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Chapter thirty-five

T he pain returned when I woke and found myself in the softest bed I’d ever known.

I groaned weakly at the terrible, throbbing ache in my abdomen, from my chest to my navel, radiating in throbbing waves through my rib cage and back.

Sweat pricked the back of my neck, but my limbs felt cold.

I looked down to see my entire torso wrapped in cloth bandages beneath a white cotton nightgown. Clean, no blood. But my chest…

Thump… thump… thump…

My heartbeat.

I let out a broken, grateful cry at the strong pulse in my ears.

“She’s waking up.” I heard a man’s voice—Damond’s, I thought—and the frantic shuffling of heavy footsteps in the room disappeared to the other side of the door. I was too disoriented to see who was with me or see who had gone.

My eyes darted around the quaint, tiny room. I was in a bed with fluffy, cornflower-blue bedding. In the far left corner sat a humble but well-structured wardrobe crafted from washed oak, and beside that, a matching wooden bench.

A familiar growl rumbled in the hallway.

Damond’s responding voice was hoarse, and he sounded far away. “Let me talk to her first.”

“Get the fuck out of my way—”

“Five minutes, Smyth!” snapped Damond. “Give me five min—”

“She is my wife! ”

That voice. Once warm and soothing, now cold, threatening. My leaping heart and churning stomach collided and made a tangled disaster of my torso. Whether from the physical pain or that evoked by recollected truths, I didn’t know. But it hurt.

I could still hear their voices outside the door, but they had lowered them enough that I couldn’t make out what they said. Outside the opaque glass window, I saw gentle blue and white foam washing over sand. A beach, and beyond it, the gray sky of a winter’s day loomed.

The door to the small bedroom creaked, and I looked up to see Damond.

He closed the door partway, turned, and gave me a contrite smile.

He wore brown pants and a blue sweater. On his head—the same round glasses and impressive mop of brown curls.

I’d seen him only days before, but it felt like lifetimes.

“Hey, Ary.”

I eyed him warily, remembering the conversation with Gavin I’d overheard that first night in Tovick.

There wasn’t a single doubt in my mind that he’d known.

Never again would I trust so easily. It would lead me to destroy myself.

Not Damond, not a single one of my friends, not Simeon or Elowen or anyone in those Caves.

And certainly not Gavin Smyth.

He read the doubt on my face and promised, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

I grunted through the pain of hoisting myself from laying to sitting .

“Try to stay still—”

I silenced Damond with a furious glare, nostrils flaring, lip curled, and could tell I startled him. Indeed, I startled myself with the flames of disdain charring my insides. Had never felt anything so unsettling and had never cared so little about what anyone had to say about it.

“Molochai dragged a knife through my body.”

“Yeah.” Damond shuddered, lowering himself into a wooden chair beside the bed. “Yeah, he did.”

“He ripped out my heart.”

Damond nodded.

“And then he threw me over the edge of a fucking cliff.”

Nervously, he shifted in his seat and nodded again.

“My heart’s beating, Damond.”

“Viridian.” He gestured to me. “God of Healing… and Regeneration.”

I gave a low, disbelieving snicker and shook my head.

“It’s true, Ary,” he contested.

“I was dead, Damond . I remember being somewhere else. ” The words snapped out of me. My throat pinched at the memory of Oliver. “How could I have re made my own heart if I was dead ?”

“He told me he prayed to the Selvaren. Something ancient, in their language.” Damond bent forward and clasped his hands in his lap. “He saw it with his own eyes. Your blood pooled around you, the ground tasted it, knew it was you, and then you breathed as if your blood commanded life itself.”

“He,” I uttered coldly.

But I knew who. Had heard his rumbling voice just moments earlier on the other side of that bedroom door. He was here.

Molochai’s son.

The Butcher of Nyrida.

Fragments of the dream I’d just woken from drifted back. I sat there and relived it all.

Oliver. His words. His… peace .

“The man with the scar on his face… He was nice…”

I shuddered and shoved away that impossibility.

“Have you known the whole time?” I demanded. “About… Smyth.” To say his first name, something I’d shared with the man I thought he was, felt like I was betraying Ollie.

Damond’s brow furrowed down at the cornflower-blue bedding. “I’m his cousin, Ary.”

“He’s Molochai’s son.”

“Cousin on his mother’s side ,” Damond emphasized with a lift of his brow. “But he is family, and he has an explanation.”

“An explanation,” I repeated, horrified.

“He murdered Oliver and Phillip. An innocent five-year-old boy, Damond!” He’d killed Elias Winterton’s parents and little sister.

He’d killed and killed and killed my people.

And I was beginning to feel even more alone than I had upon waking.

If Damond knew, my friends might know too.

“Who else of my friends knows he’s the Butcher? ”

“He told Gemma everything before you left Tovick. The others—Caz, Finn, Ezra—they don’t know.”

Gemma knew . Not me, but Gemma. And she’d let me go with him.

“He won’t hurt you.”

I shuddered at the memory. How very wrong she’d been.

“ You could have told me the truth,” I bit out, eyes locked on my fingers and the tight grip they kept on the cornflower-blue blankets.

“Not my truth to tell.” Damond picked up a glass of water from the side table and moved to take a sip. I watched him, appalled at his calm. He opened his mouth to say more but stopped when my attention shifted toward the door .

There he stood. My betrayer, my heartbreak .

I could tell he hadn’t slept in days by the dark circles under his eyes.

He wore all black, and his hair fell loose and messy at his shoulders.

He towered over the rest of the room, but there was something exhausted and defeated in the way he stood.

Power, confidence, hope were absent from him.

“That wasn’t five minutes,” Damond muttered with a roll of his chocolate-brown eyes. Regardless, he rose. “I’ll be outside.” Stopping briefly in the doorway, he shot me an apologetic parting glance before leaving the room.

Gavin appeared visibly broken, but the way he looked at me with warmth and love and sorrow still gripped my rejuvenated heart and squeezed.

That longing stare hurt more than the jagged wound Molochai had left behind.

Trust, love, forgiveness—these were things I vowed to never give him back.

But the moment his eyes met mine, my vow began unraveling.

I hated him for it with a heartbroken vigor that wrecked me.

I hate him , I said to myself. I have to hate him .

So I chose to let more unbridled rage rise to the surface. Because it was easiest. Because it was the only feeling loud enough to smother the confusion wreaking havoc in my core.

“Get out,” I choked.

But he didn’t move.

I shivered beneath his piercing, knowing stare. I remembered the things he knew. The things I should have questioned. Honey and green tea, my middle name, my mother loving blue jays, my birthday…

“Because I know everything about you.”

“Get… the hell… out! ” I screamed, but it was a mistake. Sharp pain splintered up and down my torso with the speed and ferocity of a lightning strike. I gasped for air and tried to maintain clear vision through watery eyes .

“Please.” He rushed immediately to my side. “Please don’t do that. Your powers kept you alive, but barely, and you have a very long road to healing. For your own sake, you need to try and stay calm.”

“Stay calm?” I wheezed, gritting my teeth through the pain. “Stay fucking calm ?”

The skin on his face, neck, and hands flushed and he offered his hands in supplication. “I know I have no right.”

“Leave. Me. Alone. Get away from me !” I pleaded, shattering into sobs. “I never want to see you again! Go!” My plea floundered into a pathetic squeak.

“No.” His face contorted in pain at the sight of my tears, but he didn’t move. “Not until you give me a chance to explain. Ask me anything, and I will tell you the truth.”

“It’s a little too late for that,” I croaked.

He snatched my blade off the dresser and—before I could scream or register an attack—he opened my hand, placed the knife in it, and knelt beside the bed.

“Give me a chance to explain myself to you.” His deep voice shook with the strained desperation he drowned in.

“If you still don’t believe I’m on your side…

” He watched me remember the moment after he killed those Insidions in the woods.

“If, when I’m done, you still hate me enough to wish me dead, I’ll beg you to kill me. ”

For him, I would not listen. To do anything for his sake felt like betraying myself and those I loved.

The brutal push and pull I felt in his presence was a curse on my heart, health, and life.

I just knew, after speaking with Oliver and taking this second chance at living, I needed to find the will to persevere.

Even if this life was a gods-damned mess.

But for me , I needed the pieces to fit.

“I will ask you questions. You will answer. And only then, if I choose not to kill you, you will leave ,” I rushed out to quell the hope rising in him, the waves of relief washing over him. “That is all you get.”

“Yes,” he breathed. “Thank you. ”

Patiently, he waited, and I had to wrack my cluttered brain with where to begin. My eyes shifted to the silver rings around his neck.

“Am I really the wife you spoke of?”

Without breaking my gaze, he unfastened the black cord around his neck and placed it, and the rings, at my bedside. “Yes.”

“Do you… do you truly love me?”