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“Where did you go?” I ask.
“To the infirmar—”
“Don’t lie to me!”
“Why are you sneaking around with Eagan?” I press, and I use his name deliberately because I want to see her reaction, want to see if she will hide behind the fiction that Eagan is the focus of my suspicion or if she will understand that I am giving her one final chance to tell me the truth before I find him myself.
Her mouth opens. Closes. Her throat works around a swallow.
When she doesn’t answer, I turn and storm out of the room. The door slams into the frame with a shower of splinters. The sound reverberates through the corridor as she calls for me. The panic in her voice might have stopped me an hour ago, but it doesn’t reach me now.
My boots hit the stone stairs too fast, my body moving at a speed that blurs the torchlight into streaks against the walls.
The basement corridor stretches before me, and I can already smell the humans in their cells, the copper tang of their blood, and the fear that clings to captive bodies. Somewhere among these scents is the one that was on her lips.
Eagan brushes past me and appears at the bottom of the stairwell.
He doesn’t step aside. He plants himself in the center of the corridor with his feet shoulder-width apart, his hands raised slightly, palms open. He’s the only thing standing between a monster and the thing the monster intends to destroy, and he’s well aware. The courage that requires is not lost on me, even through the haze of rage.
“Do not do this,” Eagan says. “If you kill him, she will never let you mark her.”
His words are rational, but right now, I’m not. My fist connects with the side of Eagan’s jaw. His head snaps to the side, and his body staggers two steps before his boot catches the stone and holds. He doesn’t fall, but he straightens slowly. His hand rises to his jaw where the skin has already begun to darken, and he works the joint once, testing it, then meets my eyes with a steady gaze. I shove past him, but his hand instantly grips my bicep.
“I know you’re angry, but think, Kylian. You will lose her if you kill him,” he says, and the blood at the corner of his mouth dribbles to his chin. “Don’t do this. You are so close to ending your curse. Killing him will ruin that.”
“No, it gets him out of the fucking picture!” I scream. His grip tightens.
“It paints you as a monster. You kill him, you might as well go ahead and kill her too. She won’t forgive you for this, and she won’t let you mark her.”
I breathe in through my nose and hold it, letting the air burn my lungs. The pain gives me something to focus on other than the human down the corridor whose existence I want to erase.
My claws retract slowly, the points sliding back beneath my nails with a resistance that tells me how close I came to losing control entirely. The growl in my chest dies to silence as his words set in.
“She asked about him. I didn’t realize . . .”
Eagan exhales loudly.
“When the sun goes down,” I say, “bring the human to the town square. And bring the spies we caught from Draven’s kingdom as well.”
Eagan’s brows draw together. His grayish-red eyes search my face, and whatever he finds there deepens the concern already carved into his features. He knows me well enough to understand that my most dangerous moments are not when I am raging but when I’ve calmed down.
“What are you planning?”
I hold his gaze. “Either she tells me the truth and admits what she did,” I say, “or I kill him in front of her.”
Eagan’s mouth opens and closes. He doesn’t argue, and he doesn’t try to talk me down again. My expression must tell him that the time for reasoning has passed, and the only options remaining are compliance or confrontation. Eagan has spent hundreds of years knowing which battles to pick against me. He understands what comes next will either save or destroy everything we’ve built, and the outcome depends entirely on whether she loves the man in the cell enough to tell the truth to the man she is bonded to.
CHAPTER 52
• Alessia •
I TRIED THE door twice.
The first time was midmorning. The handle turned, but the door held. My lunch came around midday, delivered by Eagan, who set it on the table and hurried away before I could ask what was happening. That was the second time I tried to open the door, but he locked it as he left.
Even though I knew I ought to eat, my stomach has closed off completely to the thought of food. Every part of it is filled with the swirling mass of guilt and dread that has been growing since last night.
I sit on the edge of the bed and look at the tray, going over the night in sequence, picking it apart for the moment where I could have done something different.
