Page 8 of Broken Shadows (Corrupt Shadows Duet #2)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Evie

I breathe in the scent of burned cigars, coffee, and polished wood as we walk into the empty, cold foyer. My eyes travel the room, over the grand staircase, marble flooring, gold-framed portraits, and the damask papered covered walls.

I never thought I’d be back here. My stomach clenches. The closer I get to seeing Lorcan, the bigger my desire to run out the door becomes.

We arrive at the living room and Rosa throws me a gray and purple sherpa blanket patterned with skull moths. I hug her jacket tighter around me as Aiden pours himself, Rosa, and me a drink, but I don’t touch mine. I’m more nauseous than ever now that the adrenaline has worn off.

Fortunately, Gomez has fallen asleep on my shoulder. The poor thing is exhausted, his tiny snores a soundtrack in my right ear.

Aiden sits across from Rosa and me on the long, clawfoot sofa and says, “Okay, so before you guys do your magic stuff, what’s the plan?”

My head throbs from all the new information over the past six hours. “I guess we need to find a solution to get away from The Order. I’m not going to kill Lorcan if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Even if he deserves it, I finish in my thoughts.

Rosa’s tone drops an octave. “You’ll only be giving Samuel what he wants. We need Lorcan. Ezra too. The Order won’t stop until they’ve found us. I overheard Asher talking with Samuel once,” she says, then adds with a roll of her eyes, “They’re either idiots or they planned on killing me, because they let a few things slip while in the room with me.”

Aiden nods. “They said a lot in front of me.” We both look at him and he shrugs. “No one ever sees me as a threat, so people often say things they shouldn’t with me in the room. The only one who was cautious around me was Gideon.” Aiden’s brows furrow and it could be a trick of light, but I swear a flush creeps over his cheeks. “Anyway, yeah, I just acted as if I wasn’t paying attention whenever Samuel came and spoke to Lazarus in particular. That was the only one he was like, honest with.”

I squeeze the edge of the couch cushions as I lean forward. “Well, people have a habit of underestimating me too. It’s their loss.” He shoots me half a smile and for the first time, I feel some sort of bond between us.

Rosa places her drink on the table and leans forward too. “So, what did Samuel say to Lazarus?”

Aiden pulls his sleeves down over his hands, and I notice they’re all frayed. I know the signs of anxiety when I see them. He’s nervous and I can’t blame him. I don’t even know how he got dragged into all of this, other than what Lorcan briefly mentioned about Aiden being indebted to him. Yet, he doesn’t seem loyal to him. Not really.

Aiden rushes his words out, barely stopping for breaths between sentences. “Well, okay, so he said there’s some chick in Hell. Your great aunt.”

“Evangeline,” I confirm.

“Right, well, I’m pretty sure Samuel’s in love with her. I’ve not been in love myself or anything, but when he talked about her it was always with like, such high regard. You know? Samuel didn’t seem like the kinda dude who was scared of anything,” he continues. “Except he did look afraid sometimes when he thought you weren’t going to crack, because he didn’t want to disappoint her. That’s all he kept saying again and again, that Evangeline needs him to succeed and wouldn’t let anything get in the way. Yeah, so he blames Lorcan for your great aunt being in Hell and says he manipulated her, and he wouldn’t rest until Lorcan’s dead.” He pauses to inhale sharply, then continues, “So, your great aunt needs Lorcan dead so she and Samuel can take over Hell, because Lorcan is next in line for the throne after Lucifer retires.” He pauses and shakes his head in disbelief. “I wasn’t sure if I heard it right either, but yeah, he said the actual devil is going to retire. I don’t know if they meant that as in they’re going to kill him, I mean can you kill the devil?”

Rosa lets out a heavy sigh. “You’re getting off track.”

“Yeah, right,” he says shaking his head. “So, Samuel kept making all kinds of promises to Lazarus of what he’ll do once he’s in charge, but like, he wouldn’t tell the other demon bros that he was going to do that. If he was talking to Asher or one of the others, he just said that Lucifer was behind the command to kill Lorcan, and he told members of The Order something else entirely, saying they were angels, not demons or something.” He scoffs and leans back in his chair, then kicks his feet up on the priceless coffee table. “It’s a lie. From what I heard, Evangeline’s with Lucifer but is secretly seeing Samuel on the side and they’re planning a muttony.”

Rosa nods. “Do you mean a mutiny?”

“Yeah, like they’re planning on taking over behind the devil’s back.”

I sit back against the plush cushions and take a deep breath. Well, fuck.

Rosa puffs out her cheeks and releases a tense breath. “I knew about Lucifer ordering them to kill Lorcan, but I didn’t know the rest.” She rubs her temples and closes her eyes. “We need to get Lorcan and Ezra out of the Shadow Realm to protect us against The Order and Samuel. We can’t do this alone.”

Aiden hisses a breath between his teeth and slaps a hand over his neck. “Fuck, stupid servant’s mark. Yeah, Lorcan’s pissed. He says he’s going to tear Samuel apart.” He grabs his drink and downs it in one. “Okay! I hear you loud and clear,” he mumbles in response to something we can’t hear. Or someone. Lorcan must be communicating with him through his mind.

My muscles tense. Lorcan! I forgot all about mirrors in the chaos. He’s probably watching us now and listening to everything we say. The thought sends pins and needles over my bare legs. The feeling is quickly replaced with a rush of rage. Of course, Lorcan’s pissed, the woman he was in love with wants him dead.

A shiver skitters down my spine, and I shudder. “I’m assuming he needs my help to get him out first.” The bite in my tongue isn’t lost on Rosa, whose brown eyes widen twice their size.

Aiden looks behind me and I recall the layout of the room from when I was in the Shadow Realm. There’s a large oval mirror behind me on the wall. “Yeah, but he says to make sure you rest first.” Aiden adds with a mumble, “I never get such sweet treatment.”

A lump forms in my throat and I’m at a loss for words. That’s the first time he’s communicated with me since I was in the Shadow Realm, even if it’s through someone else, and all he cares about is that I’m rested so I am strong enough to rebuild that fucking portal.

“What if I don’t want to rebuild it?” I question. “It’s not my problem if his ex-girlfriend wants him dead.”

Rosa springs to her feet and walks to me. She places her hands on my shoulders and kneels to my height. “Samuel is never going to stop hunting you. You’re the only one who can open the portal. Wouldn’t you rather do it on your terms?”

Anxiety threads her dark eyes. She’s scared, even if she won’t admit it. Out of the two of us, she was always good at keeping a cool head in crisis situations, partly because of her job, but seeing her on the edge of panic like this hardens something inside of me.

“Lorcan says…” Aiden begins to recite, but Rosa shushes him.

She returns her focus to me. “Do it for us.” She slips a finger to my hair, then strokes Gomez’s sleeping head. “I love you, Evie, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life on the run from these monsters, and neither do you. We deserve peace.”

I run my fingers over my clavicle and sigh. “I’ll do it for you and Gomez.”

“For all of us. We’re a family.” She side-eyes Aiden. “For him too. He’s an innocent in all of this, trust me. We talked a lot through the wall when we were trapped there.”

A semblance of control seeps back into my mind. I can feel Lorcan’s eyes on me. He could have spoken at any point but instead chose to talk through Aiden. He must be anxious around me too. Good. “I suppose I can make it a condition he free Aiden.”

“Fuck, yes,” Aiden pleads from behind us. “Thanks, Evie!”

Rosa smiles softly. “Come on, let’s find you some clothes. There must be something you can wear somewhere in this massive manor.”

Aiden bites his lip. “There is. Lorcan made me bring a bunch of your clothes here when you were trapped in there with him, for when you got out.”

“Okay,” I say and stand, careful with my movements so not to wake my little bat. He’s exhausted and has been through so much. “I don’t need rest either, I can do this now.”

It’s the truth, even though I’m depleted. My fingers tremble, and I sigh. There is no chance I can sleep anytime soon. Especially as my brain spins jittery thoughts over itself and my powers, now finally under control, that beg to be used.

I pull Gomez from my shoulder. He reaches out in his sleep to feel me, and I press a reassuring hand against his furry back. “Take him to a bedroom,” I whisper. “I need to do something. I’ll be right up.”

She gathers him in her arms, swaddling him in her jacket like a baby. He remains asleep, calmed by her energy. Then again, Rosa has always been like a second mom to him.

Rosa glances behind me at the mirror. “Good luck. Remember, you always have me.”

I force a smile, even though my chest is aching. “I know.”

I hold my breath when I spin to face the mirror because I can feel him standing there, waiting to speak, wanting me to look at him. I don’t want to see him. His betrayal cuts so deeply that I can’t even begin to think about it without wanting to explode.

I hear his voice, but it’s so sad it can’t possibly belong to him. “ Evie .”

My name. Not Little Witch or Killer . Just Evie.

I lift my lashes and face him. Pastel green eyes pin me from behind his black mask and I’m frozen.

Rosa and Aiden’s footsteps fade as they leave the room, no doubt so I can be alone with Lorcan. I can’t see Ezra anywhere in the Shadow Realm version of the living room, so I assume Lorcan ordered him away too.

It’s just us, alone, with just a sheet of glass and an entire realm between us.

“Your eyes,” he says, voice breaking in parts. “You look—”

“Broken?”

He sighs. “Miserable.”

My chest tightens. “I was tortured.”

His eyes close, appearing as if the thought actually pains him. The audacity. He’s trying to pull me back in with fake worry, so I help him defeat his brothers, but I won’t be manipulated.

“I’m sorry, Evie.”

“Stop calling me that.”

His pupils dilate. “Okay, Little Witch . Whatever you need.”

“Stop acting like you care!” I snap, my fingers flexing at my sides as I try to hold back all the venom dripping from my thoughts to my tongue. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction to know that the reason I’m sad has nothing to do with me being tortured. I’m angry over that, but Lorcan’s betrayal just fucking hurts.

Lorcan looks around to ensure we’re alone, then lowers his mask. It’s either to show me I can trust him, or to trick me into believing he cares so I lower my defenses. “I do care.”

“You’re a liar.”

“Yes, but not about what you think.”

“You were going to lock me in the Shadow Realm,” I state. “You were going to use me to get out and have me take your place.”

“I changed my mind,” he said simply.

I scoff a laugh. “You don’t even deny it.”

“No,” he admits, but quickly adds, “but I did change my mind. That night, in the library. Maybe even before then.” He pauses briefly, as if he’s catching his breath. He’s a good actor, I’ll give him that. Although, he’s a demon so what can I expect? He continues in that heartbreak, bullshit tone, “I’m not good at this and maybe it took me a minute to realize what I was feeling was more than lust—”

“Oh Hell no. Don’t go there.” I shake my head and squeeze my eyes shut. I just killed a man. This shouldn’t bother me at all. We didn’t even have anything real. It was just sex, something primal, and dark. It was nothing deep.

His expression crumples. He actually has the audacity to look hurt. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

Damn. My thoughts were too loud. I’d pushed them through our blood bond. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

His tone is so soft it hurts. “Please.”

One word, that’s all it takes, and I freeze to the spot.

He continues. “You think I was in love with Evangeline?”

“Weren’t you?” I ask, trying to keep the desperation from my tone, but my body betrays me, and my face flushes with heat. He tilts his head, and I notice the subtle shift and the corner of his lip curves.

“No,” he replies, and my breath hitches. I want to believe him, but I can’t. Otherwise, I deserve whatever happens to me after this. He lets out a prolonged sigh. “She’d shrouded my memories in smoke, and I only remembered everything recently. Everything I thought I felt was artificial. She loved me but I never reciprocated her feelings, and she hates me for it. It’s why she wants me dead and she’s using Samuel to get to me. She must have figured out how I feel about you.”

I shake my head. “I don’t believe you.”

“You should,” he states, his voice now deep and gravelly like before. “I showed you my true name. I’m making myself vulnerable to you.”

My gaze traces his true name inked under his eye, and I’m transported back to the night he first showed me it. The music, his singing, flood into my mind, replaying the moment he pulled me closer, when my heart first beat for him. That moment in the library I was certain I’d felt it—that song captured the essence of who we were together. What we were. Separately, we were monsters, but together, well, as Rosa would say, sometimes two wrongs make a right.

The memory crashes with the lie he’d fed me.

He was in love with my great aunt and his heart had already been captivated by a Fallenmoore Witch. It just wasn’t me.

I swallow thickly, suppressing the urge to clutch the fabric at my chest. “Those grimoire entries didn’t make it seem like she was a puppet. She thought she was manipulating you .”

“ She loved me, not the other way around,” he growls, and I look at him properly, deep into those green eyes that still haunt my daymares. “Ezra helped me remember everything. I was her savior, Evie, at least in her eyes. In mine, I was just trying to escape my family and found an extremely powerful witch that I could manipulate into helping me. She was alone, an outcast in her family, and I befriended her. That is all.” His breaths are uneven and all over the place. He runs a hand through his disheveled, raven locks, drawing my attention to his big, tattooed hands.

I give him an incredulous stare. “So, you’re trying to tell me it was friendship?”

“No,” Lorcan states. “I was pretending to be her friend. Like I said, she was very powerful.”

“Ah, there’s the true manipulative bastard behind the mask of niceties.”

“I’m glad you haven’t lost your fierceness.” He flashes me a boyish smile that makes him look more angel than demon. “Look, Samuel has wanted to get rid of me for centuries, and Ezra and Lazarus locked me in a fucking cage. All of it was under my father’s orders, or at least so I thought until now. Samuel has been behind everything. He always was a jealous little cunt. So, I asked Eva to help me make a prison to trap my siblings.”

Hearing him call her by a nickname makes it all the more real. “The Shadow Realm,” I state.

“Yes. She created it, masterfully, by manipulating purgatory into this.” He looks around him. “I’ve never met a witch so powerful, until you.”

“Those grimoire pages made it seem like she created it to trap you. That she was manipulating you!” I shout, holding onto the threads of my sanity, because he can’t be telling the truth.

If he is, then I have to confront something far worse than heartbreak and betrayal, admitting that I feel something for a demon who can’t ever love me back. My brows furrow when I recall the words he once whispered. ‘Demons cannot love.’

Then, maybe he didn’t love her. If that’s true, even if he didn’t have a relationship, then he doesn’t care for me either and this is all a game.

“She wrote those pages after she trapped me. Eva knew only her blood, or her descendants, could free me. By writing that grimoire, which is the very key to unlocking a portal, she knew she could poison whoever read it against me; and I hate to admit it, but it’s worked.” He presses a palm against the glass, then curls his fingers into a fist. “She was insane . I never led her on, not like that anyway. When I told her I didn’t love her in return, I found love spells and potions around her house, even demon circles. She did everything she could to tether me to her, even chaining me up and altering my memories. This went on for years . But I still left, even after she forced my heart. That’s when she locked me in the Shadow Realm with her family’s help. It killed her to do it. Did you know that? She died only a few months after.”

I feel the blood rush from my face. “Who’s to say I won’t die then, by opening the portal for you?”

“You’re more powerful than she ever was. The Fallenmoore Coven has been cultivating black magic for decades, and it grows stronger with each generation. When she died, her powers were distributed amongst her living relatives, but it was tainted with her special brand of insanity, which is why when any of them since tried to suppress her magic, they went insane. But now, with the rest of your family dead, it’s all yours. You hold the power of an entire coven inside of you. That’s why The Order kept you alive. You’re the only one who can do this.”

“So, you’ll risk my life?”

He shakes his head. “Just because I care doesn’t mean I’m going to let fear of losing you blind me to your abilities. I know you can do this. I saw a glimpse of that when you broke the blood bond on the original portal. If I thought there was any chance you could die, I wouldn’t let you do this.”

Such bullshit, but I’m not doing this for him anyway. Rosa was right in what she told me. If I don’t get these demons out, we’ll be on the run for good. I can’t protect her and Gomez forever from The Order and the demon brothers. Perhaps I might be able to take Samuel down, but all of them? I risk dying before I can finish them off. But with Lorcan and Ezra, we stand a chance.

Lorcan’s intrusive gaze lingers on me, as if he’s trying to read my thoughts, but based on the wrinkles forming between his brows, he can’t.

“But do you believe me, about Eva?” he asks, breaking the long silence, as if my believing him is the only thing that matters.

I don’t want to admit it to him, but I do believe him, only because of one painful truth—Lorcan cannot love, which means he’s using me just like he was using her. I can’t let any feelings I had blind me like my great aunt did. I’ve already put Rosa and Gomez in danger from engaging with Lorcan in the first place.

“I’ll rebuild the portal,” I say in way of answer, then add, “only if you promise to kill Samuel when you find him so he can’t come after us, and free Aiden from his servitude.”

After a heavy sigh, he nods, and I jut my chin. It’s time to free my demon from his prison of one hundred years.