“Breathe,” I ordered, low and sharp, trying to cut through her hysteria. “Start from the beginning.”
Her lips trembled. “He broke in. I was alone, and he knew that. I think he knew about me—” Acelynn’s words broke off, panic flaring before she caught herself, biting down on the rest like it had burned her tongue. Her eyes flicked away too fast. A lie. Or at least, not the whole truth.
My grip tightened on her chin, forcing her gaze back to mine. The softness in me burned away, leaving nothing but iron. “No skipping. No pretty lies. Sit.”
She froze, confusion and dread fighting on her face. When I pointed toward the overturned chair by the table, my tone allowed no argument. “Now.”
Her legs wobbled under her as she staggered toward it, the scrape of wood against tile loud in the silence as she righted it and sank down against the cushioned top. She clutched her hands together in her lap, knuckles white, eyes darting anywhere but my gaze.
I stayed standing, a shadow over her. “From the top, Acelynn. Every detail. If you hesitate, if you feed me some half-truth, I’ll know. And then the Knights will know.”
Acelynn’s chest rose and fell too fast, panic stealing the air from her lungs. “Kaius, please, I didn’t?—”
“Don’t.” My voice cracked like a whip. She flinched. “This isn’t about begging. This is about survival. Yours depends on how you answer me.”
Her throat bobbed as she swallowed, tears welling again. “He came at me. He knew my name. He said…he said something about owing blood. I grabbed the knife. I didn’t think, I just?—”
Her voice splintered, trembling into sobs. I watched her every twitch, every pause, the way her eyes flickered left when she lied to me. Fear radiated off her in waves, but not all of it was from Alaric’s attack. Some of it was directed toward me. Thethought of what I might do if I didn’t like her answers consumed her. And maybe that was exactly what she needed to feel.
Acelynn had gotten too comfortable in the club. Thought some pretty little tears and blood-covered white lies would just be swept under the rug. But not this time. This time, she had to answer not only to me but to the Knights for her crimes against one of our own.
“Enough,” I snapped, letting the silence around us hang. I stepped forward, bending at the knee to look her in the eye. “You’re safe now. He can’t touch you.”
But even as I said it, I stared past her at Alaric’s body, unease burrowing into my gut. Safe from him, maybe. But what about being safe from her? The little bit of doubt that I had earlier on the sand dune was beginning to crawl back to the surface.
Her small frame shook against the back of the chair. My hand reached out, catching her jaw in my hand. Tilting her face to meet my eyes, her tears stilled. For just a heartbeat, her breath hitched between us. So close I could feel the heat of it, could almost taste the salt of her tears. A flash of anger glinted in her eye, and in that moment, I knew she was more dangerous than Alaric had ever been. The elder Knight had known something about her past, and she had slaughtered him to keep the secret. But the small voice in the back of my head told me that it wasn’t true, that Alaric had attacked her in a crazed moment, thinking she was a ghost from his past. It wouldn’t have been the first time something like that had occurred, but Vince had always been fast enough to stop him.
I leaned closer, letting her see the cold in my eyes, letting it cut through her hysteria like the truth she couldn’t dodge. My voice dropped to a near-whisper, each word a knife pressed to her throat.
“You have Knight blood on your hands.” I let the weight of it hang there, iron and final. “Now you have to pay that debt.”
The silence that followed was heavy, suffocating. Her tears stilled. Her breath caught sharply. The blood between us—Alaric’s, hers, mine by proxy—sealed the moment like a pact.
And for the first time, I realized just how far gone we both already were.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
acelynn
The roundtable roomreeked of smoke, sweat, and something heavier, like judgment. The kind that clung to the walls, to the eyes that pinned me down from every angle.
I sat in the chair facing the two double doors, my legs trembling beneath me. No matter how I moved, I could not force them to still. My palms pressed flat against the polished wood, sticky with sweat I couldn’t scrub off, no matter how hard I rubbed them into my shirt.
Kaius sat across from me, broad shoulders tense beneath his jacket, eyes unreadable. Nolan leaned lazily in his chair to Kaius’s right, but there was nothing casual about the sharp flick of his gaze as it swept over me, dissecting every twitch, every shallow breath. Vince paced the length of the room, restless, his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides. He hadn’t looked at me since we’d cleaned up the mess.
The mess.
Alaric’s blood was gone from the floor of my house, his body no longer sprawled in glass and poison. But I could still feel it on my hands, under my nails, seared into my skin like something that would never wash off. The silence stretched until it felt like it would crack my ribs open. Then Kaius leaned forward, folding his hands on the table. His voice was low, steady, heavy enough to pin me in place.
“You have Knight blood on your hands.” He’d said it earlier, in the wreckage of my home, and he said it again now like a verdict.
My throat tightened as the words echoed off the stone walls.
“That’s not something we can ignore.”
I swallowed hard, trying to steady my voice. “I told you, he attacked me. He came into my house and?—”
“And you killed him.” Nolan’s voice sliced clean through mine, calm and lethal. “Doesn’t matter how. Doesn’t matter why. A Knight is dead. That blood debt doesn’t just vanish.”
