Page 9 of King of the Dawn

I didn’t want to know what would happen if he found him, because I knew that he could. I just hoped that he trusted me enough not to go digging for the answers.

I inhaled a sharp breath, gathering my strength. When I exhaled, I pressed my head against his heart and I whispered, “Please, don’t make me.”

As quickly as it started, the rumbling beneath my feet stopped. The air around us cooled and stilled.

His arms wrapped around me, and the nausea swirling in my stomach dissipated when he whispered against my hair. “Okay.”

Chapter Four

Jericho

They say you shouldn’t see the bride before the wedding. It’s supposed to be bad luck or something equally moronic. Blah-fucking-blah.

All of that nonsense was moronic. Anything we did in this opulent Catholic Church - the Irish home invaders insisted on it - would be meaningless compared to what we had already shared.

Last night, we burned a man alive as an offering to my bride, a small part of the revenge on her abusers that I had vowed to give her.

She had screamed into the wind, and the wind screamed back, reflecting her pain and anger as the flames licked higher, cooking the man on the pyre until he was nothing but barbeque.

I had stayed up late disposing of him. It was my husbandly duty to do so. To erase the wrongs of the past, and to wash her clean of all the old hurts.

Every husband should offer that to his bride on their wedding day. And she didn’t get a bachelorette party, or a bridal shower. So it was the least I could do.

I was tired and delirious when I got to bed. I remembered nothing of what happened when I got to our room. Just that my body had stopped aching and I had fallen asleep. Then woken to Evie, looking at me with longing in her eyes. My bride.

In a short time, I had gained a fiancée who, at our first meeting, tried to stab me. Now, I was her knight, ready to slay her dragons and present their heads on silver platters. And she had insisted on a pledge I knew she did not mean. I tried to stop her, I truly did. I had seen her scars and did not want to cause her another one… but she pushed, and I am a weak man. I let it happen. I let her make a pledge that she did not mean because I wanted it.

I wanted her to myself, body and soul. Hell, I wanted my name tattooed over those scars of her body, replacing old marks with ones of my own.

I looked down at the red mark on my palm, running my thumb along it just to feel the sting. I liked the pain of it. The ache that it caused in my heart.

Her empty promises.

I didn’t resent her. She needed an anchor in this insane world. And I could be that if that was what she needed. I just wish she hadn’t insisted on something so… permanent. Scarification would be a hell of a thing to get rid of, when she realized she was free. When she finally tasted freedom, she wouldn’t want a reminder of this life.

But she’d insisted, and I believed her. I believed her because of my own stupid wishful thinking. I caved in to the most dangerous thing on earth – hope.

A delicious, painful hope that this could be real, and we could be one.

I wanted her to tell me who Ryan was.

I needed that last part of her. The last thing to make her my true wife.

Then she had refused me the name, the identity of the man who called her his moonlight, and reality crashed down again.

She kept a part of herself away. A part of herself for another man. A man she cherished in that book. By the looks of it, she had touched that page again and again over the years, for longer than she had known me.

I clenched my fist. I didn’t know who that man was, but I hated him with every fiber of my being.

Maybe it’s selfish - hell, I know I am selfish - but I didn’t split the difference. I don’t take second place.

I am not the kind of man who does things in half measures. I do not chain a person to me if their heart isn’t in it. So the choice was hers. She could be my true wife, or she could be an arranged marriage, just as we were always meant to be. I would protect her. But if she hardened her heart, then I needed to re-build my walls.

Just… not yet. I was shameless enough to take this time for myself.

To take my rewards while I was of use to my queen of the night. I would wait. And still, the fluttering wings of hope kept batting against the empty cage of my heart.

If I practiced patience, for once, then maybe she would tell me who he was, and what he was to her. She would let me have that last bit of her… maybe if I just worked a little bit harder. Maybe if I…

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