“So delicate,” he says, his voice rising, needing an audience, needing me to hear his every appraisal. “Yet so strong. You can see the fire in her. A spirit like that… it makes the conquest so much sweeter. Don’t you agree, Antonio?”
My vision tunnels. The edges of the room go dark, and all I can see is his hands on her. The contrast of his coarse, ringed fingers against the perfect, alabaster canvas of her back. I want to peel the skin from his hands for daring to touch what is mine.
But she is not mine. Not right now. Right now, she is the currency and I am the banker, coldly counting out the notes of her dignity to buy the information I need.
Loyalty to the Brethren. Loyalty to our Grand Master. She is… she is one woman. One fucking woman.
The thought is a poison in my veins.
Vihaan turns her around to face him. She resists for a fraction of a second, a final, tiny act of defiance before allowing herself to be moved. But her head turns, and her eyes lock onto mine again. The tears are falling now, tracing silent, glistening paths down her cheeks. She doesn’t make a sound. She just stares, and in her gaze, I can see everything we were being dismantled. It is all being publicly executed in this sterile room, and I am the silent, complicit executioner.
He kisses her neck, and I see his lips press against the frantic pulse beating there. I see her eyes squeeze shut, a spasm of pain and revulsion contorting her beautiful features. A single, choked sob escapes her, the first sound she’s made.
It takes everything I have not to react to that.
“So delicious,” Vihaan moans against her skin, his voice muffled. He is putting on a show, amplifying his pleasure for my benefit. Each moan, each groaning compliment is another turn of the knife he knows he’s plunging into me. “So sweet. You must taste of heaven itself.”
He is outplaying me. Vishaan knows this is torture, he knows the information is vital, but he also knows the price is my sanity. He is buying his salvation and the destruction of Antonio Macrae in one single, devastating transaction, and I am letting him.
My fury is a living thing, a caged beast roaring in the confines of my chest, rattling my ribs, demanding release. It is a red-hot tide threatening to drown all reason, all duty.
Kill him. Kill him now.
Fuck the Brethren. Fuck the Esau. Take her and run.
The image is so vivid I can almost feel the satisfying crunch of his nose under my fist, the warm spray of his blood.
But then the Grand Master’s face superimposes itself over the violence in my mind; the weight of the centuries-old oath I took, the lives of every man in our Order, the future, the greater good. This one painful, horrific sacrifice for the ultimate victory.
The conflict is tearing me in two. I am a man split down the middle but the choice is made, the amputation is complete.
I feel a part of me die, a fundamental piece of my humanity shatter and go dark forever. I chose. I chose the Order, I chose the Brethren; I chose the ghost of a holy relic over the living, breathing woman weeping silently in front of me.
I force my body to relax into the chair. I unclench my fists, one finger at a time. I will my breathing to even out. I let the coldness, the void left by the part of me that just died wash over me. It is a chilling, terrifying numbness.
I meet Grace’s gaze. The tears are still falling, but her eyes are changing. The terror and confusion are hardening. The shattered emerald is melting and reforming into something else: a cold, brilliant, and utterly hateful diamond.
She sees it, she sees the moment I make the choice. She sees the life leave my eyes, replaced by the cold calculation of the soldier. Grace sees the betrayal not as a momentary lapse, but as a fundamental truth of my character she had been blind to.
Vihaan moves his hands lower, his touch more invasive, his commentary more crude but I barely hear him. The world has narrowed to the silent communication between me and Grace. There are no more pleas in her eyes, no more questions. There is only the devastating, absolute knowledge of what I have done.
She is seeing the real me for the first time, and the real me is a monster who sat and watched.
He leads her toward the large bed in the corner of the room. She doesn’t fight him. She moves like a sleepwalker, her body compliant but her spirit already gone, already retreating to some deep, hidden place inside herself that he cannot touch. That I have already violated.
As he lays her down, her head turns on the pillow. Her eyes, those beautiful, broken eyes, are still fixed on me. They are my anchor and my damnation.
Vihaan fumbles with his belt, his breathing heavy and eager. The metallic clink of the buckle is the sound of a cell door slamming shut.
Her lips part. No sound comes out, but I can read the words she forms, a silent curse meant for me and me alone.
I hate you.
I hate you.
I hate you.
And as Vihaan moves over her, blocking her from my view, I finally break. I look away. I stare at the wall, at a meaningless smear on the concrete, and I let the numbness consume me. The beast of my fury is gone, slain by my own hand. All that is left is a vast, empty silence.
