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Sobs wracked me—silent, void of air. He lifted his bloodied, taloned finger to my cheek, down the curve of my jaw, stopping at my collarbone.

This time deeper, sharper, slower. A thousand red-hot, finely honed blades in my skin.

He dug each nail of his claw through my flesh, one by one, until he hit bone .

I screeched, but he clamped his free hand over my mouth, silencing me so he could whisper against my cheek, his hot breath a sickening contrast to his cold lips.

“When Simeon and I made our bargain, we were told that when you kill someone, their power shifts to the killer. It’s quite the valiant sacrifice you are willing to make, darling, but your offer is useless to me. I must kill you to get what I need.”

“Then take me, kill me, and let them go!” I pleaded. “I won’t fight you.”

Anything to get this horrid, blackened ice out of me. Death was surely better.

“Why so eager to die, Ary?” he sneered. “It would be such a waste not to take my time with you. Clearly, you’re…

” he violated my shivering, naked form with his slow, salacious stare, “ divine . A sacrifice for your people is one thing, but it’s particularly intriguing ,” he purred, tracing a bloody finger along my jaw, “that you would give yourself up for such a despicable bastard.”

“He’s a better man than you could dream of being!” I spat in his face.

“Is he?” Molochai laughed darkly. He wiped my spit off his cheek with his bloodless thumb and licked it off.

“Hmm,” he purred. “You are delicious. It seems Smyth thinks so too. After all, my shadows can smell him on you. Smell… how you want him too.” His nostrils flared as he glanced down between my thighs.

“I typically enjoy this, but you… no, I will not enjoy killing you.” His lip and brow furrowed in mock sadness.

“And it’d be a shame for Smyth to miss it. ”

“Leave him out of this!” I gritted out. “He has suffered enough!”

Molochai flashed a sickening smile. “Let’s see how fast your screams make him run.”

“No!” I thrashed against my binds, but the shredding darkness stole my vision, and I held my breath to brace for what was to come.

The absence of all things good .

I lost sense of time and struggled to breathe.

Every time I gasped for air, my lungs were crushed by a clamping fist of consuming darkness, that black void allowing in only enough oxygen to see and hear and survive.

I was just conscious enough, aware enough, to feel the agony. And awareness was a torture of its own.

The shadows that blackened my blood sluiced through me like malleable, serrated snakes. Slowly, methodically, while my body begged for relief. I screeched—the sound terrible and foreign—until my throat felt shredded and I tasted copper on my tongue.

I screamed, but I didn’t beg. I refused to give him that.

Briefly, mercifully, I lost consciousness, only to be dragged back into his hell of invasive shadows.

Again… and again… and again …

Time became a blur. The parts of me that turned numb—that shut down—began to ache. My appendages stung and burned. Frostbite, maybe? It had to be. Swallowed by exhaustion, my chin limply dropped to my bloody shoulder.

And I realized— exhaustion, stinging, burning… I was feeling something other than shredding pain.

Exhausted but mercifully empty of darkness, I tried to lift my chin and blink away the lingering tears.

And then warm hands— his hands—were on my shoulders. My arms, my face.

“Ella!” Gavin pleaded, shattering through shadowy, consuming haze. “Aryella!”

Adrenaline pulled my eyes clear open. I looked at him, damp with sweat and struck with horror, then down at my skin, now pale and bloody but free of that black sludge in my veins.

No more shadows… for now. But if Gavin was here… what Molochai coul d do to him…

“No!” I screamed, jerking, thrashing away from him. “You can’t be here! You have to go!”

“I’m not going, Ella.”

The ropes that bound me splintered when he severed them with his switchblade.

“You have to! I’m sorry,” I breathed, crumbling into his arms without the ropes’ support. “I wanted to end this.” My body shuddered with tired, pathetic sobs. “I thought giving myself up would end this.”

“And it’s my fault you thought sacrificing yourself was an option,” answered Gavin, his powerful voice breaking .

His warmth draped over me, a protective, comforting blanket.

I felt his gentle fingers on my chin before the cold shock of metal on my mouth.

“Drink.” He parted my lips with his thumb. “It’s water. Drink .”

I obeyed, grasping both of his forearms as he held the canteen to my lips. Once my vision began to clear, I took in his scarred, shirtless torso as he knelt before me and realized that the blanket of warmth I felt was his shirt cloaked over my no longer naked body.

“Gavin,” I choked, and tried in vain to push him away. “Your wife isn’t here.”

“Yes, she is.” He took me in his arms and pressed a desperate kiss to my forehead. I felt his cheeks wet with tears and realized he was crying.

“You need to put me down.” I tried to wriggle myself free, shoving weakly against his chest, but his arms were unbreakable steel. “He doesn’t have your wife. I’m so sorry, but she isn’t here! You have to leave me!”

“She’s here, Ella,” he said again, searching my eyes as he cradled my cheek, silently pleading. “And I’m not leaving.”

“You shouldn’t have followed me—”

“I have followed you through four hundred years and I will follow you through four thousand more!” His eyes—full of love and fear and sorrow—burned into mine. “ You are my wife. ”

His words, like wisps of air, were fleeting, impossible to catch or prove I’d heard them. I was willingly trapped by the desperate love in his fervent gaze, but what he’d said…

“What?” I breathed.

“It’s you.” His voice was strong and clear. I hadn’t misheard. But it wasn’t possible. “ You are my wife, and wherever you go, I follow.”

I tried to shrink away from him, but he was holding me, cradling me like precious goods.

Like he truly believed his own delusion.

“That’s not poss—”

“You don’t remember because it was another life, Ella, a life that was taken from you a very, very long time ago,” he rushed out.

“You were sixteen, I was nineteen.” He cradled my face and smiled through his tears.

“You needed a weapon, so you came to me. You snuck out of the castle and came to my blacksmith’s shop.

You asked me to help you, and I couldn’t breathe when I saw you.

” He let out a tattered sob and kissed me again.

“Four centuries later, and you still take my breath away.”

I grasped at his words, trying to make sense of his story. And then, when I couldn’t, I tried to withdraw. But there was nowhere to go. I tried to push him away but was languid and frail from abuse, heartbreak, and betrayal.

“I don’t understand,” I cried softly. “You’re lying to me.”

“It’s the truth. I have no wife—no love— but you.

” He cupped the back of my head through my hair.

“I should have told you, I was going to tell you, but I was trying to let you live here , in this life.” He stroked my cheek and scanned my face like I was fragile and fleeting.

“And I’m so sorry I let you believe for a single fucking second that you’re not the only thing I’ve ever loved. ”

But it wasn’t possible, and I would be damned if this was the last moment of my life.

Watching the man I loved become so desperate for the woman he’d lost that he would insert me into some sick redemption dream.

Reality mocked my heart, taunted me with a love that came so close but I would never have.

And now, the gaping pit of emptiness drilled deeper and deeper into my chest, hellbent on being the last thing I would ever feel.

“You’re wrong,” I whispered.

“I’m not wrong. I need you to remember.” He kissed my forehead, then my cheeks. “Please, gods, please— I need you to remember what you can do, or he will—”

“I’m so glad you’ve decided to join us, my son.”

Gavin froze, his ruggedly beautiful features fractured by terror. His large form curled around me, shielding me.

“‘ Son ’?” I breathed.

He watched, sorrowful, as horror slithered through me.

“Put down our little pet, Smyth.”

“No.” Gavin’s steel grip on me tightened.

“ Put her down ,” Molochai gritted out, “or she will suffer for it.”

Gavin looked down at me, brow furrowed with pain, eyes wet with tears. “He cannot know.” His lips barely moved. “What you are to me, who you are. He cannot know.”

He lowered me to the ground.

“Gavin?” I choked, a sob escaping from my throat. It was instinct, not logic, that kept me latched to him. Pure survival. My weak fingers gripped him like a child being torn from its mother. “Gavin!”

“Hate me,” he whispered with a gentle kiss on my forehead, “and use it. ”

I cried—not because I was afraid of Molochai. I was, but I had accepted my fate, knowing that choosing to come here would end my life one way or another.

I cried because he set me down like he was obeying Molochai. Like he belonged to him.

And learning that, if it were true… was worse th an dying.

“Why?” I wept, defeated, lost in disorienting torrents of terrible possibilities.

I wept because Gavin left me lying there on the ground.

My wolf slayer. My protector. My teacher.

The man I loved. He left me crumpled in a puddle of mud and blood, barely clothed, protected only by the shirt he’d given me.

And though I wanted to trust him as much as I wanted to breathe, he left me, and it felt wrong.

So, so wrong. “Why are you going to him?”

No answer. Just silence. Deception was a sinister type of suffering, and I knew, in the deepest parts of my soul, that I had been deceived in more ways than one.