Page 53 of A Haven of Brimstone and Darkness

My breath shudders out of my chest at Ruen’s voice as it penetrates my head. “That’s not what I said.”

I don’t turn around, but the sound of his boots scraping on the floor and the shift of air at my back tells me he’s risen to standing as well. My shoulders tense at the soft swish of footsteps as he draws nearer. Setting the book on the end of my bed, I glare at the wall, refusing to face him.

“You said that I should send the food to the prison,” Ruen repeats my earlier words, and my hands ball into fists. Things were easier when I hated him, when I hated them all. “You feel guilty for not thinking of them before now, don’t you?”

I close my eyes as if that will shut off the emotions, but of course it doesn’t. All it does is shut out the image of the world around me and send me toppling head over my ass into the oblivion of all the reasons why it fucking hurts so much.

Whirling around finally and not caring that Ruen is even closer than I suspected, his body nearly touching mine, I bite outmy next words. “Why the fuck should I care about a man that kidnapped me from my mother? Or the mother that let me go to the Underworld instead of saving me?”

The image of Ruen’s face shimmers in front of me. Damn. Damn. Damn. No. I cannot be crying right now. I take a deep breath and try to suck in the tears, but they remain clinging to the edge of my lashes, just on the cusp of falling.

Ruen’s hand comes up, the bread forgotten on the ground behind him. He cups my cheek and bends until our foreheads touch. His eyes bore into me, and a burning, itching sensation swells in my chest and expands outward.

“You can want to love someone and still feel betrayed by them,” he whispers softly.

I close my eyes, hating the feel of hot liquid breaking free and rushing down my cheeks. My hands land on his chest and push him back. “I can’t explain it,” I confess. “I don’t want to.”

“Okay.” His voice remains just as soft as before. “I won’t ask again.”

I open my eyes again and find my hands hovering in front of my face, not quite touching though still there as if they want to either wipe away the tears or hide the evidence of them. My breaths come in shallow pants, all of the air I’m trying to take in making it the barest inch down into my lungs before it’s sucked back out again.

Turning from him, I escape to another side of the room. The walls have become bars of a cage, but I can’t go into the corridor; I can’t escape him now. If I do, then others might see the tears, and … I would rather die than show this kind of weakness.

I want to die, anyway, I realize. I want the room to just open up and swallow me whole and erase my existence completely. I’d rather that than tell him the truth.

“Kiera.” His footsteps as he comes closer are a warning bell.

Acid burns at the back of my throat.

Sensing his growing nearness, I part my lips to tell him … well, I’m not entirely sure what I’m planning to tell him. Go away? Leave me alone? Those sound like good choices, but neither comes out when I do manage to speak. Instead, it’s the thing I most want to hide: the truth.

“It hurts,” I whisper, my voice so thick with emotion that it comes out as a rasp.

The footsteps cease, and for a moment, as silence reigns, I wonder if Ruen just simply disappeared. I can’t see him beyond the focus my eyes have on my fingers and palms. As if I’m still deciding what to do with them.

“Her being alive hurts?” Ruen sounds confused, but he keeps his tone light, gentle. I suspect it’s because he realizes that I’m on the brink of something—of breaking maybe and he’s trying to be kind and comfort me as if I were a frightened animal. Were I in any other mood, I might laugh at that.

I want to, but … if I know anything, it’s that oftentimes people desire that which they cannot have. I cannot have my life back, my childhood, or my father. My mother, showing up now? Alive? That doesn’t make me feel better. It doesn’t make me feel like less of an orphan. At least with my father, he hadn’t wanted to die. He hadn’t chosen to leave me, and maybe Ariadne hadn’t chosen to leave me in the beginning, but later on…

Caedmon had shown her what my life would be like. She knew what I would suffer if she stayed away and still, she’d chosen to do it. She’d accepted my fate instead of trying to fight for me. She had decided to let me go to the Underworld, to be tortured, to become a killer.

No child should ever have to kill to survive and yet I had. I can’t stop hating her for that even though I know I should be grateful that she cares in her own way.

I shake my head at Ruen’s question. “No.”

A beat passes and then his footsteps start again. They don’t stop until a shadow is hovering in front of me and strong hands grasp me by the wrists, pulling my hands away from my face. Ruen’s midnight blue eyes, the flecks of violet and royal purple staining the depths, catch on my face with more bewilderment and—my heart thumps against the inside of my breast—concern.

“She’s alive, Kiera,” Ruen states. “Your mother is alive and you are not an orphan. You’re not unwanted. This is?—”

“I know!” I snap, cutting him off. My voice breaks halfway between the two words. I close my mouth and swallow before trying again, in a softer tone, this time. “I know.”

His frown deepens, but as he promised, he doesn’t ask what he wants to. He doesn’t ask me why her being alive upsets me so much, why I can’t just be thankful.

I contemplate answering the unspoken question anyway. A part of me doesn’t want to, is sure that he can’t understand. A man like him—who has no doubt idolized his own mother for her sacrifice—may never understand. He would be overjoyed were ithismother still alive, but as his mother has proven … she loved him enough to die for him.

Mine…

No. I shake my head. It’s better if I keep these thoughts to myself. They would only upset him.

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