CHAPTER 14
Fuery stared at her hands where they clutched his wrists.
He had truly lost his mind.
It was warm where she touched him, and his armour peeled back beneath his jacket, his need to feel her delicate hands on his flesh making it clear his wrists before he had even issued a mental command.
He trembled as her skin met his, the sensation overload of feeling her warmth on him, the soft press of her fingers, too much for him to take. It felt too good.
But it wasn’t real.
Gods, this was the worst form of torture.
He had been beaten, ripped apart and left balanced on the brink of dying, injuries so extensive it had taken him months to heal his broken body, but the torture and pain he had felt then was nothing compared with the agony that pulsed through him in waves that radiated outwards from the points beneath her hands.
He couldn’t take it.
He hissed and jerked his hands away from her, stumbling backwards until his back hit one of the columns in the entrance hall. He sagged against it and stared at her through eyes rapidly growing blurred.
“You are not real,” he whispered, his throat raw and heart burning. “I wish that you were. I prayed so hard to reverse what I had done so you were not dead, but the gods would not listen to me.”
Tears filled her beautiful amethyst eyes, put there by him because she was a figment of his wretched imagination, and it was his pain reflected in her.
She reached for him again. “Fuery, I am not dead.”
She had said that more than once now.
It was a lie, his mind playing tricks on him, because he wanted her to be alive. He wanted his prayers to be answered.
“I am alive.”
Those three words struck him hard, stripped him of his strength and turned his knees to rubber beneath him, and he hissed at her. Desperate to escape her, he turned and pushed away from the wall, and darkness swallowed him, jagged and freezing, chilling his flesh. He landed hard in the reception room just metres from where he had been, stumbled a few steps forwards and grasped the back of the black velvet couch to stop himself from collapsing.
He breathed hard, the agony of seeing the ghost and hearing her sweet voice colliding with the sharp drain on his strength from the teleport.
When he heard footsteps ringing in the corridor behind him, he broke away from the couches and staggered across the large room towards the hallway in the right wall, the one that would lead him to his quarters.
He glanced back over his shoulder when he was halfway there.
Shaia charged around the corner, a wild look in her violet eyes.
“No.” Hartt’s barked words echoed around the room. “You said you would wait. Leave.”
He looked at Hartt, confused for a moment. Wait? Leave? His confusion only increased when he discovered Hartt wasn’t even looking at him. He was looking at Shaia, as if he was speaking to her.
Which made fuck all sense to Fuery.
She was a ghost.
Unless she could make herself visible to others too.
He laughed, low and vicious.
Or he had completely lost his fucking mind and was imagining the whole thing.
Shaia’s gaze swung his way and she started towards him, but she didn’t make it far. Fuery could only stare as Hartt swept into her path and did something incredible.
He grabbed her shoulders to hold her back.
Said something Fuery didn’t hear.
Because the second Hartt’s hands touched her, a red veil descended and rage boiled through him.
Stupid, considering she wasn’t really there, and this whole thing was just his fucked up mind playing tricks on him.
She wasn’t real, because he had killed her.
Yet he turned on a pinhead and roared as he launched himself at Hartt, unable to stop himself as the unmated male laid hands on his female.
His female.
He would kill the bastard for touching her, for trying to take her from him, when she was his everything—his world.
His beautiful mate.
Hartt grunted as he slammed into him, lost his grip on Shaia and went down hard with Fuery on top of him.
Fuery snarled, gripped his shoulder and pulled him onto his back beneath him on the flagstones. He grinned as he punched Hartt in the face. Once. Twice. A third time. A sickening crunch was his reward as Hartt’s nose broke. The male growled and bucked up, launching a hand at his face. He shoved Fuery under his chin, tipping him backwards and off balance, and teleported from beneath him.
Fuery shot to his feet and turned in a fast circle, his eyes scanning the room and his heart pounding, his senses on high alert as he waited for Hartt to reappear.
The air shimmered off to his left.
He roared and kicked off in that direction.
Hartt hit him in the back, and Fuery growled in frustration, cursing himself for falling for that trick when he had seen Hartt use it countless times on a foe. He spun on his heel and blocked Hartt’s attempt to grab him, caught him around the back of his neck and pulled him towards him at the same time as he lunged forwards. His forehead cracked against Hartt’s, ripping a pained grunt from the male, and sending lightning spider-webbing across his own skull.
He released Hartt as the male staggered backwards, and shook his head, trying to clear it.
The second the pain ebbed, he growled and attacked again, landing punches on Hartt’s face and side, determined to make the male pay for daring to touch his beautiful, sweet mate. Hartt finally fought back, his eyes bright violet as he bared fangs at him and blocked his blows, and landed some of his own.
“If you will not bloody listen to me, I will beat you down until you do.” Hartt growled, managed to grab him by the throat, and the world twirled around him as the male tipped him off balance and slammed him onto his back on the polished stone floor, knocking the air from his lungs.
The male had been speaking to him?
Fuery recalled his lips moving, but he had heard no words above the thunderous rush of his blood, and the rage that burned in it.
Hartt backed off, breathing hard and almost tripping over his own feet. Blood streamed over his lips from his nose and from a cut beneath his right eye.
Fuery’s rage burned hotter, the violent clash and Hartt’s resulting injuries not nearly enough to satisfy it. He wanted to paint the black walls crimson with Hartt’s blood and entrails.
He flipped onto his feet and kicked off, a grin stretching his lips, put there by the pleasing images and the thought of making them real.
Shaia appeared between him and Hartt.
Fuery skidded to a halt, his fist stopping close to striking her. It began to tremble in the air between them as he stared at her, his eyes slowly widening as what she had done swept through him like a violent rush of ice in his veins, extinguishing the fire.
He dropped his hand and shook his head as he backed away, confusion colliding with conflict and pain so intense he felt sure a part of him was dying.
She had defended Hartt.
She had protected him.
A low feral growl curled from his lips as the fire swept back in and he quaked with the need to rip the male apart so his female would look at only him.
But at the same time, a thought went through him, unwelcomed and unwanted, one that cut him to his soul, plunging the blade in deep and causing him agony the depth of which he had never experienced before.
She deserved a decent male like Hartt.
Not a tainted bastard like him.
He stumbled backwards, still shaking his head, his eyebrows furrowing as he looked at the pair of them and saw them as a couple, the two people he loved most, needed most, turned against him and leaving him bereft, alone in a world he wanted no part of without them at his side.
“This is not real.” His voice hitched. “Please… I cannot take this torment.”
His left knee gave out, striking the black stone tiles hard, but he picked himself up again. When he straightened, Shaia had moved.
She stood mere inches from him.
He shook his head again and tried to back away.
She caught his wrists, and when he attempted to break free this time, she didn’t let him. She tightened her grip.
Gods, the pressure around his wrists felt real enough.
He stared at her hands and then lifted his head and met her gaze.
She whispered, “You did not kill me.”
“I did.” He remembered it vividly, because he saw it every night, every time he closed his eyes.
He had seen it happen in a thousand different ways and all of them had destroyed him.
She gently shook her head, her mane of wavy black hair brushing slender shoulders that were shaking. He could feel her trembling. She was afraid. Of him?
“You remember wrongly,” she murmured softly. “You are just muddled, Fuery. The darkness has mixed your memories up.”
Vail had said something similar. That was the only reason she was saying it now, because someone else had told him that and at the time he had wanted to believe it might apply to what he had done to her too—that he might not have killed her.
“If I was a ghost, as you believe, why would I be dressed like this?”
He looked at her clothing—a pair of worn tan trousers, old brown boots, and a washed out grey tunic.
“Because I cannot bear to see you as you were.” He was sure that was the reason she was wearing male clothing and not the beautiful dresses she had worn in all the times he had seen her in the past.
Before he had killed her.
She sighed, the sound light and melodic, but holding a weight of hurt and a dash of frustration. “My poor, beautiful warrior.”
He growled at her, despising the way she said that, as if she pitied him. Pity. It sent him spinning back to that night he had been dreaming of, to the grand ball where they had first kissed and first touched. He didn’t want anything given to him out of pity.
He wanted to earn everything, including her heart.
He had earned it, hadn’t he?
Before he had killed her.
He tried to break free of her again, but she refused to let him go, and he stilled again as her thumbs brushed his flesh on the inside of his wrists, a soothing touch that had his fight flowing out of him.
“I am mad… not muddled,” he whispered to himself, feeling it as he looked at her, as he felt her hands on his skin, squeezing his bones.
He had finally lost his mind.
“You are muddled, not mad,” she countered. “I am not dead, Fuery.”
His throat closed, and he couldn’t squeeze air past it as he considered the possibility that she really wasn’t dead. It was too much. He had lived for millennia believing he had killed her.
Hartt adjusted his torn black tunic, frowning down at it, catching Fuery’s attention. When Fuery looked at him, he lifted his head, locking eyes with him. Fuery wasn’t strong enough to say the words, to ask the question balanced on the tip of his tongue, because he feared that if he put it out there, it would build hope in his heart that would kill him if Hartt told him the wrong answer.
Was this really Shaia before him, alive and not dead?
Hartt nodded, and softly said, “She is real, Fuery. I wanted her to stay away until you were stronger. The light you felt inside you… it was Shaia reaching to you through your bond.”
Fuery’s breath left him in a rush and he sank to his knees, dragging her hands down with him.
It wasn’t possible.
He stared up at her and tried to believe that Hartt was telling him the truth and that it really was her standing before him, gazing down at him with soft eyes filled with understanding and concern.
He reached for the connection they had once shared, the one that had died when she had, or maybe before then. Something inside him had snapped the night he had first lost himself to the darkness.
His connection to her?
It had felt as if all the light had flooded out of him, and the darkness had swept in to replace it.
Light that had sparked to life inside him only a few days ago.
A light that Hartt said she had put there by opening her connection to him.
He focused on that connection, fostered it as he stared at her, deep into her eyes.
Light flickered inside him.
The darkness rushed to swamp it and extinguish it, and he growled as he broke free of her grip, shoved to his feet and staggered away from her, slamming the connection shut again. His hands shook as he gripped his head and snarled through his fangs, fighting the darkness as it writhed inside him, pushing him towards the edge, stirred into a dangerous frenzy by that echo of light.
By her.
He looked back at her and she lowered her gaze away from him, pinning it on the floor. Gods, she couldn’t even bring herself to look at him, to see what he had become. He needed her to look at him, ached with a desperate desire to have her eyes on him again, looking into his and telling him that all was not lost. She refused though, keeping her violet ones turned away from him, and he growled as pain so fierce it shattered him speared his chest.
His eyebrows furrowed as a need to escape surged through him, a desperate need to distance himself.
To spare himself.
She couldn’t be real.
And even if she was, it wouldn’t change a thing.
She would never be his.
He only wanted her to be his. That was all he had ever wanted. His only dream. One that had slipped through his grasp and was so disgusted by him that she refused to look at him.
Because he was tainted. Evil. Darkness made flesh.
He deserved her scorn.
He growled and squeezed his head, his claws forming over his fingers as his armour completed itself to protect him from the threat he felt, one it could never shield him from, because it came from inside him.
The darkness.
He sank into the despair that was now his old friend, a constant companion that had been with him for longer than he could remember. It had been born inside him when he had stepped into the darkness and embraced it, and had realised that he would live forever, until the darkness consumed him or he was killed.
It had become part of him when it had hit him that she was gone and he no longer had a reason to live.
He had doomed himself to an eternity alone, a shallow existence that slowly ate away at him.
When Hartt had given him a new path, he had taken it, his despair driving him to take on any foe, regardless of their strength, in the hope one of them would end his misery.
Because he wasn’t strong enough to do it himself.
How many times had he asked himself why he was still breathing? How many times had he asked himself why he fought back against his enemies, rather than let them end him? Why, when he was injured and in danger of being killed by his foe, did the need to live surge through him, driving him to fight harder?
To survive.
There was no reason for him to live, yet there was a piece of him that clung to hope—to life—unwilling to let him die.
Why?
He stared at Shaia.
Because that part of him had always known she was alive?
A shiver chased over his flesh beneath his armour and clothes, and gods, he wanted to believe that, ached to believe that she was standing before him, but fear was slowly building inside him, whispered words that had him backing away from her, distancing himself when he wanted to move closer to her.
She despised him, would only look upon him with hatred and disgust if she did raise her beautiful eyes to his face.
He was tainted.
Damned.
The darkness was strong in him and he had embraced it, desiring oblivion, wanting an end. He had tried fighting it, but there had been times when he had coaxed it, had needed to feel it washing through him. He was no longer the male he had been when she had loved him.
He was a ghastly shadow of that male. A wraith. A monster.
He might have been good enough for her once, but no longer.
He would never be good enough for her again.
There was no coming back from the evil that lived inside him.
As his despair mounted to a crescendo he felt sure would break him, the darkness so intense that no drop of light remained, and he wanted to sink into it and lose himself, never to return, she finally raised her eyes to meet his.
There was no scorn in them. No disgust. No trace of the feelings he felt sure beat in her heart—ones all elves felt towards the tainted and the lost.
Shaia lifted her hand and held it out to him, and gods, he wanted to take it, but he couldn’t, and it killed him.
He couldn’t taint her too.
He backed away from her, and when she took a step towards him, Hartt moved and placed a hand on her shoulder, holding her back.
That single action reignited Fuery’s rage but made it hit home at the same time.
She was real, alive, and as beautiful and pure as he remembered.
And gods, maybe he was wrong, maybe she didn’t despise him, because she was looking at him with love in her eyes.
It was too much. The room closed in on him, the emotions that rushed through him causing a torrent that threatened to sweep him under and left him feeling as if he was drowning. He needed space and air, both to stop himself from attacking his only friend again, the only one who had stuck by him through the long and weary centuries, and to process the reality that she was alive.
His beautiful ki’ara was alive.
He took one last look at her and then drew on his strength, called on all of his power, and focused on his body. Dark jagged lines chased over his arms and the world around him disappeared as he managed to teleport.
But he still saw Shaia.
He saw her hurt as she realised what he was doing, and felt her pain go through him.
And he couldn’t bring himself to go far away from her, to a place where she couldn’t reach him.
She was his mate, and she needed him.
He landed in his quarters and dropped back to his knees.
He hadn’t been there for her though. He had left her alone for centuries, his connection to her closed, believing her dead when the truth was so much worse.
She had been alive all this time, alone, believing him dead.
All this time she had been out there, and now he knew the part of him that had pushed him to live had been aware of it, aware of her and that she needed him.
His heart.
He pressed his left hand to his chest and breathed through the pain that beat in it. His pain. Her pain. They mingled together to steal his breath and burn his soul to ashes.
He had thought her beyond his reach once, but she had stepped within it, had believed him worthy of her.
But he had been mistaken back then.
Now she was beyond his reach, the darkness inside him a gulf between them he could never cross.
And nothing he did would ever make him worthy of her again.