Page 282 of Blade of the Nightking

"He told me you were evil." Each word trembled, my voice as impossible to steady as my magic. "Are you?"

He sat with the accusation in silence before asking quietly, "What do you think?"

I took him in. The hard lines carved into his face. The uncompromising set of his mouth. The vengeance burning in his eyes, and the suffering they promised.

But beneath it all lay something older. Something deeper. A sadness that had sunk its roots into the very foundations of who he was.

He'd been all cold cruelty when we'd first met—and, truthfully, he often still was.

Yet I'd seen gentleness in the hands everyone feared, a selflessness that had no business existing in a male the entire continent believed to be a monster. Slowly, other pieces of him had begun to emerge, each one hinting at how much more there was beneath the surface.

Small moments. Little glimpses.

The dimple in his left cheek when he smiled.

The laugh that escaped him when he was genuinely pleased.

The care he'd taken in unbuttoning my dress.

Each revealed another piece of him, and with every fragment the picture grew larger and larger, never replacing what had come before, only adding to it. Perhaps that was the truest thing of all. We were never only the best or the worst parts of ourselves. We were every kindness and every cruelty, every wound and every mercy, carried together until they became the whole of us.

He wasn't a mask concealing another face beneath. He was every contradiction at once, each layer laid honestly over the last, until the whole of him became something impossible to separate into neat pieces of monster and man.

He never became someone different.

He simply became more.

I didn’t need to answer his question. He found the answer in my face.

"Perhaps I deserved it," he went on. "Perhaps I went too far. Maybe if I hadn't done the things I did, they never would have taken Dannis."

The mention of Dannis made my stomach clench.

He leaned his head against the worn timber. "They told me that if I didn't surrender willingly to the Moiraithe, they'd kill him. Slowly. Brutally."

He closed his eyes for a fleeting moment.

"I didn't hesitate. I agreed to their terms. But before I surrendered, I made Aedric swear that Dannis would be spared. I looked him in the eye and made him promise my nephew would live."

He rubbed his thumb absently across his palm, as though grounding himself.

"The moment the Moiraithe bound their magic to mine and sealed my fate... the last thing I saw before they dragged me into the Veil was Aedric's knife turned on my nephew." His hand curled into a fist. "He cut off his ear and threw it at Levinica's feet."

I was going to be sick.

"The last thing I heard… was Levinica screaming. And Dannis crying for his mother."

He squeezed his eyes shut, a shudder passing through him.

"Those sounds followed me into the Veil. When you asked me what three hundred years in that place was like..." He swallowed hard. "It was that. An eternity of nothing, with only the screams of the people I loved echoing through the darkness, trapped while they suffered beyond my reach."

He opened his eyes again. The anguish was gone. In its place was something cold enough to freeze the blood in my veins. "I couldn't save Levinica—but I'll save Dannis. I don't care what I have to become or how many kingdoms fall before I find him. Aedric is only the beginning."

He held my gaze, as though waiting for me to defend my mate, to justify the things he'd done.

But I couldn't.

I'd learned too much about the darkness lurking beneath the male I'd loved, and I could no longer bring myself to excuse it. Not after this. Not knowing there was almost certainly worse still buried beneath everything I'd already uncovered.