Page 41

AVA

T he firelight danced on the walls of the study, casting long shadows over Ebony’s figure slumped in her father’s leather chair, the faint tang of spilled liquor clinging to the air, mingling with the crackle of the hearth.

Her eyes lifted to meet mine as I stepped into the room, disbelief flickering across her face as though I’d walked out of her deepest guilt, a specter come to haunt her.

Then, like a mask snapping into place, the High Lord emerged, and her lips curled into a sneer.

“You stupid girl,” she spat, her voice sharp as glass. “Now I have to kill you. I gave you twenty-four hours to leave.”

“I’m not leaving.” My voice was calm, controlled—a blade honed to perfection.

“You think I’m bluffing?” Her eyes narrowed, venom pooling in her voice. “I will kill you and everyone you love.”

Her hand moved quickly, slipping into the folds of her robe, and I tensed, half expecting a weapon. But instead, she pulled out her phone, the movement quick and precise, and dialed.

Pressing the phone to her ear, she barked the command with the cold authority of a queen. “Kill Tynan Donahue. Now. And make it hurt.”

I stood unmoving, watching her, waiting. Waiting for her to realize what we had just done.

Her brows furrowed, confusion flickering across her face as muffled voices filled her ear.

“What do you mean, it’s all over?” she snapped, her voice rising with every word. She pressed the phone tighter against her ear, leaning forward in her chair, her tone spiraling from anger to desperation.

“I demand to—put on—no, I—I’ll have you shot for—” Her voice faltered, and her face twisted with fury and disbelief. “I am your High Lord!”

The title hung in the air, brittle and meaningless. It didn’t matter anymore, and for the first time, Ebony seemed to realize it. Her hand, still clutching the phone, trembled, and the firelight caught the faint sheen of sweat forming on her brow.

Her eyes snapped to mine, fury flashing across her face. “What did you do?”

“Ty figured it out, actually,” I said, my tone maddeningly casual, as though we were discussing the weather.

Her face reddened, blotches of anger blooming on her pale cheeks. “Figured out what?”

I smiled faintly, letting the silence stretch before I answered. “He figured out that the camera in the tomb was digital. Which means you had to store your little initiation blackmail films somewhere virtual. ”

I went on. “Ty isn’t great with computers. He would tell you as much, if you ever see him again. But he knows someone who happens to be excellent with them.”

“No,” Ebony scoffed. “My servers are impenetrable.”

Ciaran stepped to my side and into the light, his expression sharp, mocking.

“I barely broke a sweat hacking in.” he said lazily, as if he were discussing breaking into a child’s toy box.

Ebony’s mask cracked. Her lips parted, her breath coming in shallow gasps. “No. You’re bluffing.”

“What better way to blackmail all your members to stay in line than to record their twisted initiation. Sickening, but clever,” I said, my voice calm as ever. “But you know what else it makes?”

I picked up the remote from the edge of her father’s mahogany desk, its surface still damp with spilled whiskey, and pointed it at the sleek television mounted on the far wall.

“Great evidence,” I said as I switched it on.

The screen lit up with a familiar news anchor, her voice calm but firm as she delivered the story of the decade.

“A secret society, known as the Sochai, has been exposed for decades of illegal activities, including blackmail, assault, and corruption at the highest levels of society.”

The anchor’s voice faded as the faces of high-ranking members flashed on the screen—the dean, Cormac Foley Senior, the police commissioner—one after another, their names and titles displayed like a grotesque gallery of shame.

Ebony let out a choke, and her grip on the phone faltered, her knuckles blanching as she stared at the screen. For a moment, the weight of what she was seeing seemed to crush her.

But then she rallied, her lips twisting into a defiant sneer.

“Impressive,” she said, her voice shaking with a false bravado. “But you don’t have anything on me . I certainly never raped anyone as part of my initiation.”

I met her gaze evenly, my tone calm, almost conversational. “You think so?”

Her sneer faltered, her composure cracking as her cell phone chimed with an incoming message. The sound cut through the tension like a knife, her eyes darting to the glowing screen as unease flickered across her face.

“You should open that,” I said, my voice calm but edged with steel.

I folded my arms, grounding myself as I watched her wrestling with the hesitation that gripped her. Each breath I took felt deliberate, steady, in stark contrast to the erratic rise and fall of her chest.

Her pale finger, tipped with a bloodred nail, hovered above the screen as the firelight glinted off its polished surface.

Seconds stretched into an eternity, my steady heartbeats filling the silence.

Then, with a sudden, jerky movement, she stabbed at the screen, opening the video file.

The sounds of Ebony’s pleasure filled the room.

I’d seen the video and so the sudden crack of a whip did not surprise me.

But Ebony’s cry of pain and demand for more was something I would be happy to not hear a third time.

The video Ciaran had uncovered was the dean’s own guarantee against the new High Lord.

Judging by the way Ebony’s face completely drained of blood as she watched it, she hadn’t known about the dean secretly filming them. Not that she could have done anything about it even if she had known.

She’d been in a room that was half boudoir, half torture chamber, bound and hanging from a complex contraption on the ceiling.

The dean wasn’t even undressed as he circled her and teased her naked body with the tail of the whip. The more she begged for it, the less he gave her.

His voice was tinny from the small cell phone speaker and it only reached me all the way across the room faintly, but it didn’t matter, because I remembered it word for word.

“Why doesn’t Daddy do this for you anymore?” he asked.

Even without the video in front of me, I could still see him circling the ropes, Ebony snagged within them, her welted body writhing for the sting of the whip.

I didn’t even blink when I heard Ebony’s response. “Because I killed him.”

The crack of the whip was nothing compared to the volume of Ebony’s cries of pleasure.

“Tell me again,” he hissed. “ Who killed the High Lord?”

Ebony’s response was near euphoric, the high-pitched cry of a woman on the edge of orgasm.

“Me, me, me !” she screamed, each answer punctuated by another brutal strike of the whip.

Ebony cut off the prolonged noise of her orgasm by turning off the phone .

Ebony’s breath caught audibly, her earlier composure shattered. She was white as a sheet.

“No,” she whispered, shaking her head as if she could will the truth away. “You… you couldn’t… you wouldn’t send this to anyone, would you?”

I didn’t answer right away.

My mind wandered—to another recording. One I hadn’t shown her.

To a shadowed altar where her father stood during his initiation.

And to a naked girl lying pale and still on the cold stone altar.

A girl with pale eyes the color of Hydrangea macrophylla .

The saddest thing of all was that Ebony had been a victim once, just like me.

And yet she had chosen to perpetuate the very system that had shattered her.

Instead of breaking the chains, she had tightened them around others, condemning victims who were as powerless as she had once been. She had taken the cruelty she’d suffered and wielded it like a weapon, carving out her own twisted sense of control.

There was no redemption for her. No undoing the horrors she had inflicted, no path to absolve the blood on her hands. The weight of that truth pressed down on my chest like a stone, heavy and unrelenting.

But for a fleeting moment—just one—I glimpsed her as she must have been before it all. A frightened little girl trapped in her own nightmare, crushed beneath the weight of her father’s sins.

Hers, too, had been an innocent life, but no one had come to save her. No pair of dark, possessive brothers with eyes as blue as the ocean had torn her from the darkness.

No one had fought for her.

I tried to block it out, but the ache rose in my chest regardless. Against my will, I pitied this woman who had hurt me so deeply. I saw the shadow of the person she could have been if someone had just reached her in time.

And worse—God, so much worse—I saw who I could have been if my life had taken just one different turn.

It hurt. It fucking hurt.

My throat tightened, but I forced the pity back down and lifted my chin.

“We’ll give you a head start…” I said. “You have twenty-four hours to leave Ireland.”

She blinked, stunned. “What?”

“Twenty-four hours,” I repeated, my voice hollow, my resolve absolute. One final mercy for the innocent girl she had been. “And then we come for you.”

Ciaran stepped closer, his hand a steadying weight on my shoulder. I didn’t glance at him, but his touch anchored me, gave me strength I wasn’t sure I possessed anymore.

I stared Ebony down, watching her unravel before me.

And for the first time, I felt a flicker of power in the ashes of everything she’d taken from me.

“And when we catch you,” I said, the words coming out like ice, “you’re dead.”