Page 17 of Tales of a Deadly Devotion (Tales of a Monstrous Heart, #2)

Breath slipped more easily between my lips as I watched the colours shift in his eyes, the paleness of them to the depths of the black at the rim.

There is a prince that sleeps beneath the earth. Serus. The ancient hymn echoed through my thoughts but I pushed it away.

I’d felt the evil of this world, the bite of its cruelty, and I knew that monsters came in many forms. Most just as simple men. As I looked at Emrys now drenched in that soft morning light, I knew those stories were nothing but lies.

There was nothing evil in him, not when the barest brush of his magic chased every fear from me. Made me wish for nothing else but the comfort of him.

I caught his hand before he could let it fall away.

Amartis. I’d said those words. I’d meant them with every fibre of my being. Known they were true the moment I’d seen my father’s hilt in his grasp. That it had allowed Emrys to summon it.

I turned over his gloved hand, running my fingers against the soft leather. ‘Why are you wearing gloves?’

His fingers curled automatically, capturing my own as if to stave off my curiosity.

‘It—’ His voice broke, his fingers tightening around my own as if fearful I could slip away. ‘I made it worse.’

There was a wounded quietness to his words, almost lost in the rustle of the wind.

His head bowed, a devout worshipper seeking salvation, shoulders slumped in complete surrender. ‘Touching you made it worse.

‘I’ve been trained to endure many things. Have endured them all without hesitation, but … I couldn’t endure that, Kat.’ He barely shook his head, breath seeming almost painful as it slipped through his lips. ‘Not hurting you. Not with what I am.’

Verr. The word he didn’t say.

The impossibility of it, yet I’d seen the truth. Only, it didn’t feel like the stories. Not a great dark evil snapping with deadly jaws. No. He was just Emrys, quiet and burdened.

There was a lie somewhere. Only I knew it had never been spoken by him. It had been spoken long ago. Long before us.

I looked over the scars on his cheek and jaw. The slight pink tinge to some marks as if they were new. I let my thumb brush over them. Remembering how viciously the dark had tried to devour him. Feeling him still beneath my touch, tense.

‘Do you think that matters to me?’ I asked, knowing what it was to be feared. To be made into a monster, when all you wished for was to belong.

‘It has to, Kat,’ he answered but didn’t pull away.

Had to because we were opposites in every way. Deadly and followed only by death. Yet I didn’t wish to be anywhere else.

I gently pulled the glove from his hand. Until I saw the dark magic lingering at the tips of his fingers, how thin veins of it ran across his palm. Then removed his other, letting the gloves slip to the floor.

My magic was content. Quiet with nothing but a pulse of curiosity at my fingertips as I pressed our palms together and fit my fingers into the space between his own. As he’d done for me, when I thought I’d never feel safe again.

When I’d told him the worst thing I’d ever done and he’d just held me. How he’d crawled across that cursed earth, reaching into flames that could turn him to ash. Because he promised he wouldn’t leave me.

‘Tell me all of it.’ Fear quieted those words from my lips. That his silence would prove there was nothing here. Nothing left in the chasm between us. That his choice was made. ‘Please.’

‘Just give me another moment.’ He swallowed, jaw tight, but those eyes remained on me, taking in every inch of my face, savouring it. ‘Another moment like this.’

As if one word from his lips would change everything.

Then all I was left to wonder was who put that fear in his eyes. Then a different type of sorrow began to bloom between my ribs. For everything he never wished to be. For the spy and the war hero he never wished to be.

‘The Mage King … in his madness began to indulge in—’ Something close to disgust cut across his expression.

His gaze moving to the window. To the stormy morning sky.

‘Rituals to try to summon the Old Gods from beneath. To give them mortal form again. To raise Verr to his cause using fey girls who had no choice in it.’

I’d heard of ancient mating sacrifices, blood rites and dark worship done by many kings obsessed with the dark. Each becoming obscener than the king before.

His gaze remained distant as if he couldn’t bear to see my expression or how I’d process his words. ‘My mother was one of them.’

Icy horror coiled tightly in my gut.

‘Lady Blackthorn—’ I frowned but he shook his head.

‘No. I was just a cuckoo in her nest. A well-placed curse.’ His eyes came back to me, filled with nothing but anguish. ‘My birth mother was fey. One of the few kept to endure the rituals. A pet of the Mage King.’

I’d heard those stories of lords’ obsessions with fey girls.

Depraved and cruel. Using them to produce mortal-passing heirs to bring magic into their bloodlines.

Mostly whispered in Daunton between the older girls.

Then in whatever pages of the Crow’s Foot that found their way into the Institute.

To spit and sneer at lies fey told. Only I knew they weren’t lies at all.

Nightmarish tales worse than mere mortal men hungering for fey girls, to appease their predatory appetites. This was different – worse. Seeing them as nothing but a vessel. A lamb to slaughter.

‘The lords who were working against the King got her out. Moved her to a safe house.’ He drew in a pained breath. ‘I was born there. Blackthorn was there. They knew she’d die from the birth, that containing such darkness for so long would weaken her with how corrupt the summoning had been.’

A hideous ache took up residence in the centre of my chest. The bitter memory of that pit. The pain that had pressed against my flesh. How they’d sacrificed others.

‘They could have saved her the agony of it but the promise of finally gaining a weapon against the King was worth more to their uprising.’ He looked down at his hand entwined with my own, dark hair falling across his brow. ‘The creature she’d birth was worth more than her life.’

Creature. The certainty of that word from his lips broke my heart.

‘Blackthorn gave his own newborn son over as a decoy – along with my mother’s body once it was done. The boy was a failed attempt to awaken Serus or any of the other princes from beneath the earth.’

A sharp talon of dread clawed its way down my back as I remained in horrified silence.

‘Gideon was the decoy. He was labelled another failed bastard and returned to Blackthorn to ward. Safe in a lord’s house who swore loyalty to a mad king.’ Emrys grimaced.

Gideon was Blackthorn’s child. It was why he looked familiar to that portrait on the stairs.

‘I stole his life.’ Emrys nodded as if seeing that realisation slip across my expression.

His smile was cold and self-mocking as he stood abruptly, breaking my hold on him as he turned to the window.

Running a hand through his dark hair. Pulling at it as if he could free himself from the burden of his thoughts.

‘I don’t even know where they buried her.

’ Such a quiet confession, almost lost to the wind. ‘Blackthorn said he didn’t remember.’

Didn’t remember. As if Emrys’s mother was nothing in that tale. Just another fragment of a myth that didn’t matter to them. My heart broke for the boy who’d asked. For never knowing.

A shudder moved through him, darkness flashing beneath his skin before it settled once more.

There was a new tension in his body as I saw that darkness curl beneath his skin, just beyond his shirt’s collar.

Marks I’d glimpsed before, only fainter.

I told myself it was nothing more than a play of the light.

‘You’ve been repressing it,’ I said. Understanding how easily he could have known I’d been doing the same.

He nodded almost reluctantly, looking down at his own hands in mild disgust. ‘ To summon such darkness is to be consumed by its hunger .’

The warning from one of the old texts came so easily from his lips, as if he’d repeated it often.

He shook his head, curling his summoning-stained fingers into fists. ‘I’ve been taking beasam bark since I was twelve. When the summoning began to manifest within me. It was poison at first. Unbearable. But I gathered it was no more than I deserved.’

His words punctured my heart. He was a child.

‘Do you believe that?’ I rose, coming to his side. That he was a monster. Some foul thing from an ancient text, no better than the galmoth in that pit, or the gobrite that had crawled out of that book.

Such a hopeless sound slipped from his lips. ‘I’ve seen what I do, Kat. Blackthorn brought a curse into his house and his family paid the price.’

I shook my head. Knowing he was Verr and yet understanding that part of him was fey too. I shortened the distance between us but he wasn’t finished.

‘Blackthorn used me to try to find more. I found others in the west. Hidden in villages and slums. Verr that had survived the sealing of the earth centuries before. Nothing like me. Settled and hiding amongst the fey. Traders, innkeepers and maids. Normal beings trying to live – mortal-passing, even.’

His words froze me in place. Verr. Amongst us all this time. It didn’t seem real, and yet I knew it was truth from his lips. It could be nothing else.

Serus . That name came again. He may be part Verr … but I was something equally as vicious. Something else that perhaps shouldn’t exist from the destruction I’d wrought and the ancestors before me.

We were two sides of an ancient coin. Two things that should be dead. Too dangerous to exist. Only we’d found our way here.

‘You weren’t the only one with secrets, Emrys,’ I challenged quietly. Reaching for his hand again, seeing the darkness beneath his skin he’d been hiding, muted and fading. Ancient strange marks that belonged pressed between the pages of ancient tomes or deep within my imagination.