Page 30 of Heir of Broken Souls (HOBF #3)

Chapter 30

Delilah

T he hollow sound of my boots clacking against the cobblestone floor fills the dark passageway. The tall white candle in my hand quivers as I tremble violently.

Something deep within me, every nerve in my body, screams at me to turn around and run.

Despite this, I continue on, my will for answers outweighing my need for safety.

Steel rings out somewhere in the labyrinth of the halls, the sound halting my feet. Holding my breath, I wait and wait and wait…

A tortured moan of pain breaks through the silence. I take off in a sprint.

I can save him.

I can save him.

I can save him.

The chant rings in my head, trying to outweigh the fear slithering around my heart.

I turn a corner, and the candle in my hand drops from shock at the sight before me. Before I can stop it, bile rises in my throat, overpowering my need to scream.

Standing in the circular room at the bottom of the library, drenched in oily black shadows, is my father. No, that doesn’t feel right. That word doesn’t fit him anymore. It never has.

The man I was taught to fear wields a knife at Ace’s throat, pushing it so deep into his skin that a trickle of crimson runs down his neck.

Tortured, fear-filled forest green eyes land on mine.

Relief consumes him once he sees me, and I watch his knees buckle, the weight of him going limp in Peter’s arms.

The one who has many names.

Father.

Husband.

Human king.

The dark lord.

Peter Bartholomew Covington.

“It’s okay, Ace,” I whisper, my words trembling along with my body.

“Don’t be a fool,” Peter spits.

Ace’s face drains of all color, his eyes shining with the silver of his tears.

Something passes across his face as Peter pushes the blade further into his skin. If I didn’t know any better, it looks like he knows what is coming and has made peace with that fact.

But that can’t be right. He has too much to lose, too much to forfeit. How could he ever find peace knowing he left so much behind? That he never experienced all he deserved?

There is no peace in that.

Lifting my hands to reveal swirling golden power, Peter tsks.

“I wouldn’t if I were you. One step, even another flicker of magic, and your friend dies.”

Injustice slams into my heart. Hatred burns in my veins, forcing me to tamp down on a snarl.

“He is not who you truly want,” I say as calmly as I can, but my voice still shakes with fury. “Put the blade down and take me.”

A saccharine smile spreads across his face as Ace closes his eyes and a tear rolls down his cheek.

“How lovely of an offer. Unfortunately, you’re not ready yet. Not fully, shall we say, developed . You’re useless to me.”

My hands clench into fists. Peter tracks the movement, but it’s Ace who breaks the silence and yells, “Take care of him!”

Panic envelopes me.

No, there’s still time… I still have time…

“Your pain, however, tastes so delicious.”

And with a wicked grin, Peter yanks the sword across Ace’s neck.

A scream rips from my throat. Panic, fury, sorrow, grief—it all slams into me at once. So powerful I fall to my knees and scramble— crawl —to Ace.

Tears swim in my eyes, blurring the sight of his decapitated head until I kneel beside him, sobbing in earnest as I try to fix him, as I try?—

I peer down at black hair, not brown. At sapphire eyes.

I’m staring at Knox’s decapitated head.

A dark female laugh rumbles from behind me. Turning, I see Hazel as she steps into my line of vision carrying the sword dripping with Knox’s blood…

I’m utterly helpless as I scream.

* * *

The scream dies on my lips as I catapult forward, not in a dark room but in a luxurious cabin. My hand juts out, finding Knox sitting up beside me, rubbing circles along my back.

I cling to his hand, needing to feel the warmth of his touch as blood pumps through his body.

Alive.

Alive.

Alive.

“Breathe, Angel, breathe,” Knox says soothingly.

I shake my head. My breath is choppy, my chest heaving as I shake from the adrenaline the dream caused. My gaze flies around the room, trying to name all the items I see to distract me—to get his face out of my mind.

The crackling fire in the fireplace.

Dark magic lord.

The candles lit along the top of the mantel.

Dark magic lord.

The sheets twisted around my ankles.

Dark magic lord.

It’s not working, the soothing touches and whispered words from Knox. I cannot get his face out of my mind. The image of him killing Knox, the sound of Hazel’s deranged cackle as she held the sword dripping with his blood.

Leaping from the bed, I hold my head in my hands and squeeze slightly, as if I can press the gods-awful dream from my mind. But my chest keeps rising and falling, faster and faster.

This is karma , my mind taunts . This is what you get for telling him not to be overprotective. This is a taste, a fraction of what Knox feels when he replays the memory of your dead body in his arms.

“No, please,” I say gutturally, ripping my gaze away from Knox’s.

I can’t look at him, not with the image of his decapitated head in the forefront of my mind.

“Please, I-I just need?—”

He splays his hand across his chest. “Listen to my heartbeat. Look at my color and the vibrancy of my skin. Look at my eyes and the life shining within them.” He slowly steps off the bed, moving toward me ever so slowly, like how you would corner a crazed animal. “I am alive .”

I do as he says, his voice washing over my body like a ray of sunshine as I listen to the steady—if slightly erratic—pounding of his heart. The way his skin glows with warmth and life, those gorgeous dazzling eyes staring at me with a level of caution.

And then I’m seeing my hands covered in his sticky blood while his head hangs lifelessly in my lap, with his eyes?—

“ No !” I scream. My throat burns as the shrill cry tears from my throat.

I squeeze my eyes shut, but I’m horrified as the image only becomes clearer in my mind’s eye, forcing me to snap open my eyelids to see Knox standing in the middle of the room, for once helpless in what to do.

My mind won’t stop torturing me.

Silver glistens within my gaze, finally giving me a reprieve as they blur my vision. Yet the liquid pooling doesn’t fall; it very rarely does. My tears are as stubborn as my will to shove away my grief.

“I-I just need some air,” I stutter out.

“Okay, we can?—”

“No!” I cry again. Shaking my head, I lower my eyes so I don’t have to see the pain flicker across his features. “Please, just let me see Aurora and get some air. I can’t look at you with it in my mind.”

He already knows this. Because this has been the dream that’s plagued me for weeks.

No matter what I do, my terrified screams wake me every night. And then I come face-to-face with Knox, my mind not able to tell the difference between reality and my nightmare.

Tonight is no different.

I know it makes him feel helpless. I can feel the anguish pouring down our bond, the utter pain radiating through his heart that he can’t help me—that he can’t soothe his mate.

It’s torture for him.

But not as torturous when all I see when I look at him is death.

“I won’t be long,” I whisper, avoiding his gaze as I race from the room.

* * *

The moment my bare feet hit the deck I feel like I can breathe again.

The tightness in my chest loosens, and the grip my nightmare had on my mind retreats as the ocean breeze greets me. The salty air soothes the ache in my throat of the shrill cries from earlier.

I don’t bother closing the lower hatch to the stairs.

There’s no point when he follows me.

He thinks he’s stealthy, watching from afar. But anyone who knows him knows he would never truly leave me, not when I’m in distress.

It’s one thing to ask for space, it’s another to ask him not to watch out for me. He would rather tear his own heart from his chest than let me wander off alone when I’m like this.

Granted, I can’t go very far in the middle of the ocean—especially considering the result of my flying lessons so far—but I suppose old habits die hard.

Softly padding across the wooden deck, I stop at the railing, taking in the moon’s glow against the endless ocean’s depth. The nightmare flashes through my mind again, unbidden. Peter killing Ace, Hazel and her bloody sword.

Anger rises fast and swift, screaming within me to be released. I want to let it out, I want to make him pay, I want to stop suffering every day. All I want to do is scream, not out of fear but in anger. And with no one to turn that anger on, I lift my burning golden eyes, and my palms, to the sea.

Golden fireball after golden fireball explodes from my palms.

The magic strikes the water, far and wide as to not alert the mermaids, although I doubt I’m being secretive, the water whispering to them. But it helps. With every fireball, my magic takes a little bit of my anger with it.

I just know deep down that no number of fireballs will ever quelch this anger. Only shoving my sword through Peter’s true heart will.

Suddenly I feel a gaze upon me, eyes burrowing into me, and it’s not the one I expected to feel.

Squinting, I try to see beyond the daunting darkness, the endless black pit of the ocean. It’s disarming how dark it is at sea, that without the small flickers of flames lit by magic around the top deck I wouldn’t be able to see my own hand in front of my face.

The niggling feeling isn’t malevolent. If anything, it’s energy full of concern. Between the waves crashing along the side of the ship, there is a breach in the water every twenty or thirty seconds. Mermaid tails.

Do they ever sleep?

No wonder I felt eyes on me. Perhaps I was wrong assuming it was concern I was feeling. I don’t see why they would start to care now.

Scoffing, I turn away, and scream at the sight of someone behind me.

In my panic, I topple backward over the railing, the ocean trying to catch me once more, but a pocket of strong air stops me just in time, pushing me back toward the safety of the deck.

Knox would have a fit if he saw me almost fall overboard.

I lay my hand over my pounding heart. “Don’t you know not to sneak up on someone near the edge of a ship?!”

When the figure doesn’t say anything, my heart slowly sinks. Swallowing past the fear engulfing my body, I snap my fingers, igniting a golden flame at the tip of my index finger.

It lights up Axel glaring down at me.

I almost scoff. Of course he’s on watch duty tonight.

“What are you doing?”

“Fishing,” I say dryly, mimicking his hard-edged tone before throwing my hands up in the air. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Being a pain in my ass.”

My jaw drops open. “Excuse me?”

His eyes narrow further. “You nearly fell off the side of the ship. Could you imagine what Knox would do to me if something happened to you on my watch?”

The incredulous tone of his voice raises indignation in me like a tidal wave, and I explode. “I only nearly fell because you snuck up behind me! It’s not my fault you’re silent and broody.”

“Silent and broody?”

“Yes, silent and broody! It’s practically all you do now.”

Now that you’re not drunk all the time is what I want to add but don’t. From the way his eyes flare, I bet he knows what I’m thinking.

“Trust me, you would be brooding if the other half of your soul died.”

What I was going to retort evades me entirely.

Everything evades me. My sight, my hearing, the feel of the hardwood beneath my feet.

It’s the first time Axel has acknowledged Ace’s death while sober, and after the dream I just had, my heart can’t take it. The grief that I have been quelching rears its ugly head.

What do I say to that?

What do I say to the man whose brother died right before his eyes, the one he revolved his entire existence around protecting?

Nothing.

Because absolutely nothing can fix what happened in that library.

As if my thoughts are flashing across my face, Axel’s body turns rigid, and he rips his gaze away from mine and moves it down to the lapping waves below—to the tails that rise and fall in a synchronized pattern.

I start, “Do you want to?—”

“No.”

“But you?—”

“I said no.”

“You can’t keep everything bottled up.”

He slides his gaze to me then. “Are you really taking this route with me?”

My head rears back. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I may have been drunk since that day but I’m not a fool.”

“I never called you a fool.”

“No, what I should have done was call you a hypocrite.”

My eyes widen with hurt and pain. Then the anger takes over. “And tell me why, exactly, I’m a hypocrite?”

“Because you, out of everyone, have been locking everything away.”

“That’s not true. Lenox is practically a walking shell of himself, and Harlow?—”

“They weren’t the ones who found out their entire life was a lie. They weren’t the ones who had everyone from their old life ripped away from them, and they certainly weren’t the ones to find out that who they used to call Father?—”

“Stop it!” I explode.

The words burst from my lips, my chest heaving in rapid succession as he pelts me with everything I don’t want to face.

“Is this payback?” I ask, my voice like gravel.

He frowns at that. “Payback for what?”

“For what happened at the meadow,” I say, waving a hand to the tails below.

Axel scoffs, plowing forward as if I didn’t say anything. “Knox thinks he’s helping you by being gentle but all he is doing is allowing you to?—”

I take a step forward, cutting him off. “I’m sorry about what happened. I was out of line. You should have never found out that?—”

“Should have never found out like that , or should have never found out period ?” he says, his teeth gritted.

“We didn’t want this to be the tipping point?—”

He snorts. “Gods, Delilah, you think I’m made of glass and it’s so fucking hypocritical.”

I take his words like a whip, holding my body rigid as I wait for the pain to explode across my body. “I’m sorry for what I did, Axel. It was selfish and I truly am sorry we didn’t tell you sooner but please stop?—”

“Stop what? Calling you out on your shit? You’re quick to call out?—”

“Axel, please ,” I beg.

“—everyone else around you, but you never take accountability for your own unhealthy habits. Tell me, when was the last time you allowed yourself to cry?”

“I said stop,” I whisper, but it comes out more like a plea than a demand.

He pushes, getting in my face, “When?”

“Stop it.”

“I said?—”

“I heard what you said!” I scream with such anger he stumbles back a step. “I fucking heard you and I asked you to stop!”

He points an accusatory finger my way. “Do not come to me and talk about suppressing feelings, not when you’re the very definition of it.”

What he doesn’t know is that Knox already broke that barrier. That he did confront me, but everyone else seems to have begun confronting me at the same time too, and I cannot handle it.

It makes panic take hold within me, so much so I truly do act a fool as I whisper, “He wouldn’t want this.”

Axel stiffens but I continue, fear taking the reins of my tongue.

“Ace wouldn’t want this for you. He wouldn’t?—”

Before I can so much as blink Axel shoves off the railing, getting in my face. “Watch your fucking mouth,” he snarls.

“No!” I shove his chest away as hard as I can, ignoring his flash of shock as he stumbles. “I’m tired of dancing around the truth! Ace would fucking hate this! He would despise everything we have become and all that?—”

“It doesn’t matter what Ace would have wanted because he is dead !” Axel roars.

The cords in his neck strain, his skin flushing a deep crimson. The grief that he has been drowning in liquor bubbles over.

“He is dead .” The words rip from his throat, husky and broken. “It no longer matters what Ace would have wanted because he is dead.” His voice stumbles on the last word. “And he is never coming back.”

My heartbeat rings in my ears, chanting that I’ve pushed him too far, that I was once again selfish and that I?—

He pushes off the railing, stumbling as if he’s drunk on grief before he stops and cranes his neck. “You want to know why I drink?”

Swallowing thickly, my back stiffens, as if it knows that I’m about to be ruined emotionally, that Axel’s words will tear me to shreds.

“Why?”

“Because with him gone…I no longer care if I wake up in the morning.”

My heart lurches, tears springing forth as I take a step forward. To do what, I’m unsure.

These words are eerily similar to what he told me, what he drunkenly confessed in the bathtub. But a drunk confession while he’s sobbing about his dead brother is one thing—a sober confession is another. All I know is that the pain in his voice, the grief, the sorrow radiating off him—I need to make it stop. I need to?—

“You cannot save me, Delilah,” he says hoarsely. “Because I no longer wish to be saved.”

“Don’t say that.” I gasp. “Do not?—”

“I thought you wanted me to share,” he says coldly, finally turning to face me as he walks backwards, holding out his arms. “There’s the truth you all so desperately want from me. I wish I had died that night.”

“Axel, please don’t say that, you have us?—”

“I have nothing without him.”

He spits the words so coldly they freeze me to the spot and lets them linger in the air, letting me taste the truth of how he feels, before he vanishes below.

Sucking in oxygen isn’t easy. I can’t even call what I’m trying to do breathing . It’s a gasp full of pain. And for the first time since that gods-awful night that changed everything, the tears in my eyes fall.

And they don’t stop.

I fall to the deck, clutching my chest as the pain spreads, as the grief that I’ve so callously suffocated finally gets a spark and goes up in flames.

The sobs wracking my body slam into me so forcefully I don’t notice the shadow that rushes for me until the warmth of his arms is around me, until he picks me up and rocks me.

“I’ve got you, Delilah. Let it all out, Angel. Let it all out.”

The words are my undoing.

Easton’s death.

Annie’s death.

Eleanor’s death.

Ace’s death.

The life that was stolen from me.

The abuse I endured.

The secrets, the lies, the deceit.

It all pelts my heart, stabbing relentlessly. A cry of agony leaves my lips as the pain becomes unbearable.

“Please make it stop,” I beg between sobs. “Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop.”

I claw at my chest, as if I can get to my heart and rip it out.

Because as I feel everything that I’ve been trying to suppress, everything that has been taken from me—I suddenly understand Axel’s desire to not wake up.

“Please make it stop!”

* * *

“Tell me what I can do,” Knox begs.

Minutes, hours, perhaps days later, I lie motionless in Knox’s arms, my eyes dry, no doubt because I cried out everything within me.

The whole time, Knox has been asking the same question over and over.

“Please, Delilah, talk to me. How can I make it better?”

Turning to him and the soft pleading in his eyes, I say the first thing that comes to mind.

“I want him dead.”

He rears back a little, his gaze contemplative and concerned.

“We’re working on it,” he says. “We’re following the leads?—”

“No,” I interrupt, my chest finally relaxing as if the conclusion I’ve come to is the answer to everything. “When the time comes—because it will—I do not want him to have a swift death. I want it to hurt, I want him to suffer, I want him to feel the unending pain he has caused me. I want him to beg for hell because it will be far kinder than what I have planned for him.”

Knox pauses for a moment, allowing my words to swirl in the air before he peppers a kiss against my forehead. He cups my jaw, forcing me to look up at him.

“I will do anything for you. In fact, I’ll take great pleasure in taking out my revenge on the man who hurt you.” He winks. “You’re not the only one with fantasies.”

“Why?”

His brow furrows. “Why what?”

“Why are you willing to turn into a monster for me?”

“Angel, you are the furthest thing from a monster.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

He sighs, moving both of his hands to my cheeks. “Maybe you still don’t get it, Delilah. I would burn the world for you.” The sharp inhale of my breath draws out his sly grin as he drawls, “And do it with a smile on my face.”

Throwing my head back on a deep belly laugh, I savor the warmth flooding my veins through the bond. As my chuckle slowly dwindles, I gaze up at the man that I’d do anything for.

I lift my hand, trailing soft gentle fingers across his cheek, feeling the warmth of his skin, listening to the pounding of his heart and the rush of blood flowing through his veins.

And then the feelings flood my heart. Ones that match what he can’t hide, not with the bond we share.

Swallowing thickly, I note how Knox holds his breath, taking in all that I do.

My heart beats furiously and my lips part with a sharp intake of air as I prepare myself to face the one thing I fear most. The thing that drew me outside in the first place.

Losing Knox is the one thing I couldn’t bear. But the look on his face, the openness, the hope—how can I not share with him the deep emotions I have for his beautiful soul?

Before I can talk myself out of it, and before fear can take hold, I whisper, “Knox, I?—”

Screams erupt from the cabin below, snapping my and Knox’s attention away.

We’re already running when Axel breaches the deck, his skin ashen, his chest heaving. Our previous argument flies out the window.

The last time I saw him like this was?—

“It’s Elysia.”