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I went as still as the dead, my eyes wide open. Like hell was I closing them in the company of three strangers, especially when they said Nightmare was following us. That, I believed. Them rescuing me? Not so much.
My bride this time. Not little bride.
I was mad, right? I was completely and utterly insane to be thinking what I was thinking. Because Nightmare had said where is the bride of death and he’ll like you—a scared little rabbit with fire in her eyes. Yes, he’ll like you very much.
Was this rider the he she spoke of? I sucked air in sharp, painful breaths. Had I been given to him like a toy, something to play with and break? We’re her sworn fucking enemies. I didn’t buy it. This was fucked up and four people were dead and I felt wrong down in my bones, like my skin didn’t fit right over them.
“I can’t take this,” the third rider spoke, quiet and serious. She’s here, he’d said, as if he could feel Nightmare closing in on us, feel her sinister power reaching out like it had that night and—
The horse on our left nudged closer, the rider leaned across the distance, and cool fingers circled my wrist. All my anxiety, all my stress, my suffering, vanished, swept away at sea, the tide returning only measured calm to me.
The rider released my wrist but I didn’t move, didn’t know how to react. I’d never felt this before, not for as long as I could remember. It was… empty. Strange. The place inside me that was always heavy and tight with stress was hollowed out. No, unburdened. Cleared, like my chest was a cluttered room and he’d tidied everything until there was logic and sense and space.
Air rushed into that space, and all I could do was freeze and blink. I’d never known my lungs could take in so much air. Never known I’d been living on rations.
“Fuck,” I breathed, staring absently at the road, the moorland cloaked in grey fog on either side of us. “What did you—how did you do that?”
He didn’t answer, only nudged his horse away.
“Questions and answers later,” the rider holding me said, something final and decisive in his voice. “Close your eyes, bride, or don’t blame me if you see something you wish you hadn’t.”
I shrugged. I wasn’t closing them.
“So be it,” he murmured, and kissed the shell of my ear. Cold shivers flashed down my body, turning rapidly hot. But I knew what they planned and I hated it. I seethed. More men who felt entitled to shit they didn’t deserve, just like June those years ago. My nostrils flared with my next breath, darkness and rage gathering inside me.
Kill them. Kill them now before they can hurt you.
The rider behind me jolted like he heard the voice too. I hoped he did, hoped he knew what would happen the second his kisses wandered below my neckline.
I was so distracted by thoughts of violence they could inflict on me, and violence I could unleash on them, that I missed the moment when our surroundings changed. My eyes focused back on the road when the rider’s arm tightened around me, and I sucked in a whimpering breath at the sight of a dark castle rising above us where the village had been.
“Oh god, how—?"
The castle towered over us, twice as tall as Milton Hall, a black, gothic conflagration of towers, spires, bridges, flying buttresses, beautiful tracery, and windows of stained glass but in shades of colourless grey instead of jewel tones.
“Death is everywhere, and can be found in any place,” the rider behind me murmured, feathering a kiss across the sensitive spot behind my ear. “Now, it will answer to you. You can access my domain whenever you wish.”
I swallowed. Ignored the tingling in my neck and held onto the unease rapidly rushing into the empty place in my chest where my anxiety lived. “Your domain.”
I knew. I didn’t want to. I really didn’t want to. But I knew who held me, who spoke with such care and tenderness, who was warm and solid and kissing my skin like I was precious to him.
Where is the bride of death?
Little bride, he’d called me. And then my bride. And now here was a dark castle in the middle of Ford’s End where it hadn’t existed a minute ago, and the horses weren’t exactly solid or living under us and—magic. Again. Undeniable and real.
“My domain,” he confirmed, fingers stroking my stomach. “The realm of Death.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
TORMENT
Iloved wearing a helmet. No one knew when you were grinning your head off, an uncontrollable smile curving your cheeks until they literally hurt. She was so fucking cute. The bride. Our bride. Cute and sexy and afraid and a little dangerous. An aura of death clung to her, a whisper of violence, and it made me hard in a damn instant. Swathed in the dark cloak of death, no one could see my hard-on.
I was rarely jealous, but I wanted to be the one holding her, feeling her body against mine. Would she be soft? Curvy? Warm? God, I could almost feel her in my arms and the imagined sensation had me biting back a groan. I hadn’t been with a woman in… fuck, over seven hundred years. When I’d been alive, before I became Torment.
It wasn’t that no woman had ever caught my eye, but they never held my interest the way Death and Miz did. No one else truly understood what it meant to be a god linked to death, to be in torment every second of every day. Well, maybe the other gods, but they were conceited dicks. Plus, women tended to lose interest in me when they realised with a single touch, I could give them the most unbearable pain, drag them through every unspeakable memory and fear they’d ever had, and intensify those emotions until there were only two results—madness and death.
That was a pretty rapid mood killer.
