Kai scrambled backwards across the floor, frantically putting distance between himself and Arwyn. I raised my hands up as if I was in a cage with a lion, attempting to tame it with nothing but my will alone.
“No one touches you,” Arwyn hissed, tongue lashing. “Never again.”
An explosion of gunfire answered Arwyn.
I didn’t know who fired the gun at first, not as the tension split beneath the sharp crack of the bullet. Arwyn’s brow rose into his hairline, Kai lifted a hand to shield his face and Romy doubled over and screamed. For a second I thought she’d been hit. But then they all looked at me expectantly, Romy with a hand to her mouth, Arwyn so still that it was the first time I was frightened of him.
He took a cautious step towards me, hand outstretched just as the pain blossomed throughout my body.
My legs gave out from beneath me, a deathly numbness spreading up from my toes until that spark of pain was severed.
I fell to the side, body crashing into the arched gateway, my bloodied hands clawing for purchase in the stone. But it was pointless; the ground had been taken out from beneath me, and I fell.
“Next bullet is for the witch’s head,” Father Tomin said, panting as he walked out of his circle of Hunters, gun aimed in my direction. “That is unless you finally give me what I want, myson.”
16
ARWYN
Nothing else mattered but Hector.
He bled out on the floor in front of me, his rasped and laboured breathing the loudest noise in the entire room.
I heard my father’s warning, but I didn’t listen to it.
I moved without thought or care, dark magic receding, until I was grappling for Hector’s limp body, eyes fixated on the blossoming of blood across his stomach.
Hector’s blood-slicked hands reached for me, and for a moment I thought he was going to use them to smack me away. Instead, Hector wrapped weak, trembling fingers into my shirt and held firm.
“Don’t… let… go,” he gasped, pink-stained spittle cascading over his paling lips. Those brilliant eyes glistened with tears, but not a single one released past his dark lashes. Even in the face of death, he held his composure.
I couldn’t find words to share in return. My mind had severed my ability to speak or think past the fact that the man I loved more than anything was bleeding out in my arms. Was this how he felt when he’d stabbed me, then begged Bahmet to saveme? Like his world was ending, and nothing but it would ever matter again.
Our gazes tethered to one another, his frightened and small, mine resilient. I wouldn’t give up on him. I knew that fact as if my soul was made for him.
“Son,” my father’s voice called from behind me. “I will give you ten seconds to make the right decision.”
Fuck him. Fuck his commands, and his desires.
I didn’t realise I was crying until I turned to face him. Tomin’s brows rose an inch, reflecting his interest in seeing an emotion that he thought he’d successfully beaten out of me many years ago.
“I willnevergive you what you want,” I hissed as the tears fell, cutting paths down my cheeks. “Not in this life, or the next.”
Tomin still held the gun up, the remaining Hunters I’d not had the pleasure of killing gathering at his back like a shield. Romy was on her knees, neck bowed beneath the pressure of a Hunter’s gun, a snarl painted across her face, hate glittering in her dark eyes at me. To her left was a witch I didn’t recognise. His focus was on Romy, as if nothing else in the room mattered but her safety.
“Look around you, Arwyn.” Tomin gestured his arms out to his sides. “Understand that this will only end one way. If you need me to kill every witch in front of you until you break, I will. Because this will only ever stop when you give me what I want. Be the smart boy I know you can be.”
I hated when he called me a boy, as if I was still that snivelling child that tried to fight against his poison, only to break after years of his suffocating treatment. Thatboydied during the first night of the Witch Trials, when I looked into the eyes of a man whose life I had destroyed.
I wasn’t the same person anymore.
“Are you so unfamiliar with failure that you cannot see it when it stares you in the face,Father?” I shouted the last word, disgusted by the title on my tongue.
Tomin smiled, eyes gazing down to Hector. I wanted to gouge them out of his skull for daring to look at him. If my love wasn’t dying in my arms I would’ve done just that.
“It would seem I know failure very well… as will you.”
I despised how assured he sounded, as if he could see the future and knew what was coming.
