Because when Kaius came through that door, he couldn’t see Emersyn Spade.
He had to see a broken girl who needed saving.
Even if no one could save me now.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
kaius
Acelynn’s voicestill echoed in my head, broken through the phone, raw with panic. I’d heard screams, confessions, lies, and begging in my lifetime, but this had cut straight through me like a razor. She hadn’t sounded like Acelynn, not the sharp-tongued, fire-eyed woman I knew. She’d sounded small. Shattered. Afraid.
The desert night was quiet when I pulled up to Acelynn’s place. Too damn quiet. The air pressed down heavily. Even the crickets were silent, as if the whole stretch of neighborhood knew something was wrong before I did.
I killed the engine and stepped out, gravel crunching under my boots. My hand went instinctively to the gun holstered in the back of my waistband. Habit. Preparedness. Paranoia. Call it what you want.
The house loomed dark, one window glowing faintly where the curtain didn’t quite shut. The front door was cracked open,tilting on its hinge like someone had forced their way in. I pushed it with two fingers, the wood creaking as the shadows inside swallowed me whole.
The smell hit me first.
Blood. The iron tang coated my nostrils before I even spotted the source. It tangled with something else—sharp, bitter, poisonous. A scent I was all too familiar with. Hemlock.
I stepped inside slowly and deliberately, letting my eyes adjust to the wreckage laid bare under the moonlight filtering through the blinds. The place was chaos incarnate—chairs overturned, drawers gutted and scattered, the coffee table split down the middle like it had taken a boot to the spine. A vase lay shattered against the wall, its water soaking into the rug, petals trampled underfoot.
It looked like a struggle, but it was too neat in its destruction. The kind of scene you’d set if you wanted people to think you’d fought tooth and nail for your life. I filed that thought away, teeth grinding against each other as I crossed the room.
And then I saw her.
Acelynn was crumpled against the far wall, a mess of tangled hair, torn clothes, and fresh bruises already blossoming across her face and arms. Her skin glistened with sweat, streaked with blood that looked half dried, and half smeared from her touch. She was shaking, shoulders curled inward like she was trying to fold herself small enough to disappear.
A few feet to her right lay a body.
Alaric.
A knife wound under his ribs was visible even where I stood, crimson pooling thick beneath him in large puddles. His hand lay outstretched in broken glass, hemlock vials shattered around him, the acrid stench of the poison biting at the back of my throat. The old Knight’s eyes stared wide and glassy at the ceiling, fixed on the nothingness of death.
My jaw locked. A hundred thoughts surged and rattled in my skull, but I shoved them down into silence.
“Acelynn,” I said, voice low, flat, carrying across the room like a knife dragged on stone.
Her head jerked up. Her eyes were swollen, red-rimmed, brimming with tears that clung stubbornly before spilling over. The look on her face nearly made me pause—terror, relief, desperation all bleeding together in one wreck of expression.
“Kaius…” Her voice cracked, raw as her body shuddered. She pushed herself up and stumbled across the chaos until she collapsed against me, her sobs breaking loose as if she’d held them back just for this moment. “Kaius…I didn’t mean…he came at me. I didn’t know what to do.”
Her words twisted, choking out half-sentences and shredded fragments of excuses. Her fists clutched at my shirt, smearing blood across the black fabric as if marking me with it, binding me to the scene.
My arms went around her, almost against my will. The instinct was older than reason—hold, steady, protect. Her pulse thrashed against my wrist where her throat brushed it, wild and unsteady, the beat of someone on the edge of collapse.
But my mind never stopped moving.
Alaric. Here. Dead.
Her story—an attack, a break-in, a fight for her life.
The wreckage matched the tale well enough, but there was something in it that sat too neatly. No overturned bloodstains in places they shouldn’t be. No spatter where there should’ve been panic. Everything angled just so, every break plausible.
It was staged. I’d bet my life on it.
But when I tilted her chin up, forcing her eyes to meet mine, what stared back was chaos of a different kind. Her gaze swam with tears, wide and frantic, pleading with me not to look too closely. Not faked. Or at least not all of it.
