At this, a wordless sound of pain and denial crackled over my lips. Aggravating the blisters lining my throat, where I’d inhaled the searing heat of her final moments. The dust and smoke of her doomed escort.
Long fingers carded through my hair, soothing, despite the catch of callouses that pulled at my scalp. “Let her go before she takes you with her, little warrior. Before she takes us both.”
My grip tightened around that slender ankle. Nails biting into flesh growing cold and spongy, dimpled in a way that seemed unable to bounce back. Still, I held on, despite the way the cold spread. “I... I don’t care...”
Lips pressed to the corner of my jaw, the rasp of his beard prickling against my ear. “Your fight isn’t over,” he murmured and caught my chin. Turning my eyes away from the woman I’d failed, he ensnared me with an unblinking stare. Trapped me in twin pools of swirling, inky depths that seemed so much more than bottomless. Brimming with so much that would have to go unnamed.
A primal call to arms, he dared me to fight. Issued a challenge in a language I couldn’t speak but could no longer ignore.
Anguish splintered through my chest, and I sobbed, torn right down the middle. Brushing up against her spirit, just once more, before he reeled me in with a leash I’d handed him. Allowed a single, silent farewell before he pulled me back from the edge with the reins I no longer held, he smiled as he fit me with a muzzle built by the very best of my kind.
And it was a kindness, in a way. To ease that terrible burden from shoulders too slumped to carry it for another moment.
Sasha slipped away, fading into nothingness so quickly and irrevocably, that for a moment I wasn’t sure if she’d ever really existed at all.
“She’s gone.”
It was spoken in a voice thick with pain. One I didn’t recognize as mine or his.
It simply was.
He brushed a lock of tangled hair back from my face, careful where it stuck to tear-stained cheeks tacky with grime. Patient, he was content to wait, ignoring the flames and the chaos. The screams of his people and mine.
And to my horror, a flood of tears washed over my lashes—I saw it in the reflection of eyes gone dark as pitch. “She… shekilledherself,” I rasped, eyes wide. Reeling, my hairline growing damp and itchy. “Killed them all.”
“I know,” he whispered, and traced the delicate angles made wet with shock, brushing at the deluge of tears that tracked down my cheeks and cleansed me of the soot of the dead.
“It was a trap. The”—I whined—“the instant he touched th-that cannon, h-he—” Traumatized, gut wrenching sobs broke through my illusion of inner strength. Thawed the frost and left nothing but anguish in the hollow. Cinders that began to smoke with the threat of new heat.
Hushing me, he sat back and pulled me into his lap, cradling my cheek tight against his chest, where my tears were hidden from the hordes of frantic Caledonians trying to escape. Where they might dry against his skin and couldn’t be burned away by the heat of Sasha’s final stand or the puddle of noxious plasma that had swallowed a general whole. “She knew what she was doing.”
The offer of comfort bought only another flood of pitiful anguish, and I clung to him.
My enemy.
A man I’d hated.
The only one who knewexactlywhat it was that twisted and lashed behind my ribs. Clawing for freedom until my throat was wet and raw, singed by the caustic burn of gifts I’d been cursed with.
He knew because he was already inside.
Fingers winding tight into the sodden fabric of his formal wear—gritty with a dusting of unspeakable grime—my lips moved of their own volition. “She died an empath,” I murmured, quiet enough that I wasn’t sure he heard my confession. “And I gave her the idea. It was my fault,” I whispered, and it echoed all around us with the ring of truth. “I killed the Head Priestess.”
2
Dust.
It clogged my lungs. Acidic and choking, it was all that remained of the six elites Sasha had sent to their doom. And what very little that remained was still hot enough that they continued smoldering with the threat of combustion. Ashes on the wind.
But it was nothing,nothing, to the tiny fleck of horror held in a brittle cage.
A beast named empath.
It was an entity I no longer controlled—and it was starving.
Iwas starving.
As if he were reacting to the mere thought, I felt the leash tighten about my throat. Throttling the empath before it could lash out. A possessive squeeze from the man who owned it, for it was no longer my crutch.
