Instead he speaks, still facing the window, his reflection a ghost in the glass.
"I was twenty-five years old." His voice has gone flat, emptied of everything except exhaustion—the tone of a man reciting facts about a stranger, dissociating from the memory to survive the telling. "Old enough that the curse was manifesting, young enough that my father believed it could still be controlled. He brought me an omega to practice with. A village girl, sweet and gentle, exactly the kind of omega who had soothed my ancestors through their early ruts."
Dread pools in my gut as I sense what he's going to tell me next, the inevitable conclusion of a story written long before he came into this world, a story with only one possible ending.
"My mother knew the girl wasn't right for me. I don't know how—maybe she could smell it, maybe she didn't know but she was just afraid because... because by then, we all knew that there would be a few deaths before the right one was found. I'd asked her—no, begged her—to promise to stop me if... if it looked bad, if it looked like the girl might not make it."
There's emotion in his voice now, and based on the expression on his face, he's sunk into the memory now, is re-living it as if it isn't centuries old. "Did she...?"
"She stepped between me and the girl. And my beast saw nothing but a threat." His hands curl into fists, knuckles white, his face tilted down, shame lining his cheeks. "Dragons are territorial during rut as it is, but the curse makes it so much worse, makes it so all the beast cares about is rutting and fucking and claiming. When she got in between, all my beast saw was an obstacle to what it really wanted, and she wasn't my mother at all"
He tears his eyes away from the window to look at me, and his gaze is heavy with ancient and horrible grief.
"I tore out her throat before my human mind could stop it. One moment she was speaking my name. The next—" He stops. "The girl didn't make it either. My father's guards chained me while the rut passed. Three days. When I came back to myself, she was already in the ground. They both were."
I can feel how much telling the story has cost him, and I have nothing to say, no words to take the pain away, to change what he is or the fact that I still wished I'd had the strength and the will to kill him last night.
"Your father blamed you for her death," I surmise from his story.
"My father was right to blame me." His voice is terrible in its certainty, full of shame and pain that has solidified over centuries of isolation. "I killed my mother. The curse, the beast, the rut—none of that changes what my claws did. The beast is part of me. Its actions are mine." He holds my gaze like he's daring me to look away from his molten gold eyes. "That's the kind of monster I am."
I should feel satisfied that he admits it, owns it, doesn't make excuses. This is what he deserves, the pain and guilt of everydeath he's ever taken with his inhuman hands. Instead I feel the ground shifting beneath me, solid footing harder to find than it was a moment ago. His scent fills my nose: smoke and cinder, spice and masculinity. There are curls in his hair where the sun has dried it after his bath, and they make him seem young somehow, as if he's lived these past centuries frozen in time, no older than the twenty-five-year-old son who watched his mother die and could do nothing to stop it.
"I should go," I say, though I don't move.
"You can stay. Read whatever you want." He gestures at the shelves. "If you find something about curse-breaking that I somehow I missed in three hundred years, I'd be genuinely grateful. As for killing me—" He almost smiles, that same feral smile from the altar. "You already know where my heart is, and you've bled me plenty with your claws and fangs. The library won't teach you anything more useful than a sharp blade and a moment when my guard is down."
The way he talks about his own death should disturb me.
It does disturb me. Just not in the way I expect. I find myself wanting to tell him to shut up, to take it back, not to give up—but I don't, because I'm supposed to want him dead, should relish in the spilling of his blood.
"I'll stay," I hear myself say. "There's more I want to read."
He nods. Turns to leave. Pauses in the doorway.
"Kess?"
"What?"
"Thank you." His throat works for a moment. "For asking questions. For looking at me and seeing a man whose name is worth knowing, whose story matters. Thank you, even, for trying. I hope next time you're able to see it through and sink your blade in deep."
He doesn't wait for a response. Just slips through the gate and disappears, his footsteps fading down the spiral stairs,leaving me alone in the restricted section with books full of curses and gods and three centuries of violence and bloodshed.
I sink into the reading chair and pull the book back into my lap.
Understanding him might be more dangerous than killing him. Getting answers might make it harder to do what I came here to do. By the time I understand the full shape of this curse, I might be too tangled up in it to cut myself free.
But I'm going to do it anyway.
I'm going to understand everything—the curse, the god, the blood, the man.
And then I'm going to decide what to do with what I know.
9
Kess
The library becomesmy refuge from my shame and my anger.
