Page 50 of Heir of Broken Souls (HOBF #3)

Chapter 50

Knox

D evastation doesn’t begin to describe the emotions pummeling our bond from her heart, or the look on Axel’s features.

It’s absolute ruin.

That’s what’s shining in his forest green eyes.

I’m watching his heart break, and I know that because the last time I saw him like this, it was in the moments before the sword swung toward Ace.

Elysia rushes to Axel’s side, trying and failing to get through to him. All he can do is look to where Hazel stood with someone impersonating him moments before, his hands clutching nothing but air.

While Delilah—my sweet, golden-hearted woman—kneels on the deck and crumbles.

Her lips are moving feverishly, and it isn’t until I wrap my arms around her I hear what she’s repeating.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Nothing I say penetrates her utter heartache. Her lip wobbles, her voice cracking as she turns to me. “Our one shot…our one chance and she’s?—”

Delilah can’t finish the sentence before a sob flies from her mouth quicker than she can stop it and her eyes flood with a new wave of tears.

I hold her head to my chest, kissing her temple. “You didn’t know,” I murmur. “You couldn’t have.”

“We’ll have another chance, Delilah,” Elysia offers softly.

She doesn’t seem to register that. She just shakes her head, over and over, her face turned solely to the floor. Not daring to look anyone in the eyes.

Swallowing thickly, I ask Elysia, “Have you got him?”

Her eyes widen before she nods.

Without another word I make us vanish. I was hoping the privacy of our cabin would calm her but the second her feet touch the floor she’s up, her voice borderline hysterical.

“You need to find him! Oh my gods, we need to find him, Knox!”

She runs for the door but I wrap a hand around her waist and frown. “Find who?”

“Lenox—” She hiccups around a cry. “She impersonated him, he’s somewhere unconscious?—”

She doesn’t finish the sentence before I’m flying, whizzing down every hall of the ship without a care for if I injure myself. Door after door, I descend lower, practically turning feral as I call his name out over and over and over.

“Lenox!”

Nothing.

“Lenox! Lenox!”

I’m surprised my screaming doesn’t wake Harlow from her healing sleep in her room.

I come to a screeching halt when I hear a low murmur. Straining, concentrating, my brows furrow when it comes again from behind me, back the way I came on the sixth level of the ship, well below the kitchens.

I follow it, and when it rings out once more, I hesitantly pull open the broom closet. I suck in a sharp gasp. Lenox lies in there, slumped forward, blood trickling from the back of his head.

Falling to my knees, I don’t realize my hands are shaking until I reach out to run them over his wound. Another pained moan falls from his lips.

“Shh, it’s all right. I’m here, buddy.”

Emotion clogs my throat as memories from decades ago filter through my mind, memories from the day I found Lenox in the hole his father had trapped him within. The one that I searched for every day for seven years.

My shaking hand slides beneath his head, warm blood filling my palm from his wound. Taking a steadying breath, I clear my mind and focus on my healing magic.

This is just another thing added to Hazel’s list of heinous acts. When does it end? The moment my eyes caught on Hazel and the impersonator, I knew we had already lost. The guilt that is going to wrack Delilah…

How do you soothe an ache in your lover’s heart that beats in your own?

How do I help her when I can’t seem to help myself?

The guttural thoughts dissolve from my mind as Lenox’s amber eyes flutter open. I heave a sigh of relief.

He groans. “What happened?”

I answer him honestly. “You don’t want to know.”

It will crush him, and I’ve endured enough heartache for one day.

“Let’s get you to bed so you can rest. Everything else can wait.”

* * *

It doesn’t take me long to find her. After all, where does a guilty heart lead you?

To the ones your actions have affected.

After putting Lenox to bed, fussing over him like a mother hen and dutifully ignoring Nolan’s incessant questions of what’s going on in my mind, I find Delilah hovering over Harlow’s bed, crying silently.

She doesn’t look at me when I walk in. “How is she?” Delilah asks, her voice gravelly.

“It was touch and go for a while there…but she’ll be fine after a deep sleep.”

“And Lenox?”

“Healing.”

I’ve never been so terse with her before.

At the sound of my tone she slowly turns to me, those blue eyes glistening with unshed tears. Her nose is red, her eyes puffy. She’s probably been crying since Hazel fled, and I certainly haven’t helped things.

I’ve never left her alone when she was upset before. I had a reason, but it feels tense between us. Our bond is hesitant and wary.

My head tips to the side, beckoning her to follow me across the hall and back into our cabin. The sight of her pillow drenched in tears makes a knife strike my heart. I tear my gaze away from it as she quietly closes the door behind her.

The moment the silencing shield falls into place around the room, she stiffens. The sight of her body turning rigid has me frowning before I realize what is happening. Clutching my chest as an ache blooms across it, I say in shock, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“You’re angry,” she whispers, her eyes downcast on her feet.

“I will never, ever hurt you.”

I move toward her, but pause when she instinctively takes a step back.

“You’ve never truly been angry with me before.”

“I plan for us to have a thousand years together, Angel. There are bound to be days when we are cross with one another, but mark my words, no matter how deeply I feel I will never lay a hand on you.” I frown, pained, as her body stays submissive, as her eyes remain on the floor. “I would rather kill myself than harm you.”

Her breath stutters out of her as she slowly, ever so slowly, lifts her head, pinning me with her achingly sad blue eyes.

It takes everything within me to remember why, exactly, I’m cross with her and to not immediately comfort her and heal that hurt. But I’m hurt too, and I know she can feel and see it.

“I never thought I’d feel betrayed by you,” I admit hoarsely. She flinches at my words.

I take a seat on the bed and run a frustrated hand through my disheveled hair, not surprised when my hand comes back covered with black and red blood.

“Why didn’t you tell me? And don’t lie to me again, I know that you saw this coming.”

Her lips quiver. “You’re right, I did. The visions showed me the battle and me holding a blade to Hazel’s throat, but nothing else. Gods, if I had seen everything, I would have learned from such a stupid— foolish —error!” She raises her voice, anger lacing her every word. At herself, not me.

A sob rises in her chest, but she continues. “Gods, Knox, it didn’t give me a choice. I received two visions, one where I told you and one where I didn’t, and the one where I showed you—” She chokes on her words. “Knox, it was nothing short of a nightmare. We all would have perished.”

Shaking my head, the anger within my heart lessens.

“You didn’t choose to betray me?”

She’s in front of me on her knees in a heartbeat, tears rolling down her cheeks freely. “No, no . I would never in a million years willingly lie to you.” Her breath leaves her, shaky. “I didn’t have a choice. Naia was also shown the same visions. She didn’t tell a soul, not even Amelia. She…she was supposed to die?—”

“What?”

“It was planned. Naia said she had accepted her fate, but I couldn’t lose another person. It doesn’t even matter we’re not close to them, I just…” Her voice grows thick. “We’re surrounded by so much loss, Knox, I couldn’t bear it anymore.” Then she pushes to her feet, spitting, “And I let our one chance of revenge slip through my bloody fingers. I was so stupid!”

“You couldn’t have known, Angel.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Do not make me feel better for this. I don’t deserve it.”

Rising, I track her movements as she paces before the fire in the hearth.

“Delilah, how would you have known?”

She shrugs. “You would have!”

“Because I would have read her mind. You do not possess such magic. Anyone would have fallen for it. They looked like our family, Delilah. There’s no world you would have suspected or hurt them.”

I wrap my arms around her to stop her incessant pacing. Her body immediately melts into my touch, her head resting against my chest where she can hear the heart that beats for her and only her. Her warmth soothes the last tendrils of hurt she caused.

Still, she remains agitated. “There’s something we aren’t seeing,” she whispers.

“Why do you say that?”

“She taunted me, right before Axel’s impersonator showed up.” She pulls back. “She said we needed her, and the look in her eye… She knows something, Knox. She knows something, and she’s looking at us like we’re fools.”

Without another word, she opens her gilded door and allows me to step into her mind, into the hallway of her memories. The moment with Hazel plays before my eyes, how she toyed with us all.

Pulling back, I cock my head, rubbing soothing circles on her skin. “I don’t even know what she would be alluding to. It’s just another mind game, my angel, something to get under your skin.”

She rips herself away from my touch. “Well, she certainly did, and she’s shoved another wedge between us.” Her eyes fill with more tears, and she chokes on another sob. “I can’t believe I let her go.”

The words leave her in a pained rush seconds before she crumbles to the floor and weeps so strongly, I can do nothing but hold her through her heartache.

* * *

With everyone preoccupied, either drowning their sorrows or healing in bed, Delilah and I are the only ones to discuss what we now know. It took her hours to calm down, and even now, her eyes still fill with tears here and there.

The pain barreling through her heart is like no other and the bond is making me feel it all. It’s so consuming, she can’t control it.

“She already won.”

Her words are so soft and yet full of hurt.

“We’re not done yet, Delilah,” I answer honestly. “The prophecy speaks of answers, of change. We have to trust it.”

“A prophecy that just so happens to take the one thing that can kill demons away from the battle that Peter has almost conquered? What if this is all a ploy?”

This has been her new thought, the new direction her guilt is taking her. Doubting her vision and her intuition because in a moment where she couldn’t control the outcome, she feels as if she should have known, and if she didn’t know Hazel was fooling her, then what’s to say the prophecy isn’t as well?

I won’t admit this to her but she had me for the first ten minutes, but it’s been hours now. I go back to the memory of the vision and how she felt when she received it, Elysia and Naia too.

Three powerful seers—there’s no possibility this is a ploy. It can’t be.

“Humor me for a moment,” I try again, coming to sit adjacent to her on the sofa before the fire. “If the prophecy isn’t real, why did Hazel and a herd of demonic creatures come after us when we’re just shy from the supposed location with answers? Why would she try and stop us?”

She chews on her lips, that adorable little furrow in her brow appearing as she considers. “But she had ample opportunity to kill me and she didn’t. The demonic creatures tried, absolutely, but Hazel was toying with me.”

I wonder aloud, “Perhaps there’s something she needs where we’re going, something she doesn’t want Peter to have.”

Delilah frowns. “But that would mean the prophecy is real.”

I can’t help but smirk. “It is real.”

She groans, flopping back onto the bed as she rubs her temples. “My head is hurting from all these theories.”

Snorting, I lie beside her, wrapping my hand around her waist and sliding her into my warmth. I allow her scent to soothe me like a drug. “What we do know for certain is the prophecy. It’s been right thus far. This is how she wins, Delilah, by making you doubt.”

I can see my words slowly sinking into that beautiful mind of hers, so I go on.

“She’s had months to kill us, and now desperately she wants to make sure we don’t make it to the location of the prophecy. She wants something there, and she wants to get there first, I’m sure of it.”

Delilah bites her lower lip. “Perhaps she hasn’t won after all.” She straightens. “Maybe she knows Peter is done with her?”

I shake my head. “No, it feels like it’s more than that.”

“ For the future lies within the golden hands, which will raise the once sacred land. ”

My eyes lock on Delilah’s as she recites a part of the prophecy.

“Sacred land…” I murmur.

“The sunken island she mentioned?” she wonders. “She wants me to raise it, but why?”

We’re silent for a long moment, Delilah’s mind spinning. I can practically feel the whirlwind of her thoughts.

“We can’t let her get there before us.”

Turning to her, I soak up the sight of her, the way her nose slopes down before turning up at the end, her long lashes, the slight furrow of her brow as she concentrates.

She’s beautiful. Even in the midst of chaos, she is the only thing that can steal my breath away. The only thing that makes me want to stop what I’m doing and bask in her glow.

“She wants something on that island,” I say softly. “So I have no doubt that she will follow us there.”

Her head snaps up, teary gaze widening. Guilt blooms down the bond once more. “You think she’ll try and attack us again?”

“She’s isn’t opposed to killing to get what she wants,” I say hoarsely, Ace’s face flashing across my mind.

A soft knock pulls my attention away before I can sink too deep into that memory. I swiftly stride toward the cabin door and fling it open. On the other side, Elysia immediately ignores me and peers past my shoulder until she finds Delilah.

“I received a vision.”