Another tiny thump hits the door, and the sound of crying grows louder on the other side.
“I’ll be right there, Jovie. Go back to your room. I’ll come tuck you in,” the duchess shakily calls to her daughter, her spine straightening and a defiant light sparking in her eyes.
“I need you,” Jovie pleads at the door.
Anger shreds me as I focus on the dagger held against the duke’s throat. The unfairness of what’s happening, the justice I’m being denied, burns in my veins. Rectitude demands that I do something, but I’m drowning in indecision. Maybethisduke deserves a bloody death. Maybe he doesn’t. But what does the little cria at the door deserve? What right do I have to destroy her young life? What right do I have to take from her, like so many have taken from me?
I could kill her parents. Kill her and stop every beating heart in this house, but where does it end?
I am death’s hand, but I won’t destroy for destruction’s sake.
I lift the blade from the duke’s throat, and he blinks up at me in shock. Frustration screams in my mind as I step back from the bed. My hands shake with the effort to hold back, to deny the bloodlust coursing through me. A tempestuous thirst for ruination pounds at my resolve, and I falter under the force bearing down on me to shower the room with blood.
“Get me the fuck out of here,” I demand quietly, the order a mangled mix of warning and an urgent plea to rescue me from the edge of vicious violence I’m teetering on.
Without another word, Scorpius, Skull, and Bones are at my side.
“Don’t ever give us a reason to come back,” Scorpius warns as someone pulls me to their chest and backs me into a shadowed corner.
My breaths grow short and volatile as I battle my inner petition for pain and savagery. I’ve never refused it before. I’ve always leaned into it, and now I feel as though I’m falling, and the landing rushing up at me promises nothing but agony.
“I’m sorry,” the duke laments as he rises from his bed.
His mate rushes into his arms, wrapping him up in a fierce hug, but his words aren’t for her. His blue eyes are fixed on mine, anguish and regret pouring down his face in a steady stream of tears.
“I’m so sorry for what he did to you.”
The in-between washes over me as his sorrow and his words wrap around my ribs and compress them against my heart. The last thing I see is a streak of long blonde braids and a pink night dress as Jovie flies into her parents’ arms.
I chose her innocence over the roar of death, and as the shadows in the corner swallow me whole, I can’t help but wish that someone had once done the same for me.
ChapterForty-Five
Tall grass sways around my thighs. Cool, wet air slaps at my cheeks. My boots press into spongy ground. I pull in gasping breaths of leather and steel, smoke and salt, and something sweet and blooming.
The Scorpions.
A thunderous crash reverberates somewhere below, and a sky of angry clouds stands guard over the turbulent sea that reaches out and kisses the horizon. Arms are still wrapped around me, and I’m pretty sure they’re the only thing holding me together. I shiver against the crisp spray that rises over the edge of the cliffs we’re standing on, but I’m not cold. My body is fighting against the decision I made, and I’m paying the price in every way.
My head is a jumbled mess of anger and admonishment. I don’t know if I’m more furious with myself or fate for dangling justice and punishment the way it did, only to snatch them away when I needed them as badly as I do right now. I was robbed and denied, and it’s all so fucked up I’m being torn apart by the injustice of it all.
I craved the death of the duke and his personal guard for so long, long before I knew that’s who they were. I had no real way or hope of ever finding them, but that didn’t stop me from planning, from envisioning how I would storm into that fucking house and destroy everyone who ever touched me. I worked it out in my mind over and over again, meticulously planning in the quiet hours of the night when I was afraid of what nightmares awaited me if I closed my eyes and succumbed to sleep. I didn’t know when or how I would find them, but I’ve steeped and stewed on exactly how I would make them suffer when I did.
The mountain was just…there. A beacon of requital that’d been waiting patiently for me. Retribution should have been mine for the taking. I walked into that horrible fucking room, knowing it was destiny, that I was meant to be there to take back the final piece that they stole from me, a piece that only their horrific deaths could restore. But someone already cut the fuckers down, and now I’m left shaking and panting from the loss of what should have been mine. Vengeance pressed against my lips, whispering dark vows of justice and punishment, and just when I leaned into the promised kiss, it all disappeared with a taunting laugh echoing in the air all around me.
“What do you need, Beasty? What can we do?” Bones demands, his face so close I can taste his breath, the heat of his presence coiling around me like it’s trying to temper my defenses.
But I feel so far away.
I feel so fucking lost.
“I need to fucking kill a dead man,” I snarl out before a new rush of rage and misery tries to bowl me over.
Arms tighten around me from behind, but I’m smothered by overpowering emotion. I want to rage and lament, destroy and keen. I vacillate between unbridled fury and drowning sorrow for who I was, what they took. I couldn’t discharge any of this emotion in the ludere. It would have only gotten me killed. I had to find other ways to cope, other ways to snatch power from the masters who tried to hold it out of reach. Leto helped. He gave me the strength to take back my body, to find pleasure and passion in what I could do with it, in what could be done to it when I wanted. We had no limits between us. We explored every inch and crevice so that all of it could be reclaimed by me. Reclaimed by my consent. Reclaimed by my enjoyment.
When my body was my own again, I poured every drop of wrath and every tear I wanted to cry but couldn’t into the fighting pits during the day and fucking Leto under the stars at night. Gradually, bit by bit, the pain started to dull. Different wounds were carved into my body and my heart by the masters, and my dark thoughts and haunting memories quieted. What happened in that house became something I survived. Something that happened. But I’m more than that now, more than what they tried to take from me. I’d whittled away at everything inside of me until all that remained was the ruthless savage that Tilleo always wanted.
I’m free, and now that I’m standing on a cliff and staring out into a raging sea that’s begging me to rage alongside it, I can finally let go. For once, I don’t have to hide. I don’t have to shove it all down or grit my teeth and bare it. I can finally scour it all from my soul.
