In the silence, the room breathes like a tomb around me, stone walls whispering with damp drips, shadows pressing close as though they, too, are waiting. Every sound feels like his name trying to reach me and failing. I tell myself he’ll come. He always does. He finds me in every darkness I’ve fallen into before. But this time the silence lingers too long, and even my hope starts to sound like a lie.
Something Billy and I are both so very good at.
Still, love makes strange saints of us, I pray to him, in the same way I have for so many years. To the warmth of his strong hands, to the promise in his voice that says he loves me more than any soul has ever loved another. I want to believe that promise still matters, even now, even after what I’ve done, the position I’ve most likely put him in, when I’m not sure either of us can keep it.
Maybe he won’t come this time.
The thought comes softly at first, like a whisper slipping through a crack in the dark.
Maybe he shouldn’t.
The weight of what I’ve done sits heavy in my chest, thick as the grave dirt I’ll shortly be buried beneath, and I wonder if he knows, if Billy can feel it too, that rot of guilt that stains everything it touches. I want to believe he’ll find me, that he’ll fight through whatever hell stands between us.
But some part of me knows I’ve made myself harder to save.
Maybe I’m not worth the destruction it would take to reach me.
Maybe love has finally learned its lesson and left me to lie in the wreckage I hand built.
Chapter 23
BILLY
Gore says nothing as we race through the underground networks beneath Raven Ridge Manor. Only the sound of our out of sync breathing and heavy bootsteps reverberating its way back to us, when he appears out of the shadows like the world’s cruellest coincidence. The man whose hands are stained with my Penelope’s blood.
Balor.
Father’s number one follower, he does anything our god says, despite the fact Milus is the one that removed his tongue for blasphemy.
He’s wiping it off on an old, discoloured rag, the dark crimson, the only thing I can focus on in the low lighting of a wall sconce at his broad back.
Gore is behind me, no real space between us, and just a mere three feet away stands the man who’s hurt my girl. No one has to inform me it was him, I know it in my marrow. After all, torture is what he’s used for.
The air thickens; the silence bends the longer I look at him. His dark eyes on mine, unfeeling, cold, dead behind them, like he’s nothing more than an animated corpse.
Then something in me breaks loose.
It builds a fury in me like fire. Slow to kindle, and then suddenly, with a quick, sharp lash of accelerant, it’s red hot and burning.
I don’t think, Imove.
The rage has a pulse of its own, steady and righteous, pounding in my ears louder than my own heartbeat. I see his face and all I can think of is hers. Imagine the tremor in her voice, the way she’d try to smile through the pain, show nothing, give nothing, and then her screams would pierce through her teeth like a hammer to glass. It rattles around inside my head like a bull battering its way through a house of mirrors.
And suddenly, mercy feels like a language I was never taught. Whatever happens next, it isn’t justice. It’s personal. It’s prayer in the shape of violence.
I lunge forward, my hands outstretched, a knife between my fingers I didn’t pull consciously, the blade of it slashing across his throat, but nowhere near deep enough to actually hurt. It’s superficial. But before I can fully close the scant distance between us, I’m wrenched back by the collar of my shirt, Gore’s breath ghosting down the side of my sweat slicked neck, his hand curled tightly over the blade of my knife.
“Leave it.” An order my body follows quicker than my brain, it’s how I’ve been trained as his second,Twomust followOne.
Then, from the gloom, the other man steps forward.
Milus.
The light catches his face just enough to draw out the edges, calm, deliberate, dangerous in a way that doesn’t need words. For a moment, neither one of us speaks. The distance betweenus humming like a live wire, charged with everything left unsaid, betrayal, fear, recognition.
My unwilling submission.
He stands just behind Balor, slightly to one side of him in the tight squeeze of space, his hands in his pockets, his crisp shirt perfectly clean, his face too much like my own to make me feel any sort of ease.
