“My father was innocent,” she said.
“My father was not. But he did teach me a hard lesson. Fucking gutted me at the time, but it stayed with me, a shadow in every nightmare. And now, two hundred fifty-odd years after that wretched, soul-crushing day, it comes back to taunt me.” He took a step toward her. Another. “Do you want to know what it was, little moonflower?”
She shook her head, tears gathering in her eyes, but Gabriel was done catering to her emotions. Done carving out his own damn heart and handing it over like a fucking whipped dog.
“My father was a scientist, above all else,” he said. “Constantly curious, constantly experimenting.Dissecting.”
The word made her shiver, her face turning deathly pale, but Gabriel pressed on.
“His work drove him to madness. To isolation. Dorian and the others dealt with it better than I—always off on one adventure or another, leaving me behind. For most of my childhood, my only friend was a blind, deaf goat we’d aptly named Nuisance, for all the trouble she caused. It was a wonder my father hadn’t sold her off for meat years earlier.”
Gabriel shook his head, a sad smile touching his lips as he remembered the damn goat, chewing through the leather tack, kicking down her stall door, following Gabriel like a shadow, sticking her nose in all the myriad places it didn’t belong.
“One day, when I was maybe seven years of age, I’d been left home alone, forgotten in one of the usual chaotic departures of a family trip to London. I was tired of talking to that deaf goat, and decided I needed to find a more stimulating activity. Something that might impress my father.”
“Gabriel, you don’t have to tell me This. I—”
“My siblings and I were expressly forbidden from entering his study, but on this day, I convinced myself he’d forgive me once he realized why I’d done it. Once he saw the budding genius in his midst. Alone in that big, empty manor, I broke into his study, retrieved his medical bag, and scanned the shelves of preserved organs and fetuses, looking for inspiration.”
The memory came back to him easily, the smell of the formaldehyde, the weight of those heavy glass jars, the sound like a wet slab of meat as he removed the fetal pig from the jar and dropped it on a piece of newsprint.
An operation, he’d called it. Cutting and slicing, rearranging, making careful notes and sketches just as he’d seen his father do a hundred times as he and his brothers took turns gazing through the keyhole, desperate for the barest glimpse of the man they hardly even knew.
Jacinda’s face grew paler with every word, but Gabriel wouldn’t stop. Not until he got to the lesson.
“I was so convinced my father would be proud, impressed even, that when he returned from the trip and responded to my operation with silence, with nothing but a graying of the face and a shake of his head, I was heartbroken and confused. Perhaps something had happened in London, I thought, to sour his mood. Perhaps he and my mother were locked in another of their infamous battles.
“Three days and nights passed, and I hadn’t seen my father. Not once. On the fourth night, I awoke to a terrible screaming—the sound one of our mares in labor. Her shrieks terrified me. I hoped she and the colt would survive the night.”
Gabriel closed his eyes and took a deep breath, the memory of those screams rattling him even now.
“The next morning, I went outside to check on the mare, to see if I might be allowed to name the new colt. But instead of a baby horse and Aiden, who worked in our stables with his father at the time, I found my father, standing in the very last stall, six inches of blood-soaked hay covering his boots. On the floor at his feet, Nuisance lay slaughtered.”
Jacinda gasped, and Gabriel opened his eyes, forcing the ice back into his tone, back into his heart, shutting it all down once more.
“My fatherevisceratedthat poor animal, Jacinda. An animal with no vision, no hearing, no concept of what was happening to her. And that man waited through the night, through the dawn for me to come. When I looked up into his face, there was no anger, no rage, no sign of a crazed murderer. Only the cold face of the father I despised. He handed me a shovel and ordered me to clean up the mess as calmly as if I’d spilled a glass of water at dinner.
“He watched me shovel up her remains, bits and pieces of the only friend I had. Watched me scrub out the stall, my hands raw, her blood staining my clothes. And for every whimper or tear that fell, he lashed me with a saddle strap, the scars ensuring I’d never forget the lesson.”
In the shocked silence that followed the telling, Gabriel heard Jacinda’s heartbeat. Heard her breath. Heard the echo of the old man’s voice, still haunting him. Taunting him.To be weak is to be a victim, Gabriel. You find me cruel, perhaps, but strength comes in learning to control your emotions. To hide your weaknesses until they become so dark and small, they simply vanish…
That was the day Gabriel learned how to turn his heart to ice. Later, when his brothers asked why he was limping, when they asked what had happened to Nuisance, when they asked why their father had locked them all out of the stables that day, he lied, swiftly and easily, telling them only that she’d died of old age. And later, when he crept out to the ditch behind the stables and found her remains, crawling with flies in the hole where he’d left her, he buried her properly, and with every shovel full of dirt, he found he could no longer cry.
That he no longer cared.
His emotions—his weaknesses—had truly vanished, just like his father had promised. And in the void left behind, a new power swept through him. A coldness no one could touch. A wildness that set him free.
Now, he gripped the demon’s jaw, the menace in his touch matching the menace in his heart, and repeated his father’s final words, the harshest words, wishing he’d heeded them sooner.
“Bemerciless, Gabriel Redthorne, or you will find yourself at the mercy.”
The old king’s voice cut across the centuries, the continents, trembling in Gabriel’s own voice, in his touch, in the eyes of the woman who’d betrayed him.
“What happened over these past few months was the result of a distraction,” Gabriel said. “A weakness I nearly let drive me to ruin.” He released her jaw. Turned his back on her. “It won’t happen again.”
He felt the ache of her pain, heard the hard thump of her heart. His own echoed the same miserable beat, but he ignored it. Shoved it down. Wrapped it in ice, just like his father had taught him.
“But… Viansa,” she said, desperation leaking into her voice. “We can’t let her run wild here, Gabriel. She’ll destroy the city, and then she’ll move on to an even bigger target. She won’t quit until she figures out how to break down the hell gates for good. We have to stop her.”
