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“What makes you believe that?”
“He was almost dead when I found him at the piers on Purgatory Island. Looked like he’d been put through a meat grinder.” He pauses, watching the man below struggle to his feet once more. “Someone worked him over before he was dumped. Broken ribs, lash marks down to the bone, and half his face was so swollen I’m surprised he can see out of it. Whoever wanted him dead didn’t quite finish the job, the warden said I could take him if I wanted him, that he probably wouldn’t last till morning.”
Kylian peers back down at the man.
“I felt sorry for the bastard. Honestly, I didn’t think he’d survive the trip.”
Something cold creeps through my veins, but I push it away because it can’t be. It’s impossible. Thousands of humans pass through Purgatory Island. Thousands of men with defiant streaks and scarred bodies.
Kylian whistles sharply, the sound cutting through the noise below. The guard handling the prisoner snaps his gaze upward, recognition and fear chasing each other across his face as he sees the king.
“He is to go to the castle infirmary for checking over,” Kylian calls down, his voice carrying the effortless authority of a man who has never had to raise it to be heard. “Then the cells until I decide what to do with him.”
The guard grins, wide and ugly, and turns to the prisoner, who is swaying on his feet, blood dripping from his face, his chest heaving with shallow, labored breaths. The guard grabs the man’s chin, jerking his face upward.
“Hear that, boy? You’re going to the castle. There’s no worse place to land for a human.” The guard laughs, the sound ringing across the pier. “See what your defiance gets you?”
The man spits in the guard’s face.
The backhand is immediate, savage. His head whips sideways, and this time when he falls, his body crumples against the stone. My stomach lurches, but even on the ground, his hands are fisting, his broken body refusing to accept what his mind already knows.
Kylian glances at Eagan with something like reluctant amusement. “He seems intent on getting himself killed before he reaches the castle.”
Eagan laughs, a low, genuine sound. “You could have sent him to the labor camps,” Eagan states.
“Not in that state. I don’t even think the infirmary can handle him. If he is as injured as you say and still this much of a fighter, he’ll be dead by morning once a guard gets fed up with him. We’ll figure it out tomorrow. We need help anyhow on the castle grounds.”
Below, the guards haul the man to his feet again, and as they drag him toward the road leading up from the pier, his head lifts. Slowly, as if even the muscles in his neck are so weak he can barely lift his head. His gaze rises from the ground to the balcony above, landing on Kylian first, and I watch the hate blaze across his battered face, open and unapologetic. Then his gaze slides to Eagan, and the hate sharpens like he hates him the most for not letting him die at Purgatory.
Then his eyes find me, and my world stops in the way that happens when your heart forgets to beat and your lungs forget to draw air. Every sound fades as my brain tries to process something it cannot accept. Kylian’s voice, the clanking chains, the barking guards, and the groaning ships against the piers—all of it gone, swallowed by the silence of recognition.
His hazel eyes peer back at me. His face is wrong, swollen and split, darkened with bruises that make the bones beneath almost unrecognizable, but I know those eyes. I know the shape of that jaw beneath the blood and the careful, stubborn set of his mouth that he wears when he’s decided something and nothing in this world will change his mind.
Arlo.
His name detonates inside me like the blast that knocked Kylian unconscious in the blood bank, only this time, it is my world that shatters. He’s alive. Broken, bloodied, and chained, dragged through the mud of a vampire kingdom like an animal, but alive. The relief of that is so sharp it almost brings me to my knees.
Then the relief dies, murdered by the reality that replaces it. Because look at me! I’m standing on a balcony beside the Vampire King, clean, fed, wearing clothes that don’t have holes in them. I’m close enough to Kylian that our shoulders could touch, looming over the other servants as if I have any right to be here. And even from this distance, I watch the moment understanding crosses his face. His gaze takes in my proximity to the king, the absence of chains on my wrists, and something in his expression breaks so quietly that I feel it in my chest like my heart is being squeezed in his hand.
My mouth opens but nothing comes out. What could I possibly say that would cross the distance between this balcony and that pier? What word exists in any language that could explain everything that has happened since the last time I saw him? The shame of it hits me so violently that my vision swims, and I grip the railing to keep from falling.
Arlo’s gaze holds mine for one more heartbeat, a heartbeat that contains every quiet conversation by the well, every brush of calloused fingers against my hand, every word he never said and the three he finally did, and then the guards wrench him forward, dragging him up the road toward the castle.
His face turns from me, and I want nothing more than to run to him, to save him from whatever fate the king decides, but showing care or attachment to another man will only condemn him. I need to get him out of here, back home with Marian and Angie where he’ll be safe from Kylian.
I’m so far inside my head I barely register the world moving around me.
Kylian pushes off the railing, already heading for the doors. Like dragging me across kingdoms, sorting seventy humans in chains, and orchestrating the suffering of half the continent is a normal day for him.
Eagan’s presence at my side is so quiet I almost miss it. He lingers, gaze flicking down to where Arlo vanished. Then he looks at me. It’s an insignificant glance, but my whole body goes cold when his voice slithers into my head.
“You know that man?”
I stare at him, trying to find words. Instead, I just shake my head. Eagan’s face gives nothing away, but his jaw ticks once, then again. He lets the silence drag out for several seconds, those watchdog eyes drilling into me like he’s trying to rip the truth right out.
“Whatever that look is on your face,” his voice flits through my head again. “You might wanna remove it before Kylian notices. He is not a sharing man.”
Then he’s gone. Just slinks off after the king, leaving me standing there like an idiot, veins full of fear and shame and that wild screaming need to chase Arlo and fix everything, even when there’s not a single damn thing I can do.
