Tearing me open.
Tearing the life from me, and I…
Everything that had happened came to me in a rush so violent it stole my breath away, and if the arms hadn’t been wrapped around me, I would have fallen to the ground. The voice that spoke was a soft whisper in my ear, a tone I didn’t recognize.
“I have no idea if our situations are the same, but I’m going to guess they are. You’ll save yourself a lot of trouble if you don’t fight it.”
Don’t fight it? Don’t fight what? My eyes swung forward, back to the man in front of me.
The man who’d been there, who’d pulled me out of the water, who’d been in the room with Caiden when he died, even though I hadn’t been.
Sephtis.
I hated him.
So why was I still fighting against the arms that were holding me, desperate to close the distance between us?
“What thefuckis going on?” I finally snarled, and the coherency in my voice more than anything seemed to settle everyone around me. Sephtis pulled himself to his feet, leaving enough space between us that I couldn’t reach out and touch him as the arms around me slowly let go. “And I swear if you come out with more‘I’m sorry I can’t tell you’bullshit, I’m going to kill you.”
Kill him.
Like that thing had tried to do. Shit, I could have been done with him if I’d just let the beast tear into him instead of…
Instead of me. Instead of putting myself in danger to keep him safe.
I glanced at the front of my shirt and caught on the way it was shredded and bloody… the way I was fairly certain I should have been so torn open that I couldn’t move.
“Cole…”
“What did youdo?” And then, because I couldn’t seem to stop myself from asking the same damn thing over and over again, I added. “What are you?”
His expression was still pained, and he glanced at the man standing behind me. I whirled and was met with crimson eyes—the same crimson as the thing that had attacked me. It made me take two quick steps back, instinct still driving me toward Sephtis even though my brain was telling me I wanted to strangle him.
“Does he really not know?” It wasn’t the red-eyed man who spoke, but the one beside him. His eyes were… violet.
A completely impossible purple… and he had a fucking bow in his hand.
What fucked-up fairy tale had I somehow fallen into?
“Doesn’t look like he’d be able to handle knowing anything, honestly.” My glare swung around to the man who’d beenholding me, and he shrugged almost apologetically. “It’s a lot to handle. Trust me, I know.”
Whatever retort I was working on, I wanted to make sure it was sharp enough to flay the skin off his pretty face. I was cut short by Sephtis stepping up beside me.
“When we were made, the ability to tell humans what we are was stripped from us. I can’t… I haven’t been able to…”
“Do you want me to?—”
“No. I’ll figure it out, Wren.” Sephtis cut him off before he had a chance to spill the secret he’d been keeping from me, and I frowned.
“What, you can’t tell me, so no one else gets to either?” Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that something close to hysteria was bubbling just beneath the surface of my angry facade. I’d been attacked—I’d had a monster’s claws go deep enough into my chest that I was pretty sure I knew what it felt like to have my lungs pierced…
And now I was standing here, in front of a man whose cuts healed almost instantly… and two people with impossible eyes who’d fallen from the fucking sky.
I was at my limit. I was officially at a place where I was pretty sure I was going insane.
And no one was telling me what was going on.
“I should have let that thing eat you, you asshole.” I shot the accusation at Sephtis, but it was the man who’d been holding me who chuckled.
