Page 143 of The Silversmith

“It’s the truth. I have no wife—no love—but you.” He cupped the back of my head through my hair. “I should have told you, I was going to tell you, but I was trying to let you live here, in this life.” He stroked my cheek and scanned my face like I was fragile and fleeting. “And I’m so sorry I let you believe for a single fucking second that you’re not the only thing I’ve ever loved.”

But it wasn’t possible, and I would be damned if this was the last moment of my life. Watching the man I loved become so desperate for the woman he’d lost that he would insert me into some sick redemption dream. Reality mocked my heart, taunted me with a love that came so close but I would never have. And now, the gaping pit of emptiness drilled deeper and deeper into my chest, hellbent on being the last thing I would ever feel.

“You’re wrong,” I whispered.

“I’m not wrong. I need you to remember.” He kissed my forehead, then my cheeks. “Please, gods, please—I need you to remember what you can do, or he will—”

“I’m so glad you’ve decided to join us, my son.”

Gavin froze, his ruggedly beautiful features fractured by terror. His large form curled around me, shielding me.

“‘Son’?” I breathed.

He watched, sorrowful, as horror slithered through me.

“Put down our little pet, Smyth.”

“No.” Gavin’s steel grip on me tightened.

“Put her down,” Molochai gritted out, “or she will suffer for it.”

Gavin looked down at me, brow furrowed with pain, eyes wet with tears. “He cannot know.” His lips barely moved. “What you are to me, who you are. He cannot know.”

He lowered me to the ground.

“Gavin?” I choked, a sob escaping from my throat. It was instinct, not logic, that kept me latched to him. Pure survival. My weak fingers gripped him like a child being torn from its mother. “Gavin!”

“Hate me,” he whispered with a gentle kiss on my forehead, “and use it.”

I cried—not because I was afraid of Molochai. I was, but I had accepted my fate, knowing that choosing to come here would end my life one way or another.

I cried because he set me down like he was obeying Molochai. Like he belonged to him.

And learning that, if it were true… was worse than dying.

“Why?” I wept, defeated, lost in disorienting torrents of terrible possibilities. I wept because Gavin left me lying there on the ground. My wolf slayer. My protector. My teacher. The man I loved. He left me crumpled in a puddle of mud and blood, barely clothed, protected only by the shirt he’d given me. And though I wanted to trust him as much as I wanted to breathe, he left me, and it felt wrong. So, so wrong. “Why are you going to him?”

No answer. Just silence. Deception was a sinister type of suffering, and I knew, in the deepest parts of my soul, that I had been deceived in more ways than one.

I tried to draw into myself. Attempted in vain to convince my body to be calm as I cried broken sobs and grasped at the version of him I knew. Not this man that left me to drown in confusion and lies.

“She looks just like my Christabel. We have similar tastes, it seems.” Molochai violated me with his languid stare. I flinched when his lip curled over his teeth in a snarl that I had seen before. Before, it had belonged to Gavin. Bile slithered into my throat at the uncanny resemblance. How I hadn’t noticed before… the snarl. The smile. The eyes. “Ary.” Molochai cocked his head at me, tsked three times, and flashed a wicked grin. “Did he not tell you who he was? Did he not tell you he killed Phillip Gold and your little Oliver?”

My stomach churned something horrible.

“Yes,” hissed Molochai, grinning at me as he watched me fall apart. “The Butcher of Nyrida. A son so loyal, he’s done my bidding for four hundred years.”

“I’m not loyal to you.” Gavin’s words were frigid.

“You wound me, boy,” Molochai mocked, turning sideways to reveal the rough, warm face I’d sought as a source of constant strength had been reduced to a sickly pale, like marble stone, with eyes damp from tears. A shell of man. “I would like to know how you convinced her to give herself up for you,” said the dark sorcerer. “When your little rat of a friend—Morton, was his name?—came to me with news of your wife as a bargaining chip, I was simply offended you’d never shared such wonderful news of your nuptials with your own father. You should have told me why you made a deal with me that day. I would have helped you find your wife.”

I looked back and forth between them. Gavin’s eyes were trained on me in a silent plea. He gave me a head shake so subtle I couldn’t be sure I’d seen it, but I couldn’t process… all I could hear when I looked at him was…

“He killed… your little Oliver.”

When I’d mentioned the Butcher, he’d gone so pale…

And his knife. That truth had stared me in the gods-damned face.