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CHAPTER THIRTY

ROOK

“Pyrah?” I say, urgency roughening my voice. “Talk to me.”

“Fuck.” She sighs out the word, though she doesn’t open her eyes. “Don’t stop. Keep devouring me.”

“No.”

It’s the only acceptable answer. I have taken what I need from her, and it doesn’t matter that I want more.

“Was I enough for you?” she asks.

“You are my everything.”

Gently, I carry her to a patch of moss and cradle her in my arms. I clutch her to me and press my forehead to her cheek in a silent apology. Emotion rushes through me and grabs my throat in a choke hold.

“Rook,” she whispers. “Are you crying?”

I have always believed myself to be the kind of man who never cried, but I’m defeated by the bittersweet potion of shame and relief. My tears keep falling upon her face, no matter how hard I try to stop.

“I’m sorry.” I grit out my apology. “I went too far. I almost hurt you.”

She tries to comfort me, her hand resting on my thigh, but her cool touch brings me back to the dungeon and the cold threat of the queen’s blade.

My stomach twists from the sick memory.

I push myself away from the ground and start pacing through the ruins of the castle, acting little better than a caged animal. I’m shaking with unspent energy as a torrent of emotions overflows inside me.

“What happened to you in the dungeon?” she asks.

“Nothing they haven’t done to me before.”

She’s silent for an eternity. “Who did this to you?”

“The queen. My father is dead.”

“Rook…”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“No.” She speaks with protective ferocity. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

How can she be so certain? She knows little of the darkness in my past, and the shadows that still cling to me even now and cast doubt upon my feelings. Why am I crying, when I don’t even deserve the luxury of tears?

“I’m not a good man,” I say. “I’m not even a man. I’m a demon, a cambion, a half-breed bastard. There’s a crack running through the middle of me, just like that fucking throne in the prophecy.” The pain in my throat clamps down and strangles the rest of my confession.

Pyrah stares at me with what might be horrified fascination. When she understands who I am, and how broken I am, she will know she has made a mistake.

“They hurt you,” she says, and it isn’t a question. “You’re still hurting.”

“They stripped me naked. I’m unable to hide my scars.”

More than a statement of fact, these words fill me with a sense of rage and grief that threatens to drown me. I lean against the crumbling wall of the castle and press my forehead to the stone until the grit reminds me of reality.

Queen takes rook.

Dulcamara’s sneering words echo through my mind, even now, and I want to claw them from my memories.

“Should I touch you or not?” Pyrah asks.

My claws gouge the stone of the wall. Fuck. She noticed when I flinched away from her hand on my thigh. My memories poisoned her tender gesture. I’m filled with a deep sense of self-loathing.

“The queen held a knife to me,” I confess. “She threatened castration.”

“Fuck,” she whispers. “That makes me sick. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to remind you of what happened.”

“Don’t apologize. You didn’t know.”

“Could I shift into a dragon? Would that be different enough?”

I swallow hard. “We could try.”

When I turn around, she’s already armored in red scales. Her skeleton melts into another shape. Fully dragon, she looms over me. She wraps one of her wings around me, a gesture in common with both dragons and demons. The fire in her belly heats us both. I surrender to her embrace.

My tears twist into ugly sobs that wrench the air from my lungs. Every day, every minute, every second of my time in the dungeon has been bottled up inside me like poison, until I cracked open and spilled everything out.

No, that’s not true. I have more memories than those from the dungeon. I learned how to swallow down poison as a little boy. All the hatred and disdain from the king and queen filled me up until it became a part of me.

I have swallowed enough poison already that I could drown in it. I have been submerged in it for most of my life.

I can’t let it all out. I don’t know how.

After what might be an eternity, I’m wrung out, with no more tears left to shed. I’m empty of all emotion. Calm settles over me like a shroud. It’s not the same numb feeling as before but a blissful absence of pain.

I lift my head from Pyrah’s shoulder. We look at each other in silence. I never expected to find such comfort in a fearsome dragon’s golden eyes.

“Thank you,” I say at last.

She lifts one of her claws to my face, with utmost precision, though she stops before she touches me.

“Your eyelashes,” she says.

“What about them?”

“They still have tears on them.”

“I was crying.” Gruffly, I rub them from my eyes. “And I never cry. Not since I was very small.”

When tears always lead to punishment, even a child learns to control their emotions.

Her claws drift lower, to my jawline, where she traces the stubble of seven days. “You have a beard now.”

“Just stubble.” I want her to remember me how I was before, when we first met. “Unsurprisingly, they didn’t allow me to have a cutthroat razor while I was locked in the dungeon.”

“What happened?” She rests her head against my shoulder. “Tell me, if it’s not too painful.”

“You asked me not to go back to Netherhaven.” I close my eyes for a moment. “I should have listened to you."

She says nothing, just stares at me, and I can’t tell if she thinks I have been brave or the biggest fool alive. Shame creeps through me like a stain, an old, familiar feeling. My father never believed I was good enough, but I must believe that Pyrah doesn’t see me the same way.

I swallow hard. “I went looking for the soulstone.”

“Rook.” Her voice snags on my name. “You did this because of me."

“Because of us .” I look into her eyes. “Our equilibrium.”

“ Kelrial ?” The Umbric word sounds strange in her voice, since she has never said it before.

“Yes. But the queen has the soulstone.” My fist clenches at my neck as if gripping an imaginary pendant. “She dangled it in front of me while I was trapped in her dungeon.”

“That bitch,” Pyrah growls. “She deserves to die.”

“I know.”

“God, Rook, I’m sorry. We tried to find you.”

“Your apology is unnecessary,” I say, trying to be gentle.

“But, Rook, it was as if you had vanished from the Overworld.” Her voice breaks before she takes a steadying breath, regaining her composure. “I refused to believe you were dead.”

It hurts to meet her gaze and see the pain shining in her eyes. This was my fault. I should have stayed with her. “I’m unworthy of such devotion.”

“Why would you believe such cruel things about yourself?”

Because that was what I had been taught to believe since birth. Because all the people who had power over me wielded it to hurt me. When I was younger, I believed them without even understanding their cruelty.

I settle for a blunt distillation of the truth.

“The queen hated me," I say. "The king hated me more."

“Where was your mother? Why didn’t she protect you?”

It’s difficult to put into words, but for Pyrah's sake, I must try. “My mother belonged to the king. She was a succubus, a courtesan, and she had very little power. The court considered her a glorified whore. I was a whore’s son, and some believed I should not have been born. What was worse, I had a twin. My sister was twice the proof that the king had sinned. Some in the court suggested that he should…correct matters.”

Pyrah exhales a puff of smoke, a mere hint of her anger. In a true rage, she would unleash an inferno. “If anyone threatened my baby, I would destroy them.” Not that it was ever in any doubt.

“My mother was furious but powerless." I frown. “Maybe we need to get the hell out of this kingdom.”

“Where would we go?”

“Chymeria isn’t the only kingdom in the Overworld. And there’s the Underworld, though the Demongate has been closed for years. Lark still believes that our mother escaped, and she’s waiting for us in the Underworld.”

Pyrah searches my eyes. “What do you believe?”

“That the queen must have killed my mother and buried her in a shallow grave.” There’s no bitterness in my voice, just the cold, hard facts. “Sometimes I doubt it ever happened. Sometimes I wish I had seen her dead, just so I would know .”

“You never had the chance to say good-bye to your mother.” She whispers it, her words almost lost in the wind. “I gave my mother a dragon’s funeral, on a pyre, and my dragonfire helped her to the afterlife.”

“How old were you?”

She shivers under my touch. “Not quite sixteen.”

It’s impossible not to feel for her. Her grief and loneliness must have been heartbreaking. “You should never have to feel such pain again. If I can protect you from it, then my life will have been worth living.”

Her golden eyes glitter. “And you still believe yourself unworthy of my devotion?”

“Perhaps less unworthy.” I glance down at my empty hands. “After what happened in the dungeon, I have nothing. Not even the clothes on my back.”

“That’s not true.” She laughs as if she’s delighted to surprise me with what she says next. “When we went looking for you, we found your horse.”

My heart jumps. “Bolt?”

“She was in a stable outside Netherhaven, along with all her tack and everything in her saddlebags. We brought her back to Lark’s cottage. She’s getting fat and happy eating all the grass in the meadow.”

Against all the odds, a smile shadows my mouth. “Good.”

“Let me take you home.”

Home. Such a simple word, and yet it carries so much weight. “Where?”

“My cave or Lark's cottage. Those seem to be our only options at the moment.” Pyrah glances at my body as if remembering that I'm naked. “Sorry for not bringing any clothes with me. It can get cold up in the sky.”

I glance around the ruins of Hexfall. “Give me a minute.”