Page 123 of Bane of the Wild Hunt

I peered around her curiously, but I was not expecting to see Orion waiting outside Riordan’s apartment. He still looked so… brittle. Like he was barely able to maintain the illusion that he was alright.

“A moment,” he begged Helena quietly, more quietly than I had ever heard him speak.

“No,” said Ares from behind me, and I could tell that Helena agreed with him even if she looked sympathetic. But Orion was looking at me. Beseechingme. I knew I should probably heed their caution but was too morbidly curious about what he had to say to me to decline him.

I gestured to the door behind him in invitation, and he turned to open it with a key already clenched in his hand. Sofia did not look impressed when I motioned for her to remain outside, but she reluctantly agreed with a reminder that we did not have long before Riordan arrived.

Orion waited inside the dim room as I closed the door, and then he walked deeper into the chambers to get away from where I was sure they would all be listening. I went with him, and once we’d gone far enough from the door, Orion turned back to me with that devastation plainly all over his face again. A gleam of desperation in his eyes.

“Please do not do this. Don’t go through with it.”

“What?” I gaped. Of all the things I assumed he might wish to say to me at that moment, I never would have guessed that he would resort to begging me.

“I thought I could do this, I told myself I’d endure it, but… I can’t. So what will it take? What can I do to try and change your mind about this?” he insisted.

The anguish and desperation was so clear in his face and in his voice that it made me tear up for him.

“I am sorry you have been hurt by this. That was never my intention. But… Ilovehim. There is nothing that you could do or say that would convince me not to do this.”

I watched as all his heartbreak and devastation twisted into anger so fast it was shocking.

“I know you love—” I tried to continue, meaning to bring up my hopes for a future in which we could know harmony together. But he stepped near to me abruptly, using his immense body to silence me as he loomed over me until we were nose to nose.

“You are not fit to breathe the same air as him, witch. Howdareyou think otherwise?” he demanded.

I should have expected it from him, but his words still cut me.Deep. It felt like he’d severed an artery.

“Is this really how you think love looks?” I demanded before I could reel in the outburst, but I couldn’t help but lash out to hurt him back. “You are so bitter and selfish that it is no wonder he never loved you back.”

I could almost see the words landing like bombs that detonated in him with a devastation equal to the words he had hurled at me. And it was in that horrible moment that I realized how alike we were. Only I had filled the craters my mother left behind with fear and distrust while he had filled his lesions with rage and anger. But we were both just trying to protect what was raw and bleeding inside. And as I stared up in regret at the desolation I’d wreaked, I couldn’t help but wonder who was the one who left the festering wounds on his soul.

“I am sorry. I shouldn’t have said—”

“You were wrong before,” he interrupted me with a deceptive calm. “Riordan deserves the best of everything. He deserves a mate who is his equal. I would rather suffer that than watch him with someone so unworthy of him.”

I stared up at him, rolling the loathsome words around in my mind. How many times had I told myself the same thing that someone like me didn’t deserve anything?

“Riordan is the king of the Vale. And you arenothing,” Orion pressed, evidently taking my silence as a sign that he was having an affect on me.

His words stung me, they ripped me open and left me raw and bleeding on the inside. An echo of the doubt and hatred that I had harboured toward myself all my life.

Remember what I told you,Nell’s words resounded in my head once more. A raft in the midst of a tireless storm of self-loathing I could never seem to outpace. No matter how hard I tried to paddle, it seemed it would inevitably catch up and swallow me again.

But I tried not to let him see how he’d wounded me as I raised my head in determination to keep paddling.

“I hope that you find a way to heal,” I told him softly, and he scoffed at me, looking even more resentful.

“Does his image truly mean so little to you that you have no shame in tarnishing it?”

“Of course it means everything to me, but I know that is not what this is about, Orion! Not really. All this time I’ve been trying to work out what it is about me that you hate sofuckingmuch, but now I know,” I assured him.

“Oh?” he laughed scornfully.

“It isyouthat feels unworthy of him.”

His derisive smirk faded instantly, and the feathers on his wings raised slightly as the tip of his tail became completely motionless. A shiver of fear shot down my spine that he might react in violence, but then he turned his face away as if to redirect his rising temper.

“I never wanted to be your enemy. I willnotbe made into your enemy,” I maintained more levelly. “But I spent my wholelife believing what you just told me because my mother said so,” I found myself admitting. I was uncertain at first whether it was the right decision to share anything with him that he might weaponize against me.

---