She stares down at our joined fingers, horror blooming across her face. “No,” she whispers. “I couldn’t have. I would never?—”
“Yes.” My grip tightens, but I don’t confess that those screams she heard were mine. “That blood on your hands?Mine,” I breathe into her face. “Believe me, my deadly Elara, every second of it is seared into my memory.”
Her gaze meets mine again, desperate, pleading. “But not in mine.”
The words twist and fractures something inside me I didn’t know was left to break.
“Then why did you run? And where were you?” I snarl. “Where the hell were you while I tore eternity apart looking for your corpse?”
Her voice trembles now and her eyes brim with tears that cling to her lashes like priceless diamonds. “Buried. Bound. Hidden where no one could find me.”
“Explain yourself better, Elara. What does that mean?”
She lifts her hand, touches my jaw as if afraid I’ll vanish. “It means I died for you in every way that mattered.”
I feel the words, sharp as fangs, sink into the hollow place where my heart should be. Then I feel my own fangs descend, ready and eager to rip and rend.
But centuries of rage aren’t so easily exorcised.
I catch her wrist midair, pin it against the wall beside her head. My other hand finds her throat, perhaps to hurt, because,devil’s breath, I should end her right here right now and free us both of these tormenting lies.
But… I hold her still. Make her look at me.
“For the last time, speak plainly. What. Happened?”
“The coven. They made me swear. They made me drink. They made me do it…whatever I did to you was not of my own free will. I swear it, Lucien. Look it into my mind if you don’t believe me.”
I’ve never been a creature of restraint.
The glamour has always come easily to me. It did even when I was young, barely three thousand years into this endless curse, a master at bending mortals and monsters alike to confession with nothing but a glance.
Over the centuries, I’ve honed it further, carved it into a scalpel sharper than truth itself.
The last two hundred and fifty years gave me reason enough.
Every liar who whispered her name paid for their silence in screams. Every witch who dared to barter information found herself confessing her soul before I granted mercy.
I can strip a mind bare now in seconds, slip between thoughts, pull memories like threads from silk.
And yet, when I reach for her, the power trembles.
It takes three heartbeats. A breath. A whisper of intent. Her pupils dilate, her body sways, and then I’minside.
Her mind opens like a door that’s been waiting centuries to be touched.
What I see stops even my ancient heart.
Sorrow.
Searing, unrelenting sorrow.
There’s no deceit or guilt, only the endless ache of loss.
She’s reliving the night in fragments: the blood-red altar, the chanting, the moment her hands lifted the chalice to her lips as they forced her to drink.
I see the confusion, the terror, the spell flaring like wildfire behind her eyes as she approaches where I’m laid out, a bloody sacrifice to covetous witches. The look of realization too late to stop what’s already begun.
And then—darkness. Roaming among catacombs and headstones. Her own scream is cut off by silence. Repeatedly.Endlessly.
