“Anya?” I stepped forward, waving a hand in front of her glazed-over eyes. She didn’t even blink. “Anya!”
She startled back, colliding with her bedframe.
“What just happened?” I demanded, moving aside so the firelight could shine into her cell. The bars’ shadows slashed across her ghostly white face as she gripped the frame, her pointed nails scraping the wood.
“A vision.” She tipped her head toward the ceiling.
I followed her line of sight, only finding damp stone. “Of what?”
Her eyes flicked to mine—humorless, haunted. “Of teeth,” she said softly. “And what they leave behind.”
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
Ronen
Last night, after showering off my frustration from my useless conversation with Anya, I tried to come up with a solution to this morning’s problem—with little luck.
MJ had said I needed to do something more for Lucille. Well, that something more was proving difficult as I sat on my bed, geared up, and contemplated the probability of me not killing the pet in the next hour.
It would hurt the hellion if I killed him. But that knowledge wasn’t enough to stop my shadows’ murderous urges. Not when his very survival threatened her life.
So how did I stop myself from slitting his throat the moment I got him alone? How did I keep my praesidium at bay?
I stared at my bedroom ceiling, unseeing, and his voice entered my head—Gabriel’s.
“Fate is a cruel bitch, Ronen. She bludgeons our souls to see if we can withstand her tests. They are never easy, and lesser males fail them all the time. So I ask you, do you want to be a lesser male, or do you want to rise to the occasion and be better than Etan and his rotten council?”
I looked out at the blindingly white Ethereal Castle in the distance from the cliff where we stood. “I’m sure I don’t have a soul left.”
We had just killed yet another sinner. If that was what you’d call a teenager who didn’t listen to their parents. A fucking teenager.
“I believe there will come a time when you are no longer under his thumb. And if you are a lesser male, you will not make it. You will not atone. You will dishonor their memories. So you have a choice, Ronen. You can either free yourself, or you can waste away knowing he won.”
It hadn’t been just his words that day that helped me decide. It also wasn’t a clean-cut process. Deciding to live and face everything I’d done, runed or not, was an unimaginable daily battle. Little things pulled me back from the edge. Remembering Gabriel’s words, memorializing him by tattooing his dagger on my neck, the names inked across my back, meeting Alexei and MJ—all those pieces brought me back from the ledge the pet hovered on. The day I officially overcame the idea of taking my own life, I addedAphesis, liberation, to my wrist. A reminder of my choice to be more, better,free. To be nothing like the filth who sat on his heavenly throne and called himself king. To beat Etan, so one day I could overcome my demons enough to face him.
The hellion was right. In a lot of ways, the pet and I were the same. I understood exactly what he was going through. I was the only one who could.
As Gabriel would say, I had a choice: to be a lesser male or to be better. To be someone the hellion would be proud to have at her side or to give in and lose her forever.
I stood and walked out of my rooms.
Fate was a cruel bitch.
Wake him up discreetly, Rune.
She lay wedged between my beautiful, although somewhat rumpled, hellion and the pet. Couldn’t say I was surprised by that, though her allowing him to lie on her didn’t sit well with me. I had half a mind to demand that she not let him touch her, but much like my stubborn cordistella, that would probably make her let him touch her more. At least he wasn’t curled against my hellion. Small mercies.
Beside the hellion lay Oliver with one arm thrown over his face andthe other nearly draped across hers. He sprawled out much like Rune did when she slept with me. The bed seemed pretty damned cozy with all of them.
If this went wrong,I didn’t want the hellion to worry just yet. And if she woke before I brought the pet’s fully breathing body back, I had a plan.
Rune, with her cajoling ways, led the pet down the hall to where I stood fully armed in front of my door, my fingers itching toward my Soul Swords. He approached, relief easing his shoulders and smoothing the creases from his face as if he knew death hovered just within reach.
No wonder he came so easily.
He stopped a foot away and closed his eyes.
