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“You think because I have guilt, it has to do with Tobias?”
“Does it?” I ask in return.
“You know nothing, Aleera, and you are opening closets full of skeletons that need to remain locked away.”
“That's what this place is, isn't it? Your closet full of skeletons, though I don't think you realize the monsters you think you keep locked down here are spilling into your real-world haunting you. Wouldn't it hurt less to set them free?”
“Everyone has a past, Darius. It doesn't mean we should stay stuck in it.”
“Allowing you to mark me won't set me free, Aleera. It will only make you the next skeleton kept here.”
“Maybe I already am one of your skeletons,” I muse. Darius laughs, the sound as demonic as he is.
“No, Aleera. You aren't one of my skeletons. You're one of the gatekeepers. If I let you in, all this becomes yours to live with, too. Don't you get it? It isn't just about losing them but protecting you.”
“Protecting me from what? Your past, the shit you have done?” Darius says nothing, but I could tell he was getting annoyed with this situation, annoyed with me intruding on his privacy and creeping into his creepy bunker of sins.
“Tell me something, Darius. Because if you don't, I will keep prying until I figure it out for myself.”
“You killed my father. And I forgave you! What else could you be protecting me from?” I scream at him.
“From me!” he screams back at me, his face twists angrily, his skin rippling as his eyes turn to the darkest shade of black while stalking toward me, and the lights flicker as his power surges. "Everything I touch, everyone I love, I kill, and you will be the same as the rest of them," Darius snarls.
“Tobias, Lycus, and Kalen are still here, Darius. They ain't dead yet!”
“Aren't they? Look at Kalen, Aleera. I lost count of the amount of times he died because of me because he couldn't have you. I could have brought you home, and I didn't. Tobias, what I did, killed him, maybe not physically, but in here, I definitely killed a fucking part of him.” he punches his chest.
“I broke that and destroyed him, and Lycus, my father, destroyed it because I wouldn't give him what he wanted! You think you know or want to know, but you don't want to live with the guilt of what I have done to our mates. That will kill you!” he tells me, gripping my arms, his hands heating, and I know he is about to toss me back to our room.
I hear the portal open up behind me as he walks me backward, and I grit my teeth, gripping his arms back and turning his magic on him.
I warned him that I would find out what he was keeping from us, so instead of arguing with him; I plunged him back into my memories of the night Tobias' brother died.
The cast fizzles at first as I try to siphon his magic, yet his resistance is hard to manage. But I am his keeper, and once my bond latches on to his power, I push it outward, setting the cast completely around, wrapping us inside a bubble of his power, and a bubble of my memories.
We stand there watching it and my heart hammers as the memory pulls us. Though watching it is like reliving that horrid night, Darius' hand on my arms never leaves as he watches the scene play out.
“Where are we?” Darius murmurs next to me.
“I don't know, I had portaled here. It was the one and only time I used my magic to portal,” I tell him.
“Why this place?” he asks.
“I was looking for Astrid. I tried to envision what Kalen had told me, and it sent me here, but nothing was here. I portaled to the wrong spot,” I whisper to him as if the memories of my past self could hear us.
I was running, running for my damn life, which is a regular occurrence now that I look back on it.
I had come to a dead end and was trapped looking between the forest at one end of the parking lot. A forest that no doubt had worse things hiding within its shadows than what I was running from.
“That is Thomas,” Darius whispers, and I nod. I watch as he approaches me in the memory, stepping out of the shadows of a portal.
“Well, don't you burn brighter than the sun? The first time I have seen a rainbow aura? I knew there would be something special about you,” came a voice that had me spinning around to face it.
I found a man behind me. He smiles before hearing the footsteps of the fae that were chasing me.
“He wasn't supposed to come for you. We told him to wait,” Darius murmurs.
“If he had, I would be dead,” I whisper, glancing at Darius over my shoulder before nodding back to where I stood with Thomas.
