Chapter 33 #2
I can’t take one more ounce of treachery.
“Tell her. Go on then,” Rhett encourages, gripping the back of the professors’ necks and moving toward us.
Finnley turns fully toward him, his arms outstretched. “Stop it, Rhett. Please. It’s not too late to undo all of this,” he pleads, desperation making his movements jerky.
Rhett shakes his head in disappointment. “How are we even blood related?” he asks on a shallow sigh. “Allow me, then.”
Finnley steps toward his brother.
“You move, and I’ll kill her,” Yaretta warns him.
He stops and looks into my eyes, full of remorse, as his brother continues talking.
“You see, dear Norissa, your father ruined our family. Tore us apart from the bottom and watched us crumble. All because he was a selfish bastard. Our father,” he growls, rubbing his chest where his heart should be, “loved our mother fiercely, but died protecting the realm from the very monsters in this room.” He points to the battle erupting around us.
“He gave his life to keep the wraiths at bay. And for what? The general to use them behind the people’s backs?
” he demands in anger. “You see, there are monsters everywhere, Norissa. Different kinds hiding among us.”
He tucks a few strands of hair behind Professor Hunstal’s ear, causing her to whimper behind her gag.
He pats her cheek in a condescending way.
“After his death, she did her best to raise me on her own, but she was pregnant with Finnley, and the loneliness was creeping into her bones. I wasn’t enough.
” He stares off for a second as if he’s in a different place and time.
The bellow of a wraith being torn in half by shadows causes him to remember where he is.
He starts talking again as if it isn’t madness to be having this conversation with pandemonium erupting around us.
“After her grieving period was over and she returned to active duty, she met your father.” He rubs his chin thoughtfully.
“Do you even know his name?” he asks, dipping his chin with a knowing smirk.
I bite the side of my cheek and continue to meet his stare. I won’t play his games, but a small part of me, the little girl who still wants a father, is hanging onto his every word, praying he tells me.
He drops his hand and starts pacing in front of the professors. “Well, his name was Solomon. Solomon Vynchael.”
I exhale sharply.
And for the first time since the torture started, a tear escapes.
“Our mother, Sierra, met your father during a breach of the wall. Their units were ordered to contain it. He decided that day that she was his mate.” He chuckles darkly.
“If you buy into that bullshit. Anyway, she fell desperately in love with him too, explaining it as a love they had no choice but to follow through on. A fierce, ferocious kind of attachment.”
The salt from my tears burns the various cuts on my face, but I’m thankful for the sting. Anything to balance out the way my heart is being eviscerated.
He looks at me, smiling low and cold. “The kind where he can leave his pregnant lover without a backward glance.”
The heart I protected for so long, fragments in my chest.
He doesn’t pause for my pain. “They were inseparable. To the point that nothing else mattered. Not even me. I was still young, young enough to need my mother. But I just needed to bide my time. You see, everything was about to change.” He ducks as a knife soars past his head.
“Solomon fell in battle, a conflict with an opposing kingdom, a misunderstanding, and our mother lost her mind with grief. She couldn’t accept that her mate was no longer in this life.
To put it mildly, she went mad,” he says.
“Ended up at Harkin House, where Finnley was born, and we were taken from her and raised in the broken homes of people desperate enough for coin to take in a pair of orphans.”
“Rhett, that’s enough,” Finnley says, inching closer.
Rhett ignores his brother. “Your mother, of course, found out about her ex-lover’s death, and his mate’s new home of padded walls and syringes.
As a high-ranking officer, she made sure we were never allowed to visit our mother.
” His angry eyes hold me captive. “She threatened every family we landed with.”
I swallow the bile coming up my throat.
A soft cry drags my attention to the professors. “Leave them out of this. They have nothing to do with our past. We have nothing to do with our past.”
Rhett shakes his head in denial. “Go ahead, Finnley, it’s your turn,” he orders. “Or Yaretta here will carve out your little friend’s jugular.”
To drive the point home, she digs the blade deeper, causing me to cry out.
Kingston’s head whips in my direction at the sound, shadows rushing toward me as he rips the heart out of a wraith’s chest with his bare hands.
He’s surrounded.
“You do that, and she’ll die before they reach me,” Yaretta screams at him.
Kingston grinds his teeth, swiftly decapitates another wraith coming at him and points his sword at Yaretta. Fury and the promise of pain reflect back.
The shadows stop right before they reach us.
His fully black eyes meet mine.
Hang on, Norissa.
I’m coming.
I can’t help the small tilt of my lip. This is the first time he’s ever called me by my first name.
“Okay,” Finnley says, holding up his hands. “Okay, I’ll tell her.” He looks up at the sky, then at the ground. He doesn’t meet my eyes as he speaks. “We needed to fix her.”
I silently beg him with my eyes to stop talking. If he would just look at me, he’d see I just want him to stop.
He clenches and unclenches his fists at his sides.
“To get her out of the continuous hell she lives in. There were rumors of a way to fix the mind, regardless of how broken it is. We spent years researching it, but we needed experts, which we clearly weren’t,” he says.
“We needed a dark object and an incantation for it to work. Rhett stole a dark object last year while he was at Kintoira, but being a Veil, he obviously couldn’t use it, so he kidnapped the alchemy professor.
” His jaw tightens and a muscle jumps as he speaks.
“We thought, with someone who knew about metals, we could find a way for the incantation and dark object to be used by a Veil. We couldn’t get it right, though, the research we were finding was in too many different dead languages.
We decided I would enroll in the academy to finish what Rhett started before he graduated,” he says, finally lifting his sorrow-filled eyes to meet mine. “Which is when I met you.”
I shake my head for him to stop. I don’t want to hear anymore.
Please just stop.
He runs a hand through his limp curls and stares at me with so much raw vulnerability. His ashy brows furrow as my eyes widen in alarm. A wraith is approaching him from behind, and there isn’t enough time for him to react.
I watch in slow motion as its rotten fingers reach out for Finnley’s hair. It’s the maze all over again. Only it’s not.
This time will change everything.
My mouth is open on a silent scream, a refusal filled with fury and regret. When I think I’m about to fragment on the pain I’m having to bear witness to, an arrow pierces its throat, and the wraith crumples at Finnley’s feet.
I drag my eyes up to Ambrose, who’s fighting his way through a horde, trying to get to me. He throws his bow down, flames rising from his palms as he starts burning through the abominations again.
There’s a desperation to his movements.
His skin is pale and soaked with sweat. He’s going to burn out. And when he does, they’ll descend on him like the plague they are and take the last thing I have worth living for.
I can’t let that happen.
I won’t let that happen.
Finnley steps away from the dead wraith and walks closer to me, staring at his feet as he does so.
“We didn’t know about Liminals yet. They were wiped from our texts as you now know.
” He smiles sadly. “I was working on finding another dark object for Rhett to give the professor to work with. But then you placed as a Liminal. Both Veil and Noctryn.” He looks at me as if I’m something precious.
“It was like you fell in my lap,” he says, hanging his head.
“You already considered me a friend. I knew I could use you to help us.”
“Look at me when you speak of betraying me,” I say in a soft, broken whisper, as blood drips down my chest. The gray shirt is brittle with dried blood. It’s now a mesh of rust-colored stains co-mingling with the vibrant crimson of fresh blood.
He raises his head. “I didn’t want to use you, Nori. I couldn’t. Which is why I kidnapped Professor Hunstal and stole another dark object instead.”
Rhett clears his throat. “That’s close enough. She can hear you from where you stand.”
The sound of Kingston and Ambrose fighting their way through the endless army is a chaotic symphony of violence surrounding us.
Finnley stops approaching and doesn’t even look at his brother.
“I figured with an expert in language and an expert in alchemy, we could use the old texts to figure out an incantation to create our own dark object. But…” He rubs his face with both hands, clearly agitated by the turn of events.
“I’m sure you put two and two together that we ended up needing a Noctryn after all.
What dark wielder is going to help a light wielder, though? ” He laughs darkly. “Unlikely.”
Rhett claps his hands together in quick succession. “Which is why we needed you. Because you are not only Noctryn, but a Liminal. End of story,” he says with finality. “Thank you, Finnley.”