Page 176 of Wolf Caged
“Neve seems to believe so.” He didn’t look pleased that the dragon had decided the stone was necessary, or that I was insisting on going with him, determined to find a way to break his resolve and make him agree to take me, or that his spymaster had been so quick to divulge their little secret.
“Then we should go and find it.”
His silver eyes narrowed on me. “Why are you so invested in this?”
“Because I’m coming to realise how important vengeance can be… how it can give you a form of closure that just letting it all go can’t sometimes.”
He growled, “You speak of the wolf who sold you.”
I nodded and prodded at a small worn dip in the stone before me, my focus on it now as anger simmered in my veins, as I thought about Lucas and my wolf side didn’t howl in pain.
It snarled in rage, hungry to sink fangs into the bastard.
He faced me, a wall of muscle that radiated darkness as his shadows twisted around his legs and forearms, and caressed hisshoulders, his handsome face hard and fierce. “What lengths would you go to in order to have your vengeance?—”
“Anything.” I cut him off, my voice a thick growl that startled me. I had never sounded so vicious, so dark. “I’d do anything to make him pay.”
He lifted his right hand and feathered the backs of his fingers down my cheek, concern breaking through the steel in his eyes, his voice low as he said, “Vengeance is a dark and bloody path, one that requires you to cut out parts of yourself and not one I would recommend.”
I fell silent as I looked at him, deep into his eyes. How much of himself had he cut out, and how little would be left of me if I followed in his footsteps?
His gaze lifted to the garden and then the castle. “I built this castle here because of the view—this vantage point over the entire kingdom. I knew the moment I saw the view from up in these mountains that I would build my home here, but I had not expected to move the capital to this location.”
Because he hadn’t expected to rule.
“I thought the castle was old… built centuries ago.” I looked at it too, at the colossal black towers that rose from it, at the arched windows and beautiful carvings on columns and around some of the doorframes.
He slid me a look, a soft and amused one. “It was. I completed work on it around four hundred years ago. It took half a century for the court’s finest craftsmen to build the palace, and another half a century to complete the town to the point you see it today.”
I looked at the monument to darkness, a castle designed to strike terror into the hearts of his enemies, but one that managed to still feel like a home. I had the feeling the sense of this being a home had taken time to take root, that at first it had been a cold and merciless place, much like its master had felt.
“How old were you when you became ruler of these lands?” I shifted my gaze to him, catching the pain my question caused in his eyes before he concealed it, lowering his mask once again.
“I was a boy… No more than sixty. I looked as you might have at the time.” His gaze fell to me, a hard edge to it, as cold as a blade of ice, and I wondered what terrible things he was remembering as he drifted away from me, falling into the darkness of his past.
He would have looked like a teenager. A boy barely as old as his brother had been in that painting. The brother that should have ruled this court.
“What happened to your family?” My voice wobbled as I asked that, betraying the nerves and the feeling I shouldn’t have asked, that it was rude of me to bring it up and make him relive the pain.
He turned his cheek to me, his face hardening once more and the air around him growing cold, and a glance at his fingertips revealed they were stained inky black at their tips. He flexed them, revealing a thin line of fae markings that ran down their undersides to his palm.
“They were murdered by seelie.” His deep voice was empty, emotionless. “And my brother was taken.”
I looked from him to the castle he stared at, a monument to his pain and rage, and then reached for his hand. “I’m sorry.”
Before I could make contact, he pushed away from me, heading for the castle.
“I do not need your pity,” he snarled over his shoulder. “I need revenge.”
He stopped at the entrance of the white wooden pergola and looked back at me, darker and more menacing than I had ever seen him as his crimson eyes met mine and he growled.
“Can you give me that?”
I didn’t like how I felt in that moment as I looked at him, as I saw all that pain and that violent need for vengeance in his eyes, and I wanted to do it for him, despite the fact I knew he wanted the heads of those he believed responsible for his parents’ deaths and his brother’s abduction.
When I failed to find my voice to answer him, he disappeared in a swirl of inky night glittering with gold and silver stars.
Leaving me alone.
