in my parents’ eyes change from love to pity to helplessness. I watched my only friend, my protector, jump before a Wellhound to save me and die. I watched the blood of my new friend cool because I was too late to save him from a cruel world I summoned.” My throat closes up. Tears burn my eyes. My next words are a harsh whisper. “Since I started going into heat, I’ve been stifling my urges because I’m different. And that made me feel so alone. Not once have I let someone else touch me to ease the agony. Not once have I felt safe enough to explore these desires until you—and we were surrounded by Nightmares!”
“Willow—”
“I’m not done!” I am shouting now. Shaking and blind with tears and rage. “I watched Fox sacrifice himself, become stone, to protect me. Because you lied about this! Pain comes in all shapes and sizes, Emrys. Anything you want to throw at me, I can take.”
I fling open the door and charge into the hurricane.