His look was pained, if not pleading, and tiny fissures slicing through my heart.
“Tarrin?” My voice cracked on the single word.
He winced, and something in that movement filled those fissures with fire, igniting my ire. One way or another, we weren’t leaving this camp without the truth.
I wasn’t sure what Kaelun’s unara shared with him, but he stepped aside, allowing me to approach Tarrin.
I glared up at the man I once called my friend. The man I had saved. The man I’d defended. Steeling myself, I said, “Were. You.Physically.Capable. Of. Defying. Thaddeus’ will?”
His mouth opened, then shut.
“Answer me,” I shrieked, making everyone but Kaelun jump.
He just stared at me with deep sorrow.
“Answer”—I pushed him—"me!" I yelled at the top of my lungs, and it wasn’t lost on me that our companions had shifted their stances so that they could jump in—to protect him from me.
“I swear to the seven hells below, Tarrin, if you don’t answer?—”
“I don’t know,” Tarrin screamed like a man undone, face red, forehead veins bulging. He grabbed his hair with both hands so hard that it looked as if he was trying to hold onto his sanity before he threw them to the side. “I don’t fucken know. Is that what you want to hear?” he bellowed, our faces to close spittle fell on my leathers from his outburst.
“No, Tarrin. I want the truth!” I yelled back.
“I-don’t-know-Ny.” His words were so fast they blended together. “Until that day I hadn’t thought it possible. I couldn’t physically defy him, not at first—I’d stopped trying after fifty-two years, okay? But now looking back at it, maybe that changed. I don’t know. And when he was killing you—I don’t know, Ny. Maybe I could’ve told you about your parents. The twins. The bond. I don’t know. Then when you left, Thaddeus ripped my title away. Made Nevander his second. He said he couldn’t trust me. That I’d given Luca to you.”
“Stop.” I held a hand up, unwilling to let him diminish my trauma with his.
“Ny, please.”
“You don’t have the right to call me that. In fact, you no longer have the right to talk to me; do I make myself clear?”
He reached for me. “Ny, you don’t mean that. Please.”
I had a blade to his throat faster than he could blink. His eyes went wide, and I could sense everyone freeze. Undiluted rage coursed through me. At him. At what had been done to me. At all of it. My chest heaved with heavy breaths, and all I saw was red as I stared into his lying, cowardly soul.
Lifting up on my tiptoes so I was closer to his ear, I whispered, “I should have let you bleed to death in the Autumn Court.”
The venomous words tasted bitter on my tongue, but that didn’tstop the primal magic nestled deep within from delighting at the wave of shock it elicited from Tarrin. She purred from the hurt now radiating off him. A distant part of me regretted the words, begged me to take them back. But the anger that coursed through my veins was deliciously heady. Besides, it was his turn to feel a fraction of the hurt he’d put me through.
“Commander,” Kaelun said, his voice sounding muffled—or was it distant? “She needs to stop. We’re all at risk.”
I didn’t know what his words meant. Why he was being so formal. Hells, I wasn’t even sure I’d heard him right. All I knew is that my pain called for vengeance. For blood. For Tarrin’s blood.
“Spark, I’m going to need you to give me the blade. Okay?”
“Leave me alone,” I screamed, slashing the blade against Artton’s leathers, instantly annoyed I hadn’t cut all the way through.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t do that.”
Crouching into my fighter’s stance, fixated on the male before me. One moment I was preparing to strike, the next someone plucked the dagger from my hand. Screaming, I swung around, power bursting from my hand at the culprit. Then, strong arms wrapped around me, gripping me like a vise.
I thrashed. Screaming and kicking.
I was going to die. They were going to kill me. This couldn’t be happening. Thaddeus had found us.
Panicked, I placed my hands on the strong arms binding me and let my powers flow.
“Fucken stop her,” my captor yelled in pain.
