Page 88 of Reaper's Ruin
I was feeling alive... with him.
“We need to get into those chambers ourselves,” Rhyker said quietly, breaking the silence. “See that list with our own eyes.”
I nodded, pushing away my conflicted feelings. For now, we had a mission. Questions to answer. A murderer to expose.
But as we began planning our next move, I couldn’t shake the image of that door—and the fear that when my own finally appeared, I might hesitate to step through.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Rhyker
I watched Soraya from across our shared sitting room as she pored over a roughly sketched map of the castle, trying to determine the best route for us to take to Lord Cassius’s chambers. He was back now, and tonight during the festivities was our chance to get a look at this list. Her brow furrowed in concentration, a strand of hair falling across her cheek. She tucked it behind her ear absently, her fingers lingering at the curve of her jaw.
Beautiful. I’d thought her beautiful from the first moment I saw her, even when I’d been hunting her and she’d been a sobbing, bloodied mess kneeling in the dirt. But the more I knew her—her bravery, her determination, her odd sense of humor that still made little sense to me—the more that beauty seemed to radiate from somewhere deeper than skin.
Skin it turned out that was... half-fae.
The thought kept circling in my mind, relentless and inescapable like a predator. Every time I looked at her, I searched for signs I might have missed—some hint of the heritage that apparently ran in her veins. But there was nothing. No shimmer in her skin when light struck it a certain way. No subtle sharpness to her features. Her eyes had been unmistakably human before Selyse had glamoured them to resemble the fae it turned out she was. Nothing to scream that the blood of my ancient enemies flowed through her.
Fae.
The thing I hated most. The thing that had destroyed everything I’d ever loved. The creatures that had slaughtered my people, wiped humanity from Faelora.
Memories of my final days in the living realm flooded my mind. The panic. The terror. The blood as they’d carved through us like a wave of destruction. All five courts united against one. Us. The humans. The thing they’d decided didn’t belong.
The screams still rang in my ears. The cries of mothers calling for their children. The hollow in my chest when I realized they were gone.
Every last one.
And I was the last human standing.
For that short time to know I was alone in this life. Everyone and everything I’d ever cared for gone. Everyone I was supposed to protect wiped away by the fae. And then, they’d ended me too.
And Soraya. Sweet Soraya. She was one of them. It felt impossible.
And yet...
She had to be. It was the only explanation for how she’d arrived here. Somehow, twenty-four years ago a Realm Walker must have broken Faelora law, gone to the Mortal Realm and created... her.
Warm, vibrant, impossibly human Soraya.
Half-fae.
However horrifying, it had to be true. And if her father was a Realm Walker, the ability, though rare and not always passed down, must have been how she’d made it here. Some inherited ability hidden inside her that somehow, someway, pulled her into my world, into my life, into my... heart.
It clenched thinking about the fact she was half-fae. But it clenched harder thinking about that half-fae moving on when she got her door like Elira had.
The way she’d looked when Elira’s door appeared—her eyes wide with wonder and fear, her lips parted in awe—had stirred something protective and desperate inside me. She would get her door too, eventually. All she needed was to find peace, to understand who had killed her and why.
Part of me wanted that for her. Wanted her to find the answers that would lead her to her mother, to whatever awaited beyond that shimmering doorway.
But another part—a selfish, broken part—never wanted that door to appear. Because when it did, she would leave. And I would remain, returning to my eternal duty in the shadows, alone once more. But I knew she couldn’t stay. Every moment she remained was a danger she’d be reaped from this life. A soul extinguished for good, and a soul too beautiful to perish into oblivion.
She could never be mine. This life could never be ours.
I understood it, as painful as that truth was, but still... all I could focus on was the memory of her lips against mine in the forest. The way she’d felt in my arms, warm and alive and wanting. The taste of her—rain and sweetness and something uniquely her—haunted me in quiet moments. It was all I could do not to pull her into shadow-filled corners, to press her against walls and claim that mouth as my own.
And the way she looked at me sometimes—a lingering glance across a crowded room, a flutter of lashes, that small smile she reserved only for me—told me she was thinking of it too.
