Текст книги "Daggermouth"

Автор книги: H. M. Wolfe

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

“Li.” He kept his voice steady, gentle in a way he reserved only for her. “Focus on my voice.”

Her eyes were wide behind her mask, pupils dilated. Her hand went to her throat where Maximus’s fingers had been.

“I can’t—” she gasped, the words fragmenting.

Lira’s breathing quickened, each inhale shorter than the last, her body trembling visibly now. Panic attack. She’d had them since childhood, since the first time their father had shown his true nature in front of her.

Greyson moved toward her, but Shadera was faster, stepping in front of his sister. She placed her hands on Lira’s shoulders, her movements careful but decisive.

“Look at me,” she said, her voice gentler than Greyson had ever heard it. “Through the mask. Find my eyes.”

Lira’s head jerked up, her chest heaving with the effort to draw breath.

“Good,” Shadera continued, reaching up to adjust Lira’s mask, straightening it softly. “Now breathe with me. In through your nose.” She demonstrated, her own chest rising with a deep inhale. “Out through your mouth.”

To Greyson’s amazement, Lira tried to follow, her breath still hitching but gradually slowing as she matched Shadera’s rhythm. Shadera continued the pattern, her attention fully focused on Lira, as if they were the only two people in the elevator.

“That’s it,” Shadera encouraged. “Again. In . . . and out.”

Greyson pulled his tablet from his jacket, wincing as the movement sent fresh pain lancing through his shoulder. He keyed in a secure code, bypassing the usual communication channels to connect directly to Chapman.

“Sir?” Chapman’s voice came through immediately, alert and concerned.

“We have a situation,” Greyson said, keeping his voice low. “Get to my floor. Immediately.”

He ended the call without waiting for a response, knowing Chapman would be there. The man had never failed him, not once in ten years of service.

Greyson turned back to the women, watching Shadera care for his sister as something shifted in his chest. The scene felt surreal, disconnected from the truth he thought he understood about Daggermouths.

They were supposed to be emotionless killers.

They weren’t supposed to care for other people, weren’t supposed to feel empathy, show kindness.

Pain pulsed from his shoulder, but he pushed it aside, compartmentalizing it as he’d been taught. Physical pain was the least of what his father had inflicted tonight. The bullet wound would heal. The sight of his father’s hand around Lira’s throat, of the gun aimed at his mother’s head—those wounds would fester like all the others, buried but never forgotten.

The elevator slowed, then stopped as rain began to drum against the glass box. Shadera’s gaze moved to the city beyond the window, cataloging, assessing, planning—Greyson could almost see the calculations behind her eyes.

The doors slid open to reveal Chapman standing at the threshold between doors, back straight, expression neutral despite the blood on Greyson’s suit, despite Lira’s obvious distress.

Shadera helped Lira to her feet as Chapman used his own key to unlock the door, stepping inside first to verify it was secure. He nodded once to Greyson before he ushered them inside.

“I need you to take Lira to Callum,” Greyson said to Chapman without preamble. “Tell him she doesn’t leave his side until I contact him. Not for any reason. Not for work, not for Father, not for anything. And use the service tunnels, not the main roads.”

Chapman nodded, already moving to retrieve a coat for her from the closet by the door.

“Grey—” Lira began, her voice still unsteady.

“Please.” He heard the desperation in his voice. “You’re not safe at home right now. Callum can protect you until we figure out our next move.”

“Then come with me,” she pressed. “If he can protect me then he can protect all of us.”

Greyson shook his head. “No one is safe around Shadera and me right now.” He placed his hand on her uninjured cheek, a rare gesture of physical affection. “I need to know you’re safe, Li. Please.”

“At least let me help you first,” she conceded, leaning into his palm as her eyes flicked to his shoulder.

“I’m fine,” he lied, ignoring the hot blood spreading down his side beneath his jacket. “This isn’t the first time. I doubt it will be the last.”

Something about those words seemed to break her completely. She surged forward, wrapping her arms around him in an embrace that sent pain screaming through his shoulder. He didn’t flinch, didn’t pull away. Instead, he gritted his teeth and wrapped his arms tightly around her, cradling his little sister against his chest as her tears soaked through his shirt.

“I hate him,” she whispered against his chest. “I hate what he’s done to us. I want him to die.”

“I know.” He brushed a hand down the back of her head. “I know, Li. Go with Chapman. Stay with Callum. I’ll fix this.”

Another lie, perhaps. But one she needed to hear.

She pulled back, fingers brushing his injured shoulder with butterfly lightness. “Promise me you’ll take care of this,” she said, gesturing to the wound.

“I promise.”

Lira turned to Shadera then, the movement hesitant, uncertain. “Thank you,” she said simply. “For in the elevator.”

Shadera inclined her head. “It was nothing.”

“It wasn’t nothing,” Lira insisted. Then, more quietly, “Take care of him. At least for tonight, please keep him safe.”

Before Shadera could respond, Lira turned away, moving toward Chapman who waited in the entryway, his patience infinite, his discretion absolute. Greyson followed her toward the door, opening it and pressing the button to call the elevator, then pulled Chapman back a step.

“No one touches her,” Greyson said, his voice low enough that only Chapman could hear. He pulled his gun out of its holster and slipped it to him. “If anyone tries, even Veyra, you have my authorization to use lethal force.”

Chapman’s eyes reflected his understanding. “Yes, sir. With my life.”

The doors to the elevator opened and in the next breath they were gone, leaving Greyson alone with Shadera in the suddenly too quiet apartment. The absence of others made the space feel larger, emptier, the silence pressing in and suffocating him.

Greyson stood motionless, his control maintained by the thinnest of threads. Now that Lira was gone, now that his focus on her safety no longer anchored him, he could feel something unraveling inside him—a coil of pain and despair that had been wound tight for decades.

Control. Everything in his life had been about control—maintaining it, projecting it, never letting it slip no matter what his father did, no matter what horrors he witnessed on the execution platform, no matter how much of himself he had to carve away to maintain the facade.

The sound of his own heartbeat thundered in his ears, the wound in his shoulder a distant concern compared to the rage building inside him.

It started in his fingertips, a tremor that traveled up his arms, spreading through his chest until his entire body vibrated with it. That control he maintained—always, always maintained—began to crack, fault lines spreading into gaping voids.

“You should sit,” Shadera said, breaking the silence. “Let me look at your shoulder.”

Her voice penetrated the fog beginning to cloud his thoughts, but he couldn’t bring himself to respond. The sound of his father’s hand striking Lira’s face echoed in his ears. The image of the gun pressed to his mother’s temple burned behind his eyes. The feeling of powerlessness—familiar, suffocating—tightened around his throat.

“Greyson?” Shadera moved closer, her voice sharper now, more insistent.

For the first time in his life, Greyson found himself contemplating not just escaping from his father’s control, but something far more permanent. Something that would end his reign once and for all.

Something snapped.

His fist connected with the wall before he consciously decided to move as a sound more animal than human shredded his lungs. Plaster cracked and gave way, pain shooting up his arm to mingle with the fire in his shoulder. The physical sensation was cleansing, clarifying—a point of focus in the storm.

He tore the mask from his face, hurling it into the mirror above the entryway table. Shards exploded outward like crystalline shrapnel. His hands reached for anything, scrabbled for anything he could destroy. The island stools were next. He picked them up one by one, slamming them against the counter, against the walls, the refrigerator until they were nothing more than twisted metal.

He dragged his suit jacket off his body as his heel connected with the coffee table. It flew across the room, flipping and splintering, as it connected with the entertainment center and shattered the thin glass television screen. The sound was like ice breaking on a frozen lake.

It wasn’t enough.

Nowhere near enough to contain the fury boiling through his veins.

“Fuck!” The word tore from him as his fist connected with the marble island, splitting his knuckles.

He tore through the apartment like a force of nature, upending furniture, shattering anything his eyes landed on. Each act of destruction felt like oxygen after too long underwater, like breaking the surface when he’d been drowning his entire life.

He swept everything from the counters with a single arc of his arm, dishes and glassware shattering on the floor. A liquor bottle flying toward the window.

Thirty-three years of obedience. Thirty-three years of swallowing his hatred, of playing the dutiful son, the perfect heir. Thirty-three years of watching his father destroy everything. And for what? For the privilege of living in a cage, of killing on command, of pretending the Heart’s poison hadn’t infected him to the core?

He was dimly aware of Shadera standing in the entryway, watching his rampage with calm eyes. Her presence registered like a distant signal through the static of his rage, but he couldn’t stop, couldn’t regain control. Not yet.

Greyson went for the couch next, flipping the large sectional over as another scream ripped from deep inside of him. The exertion sent a spike of agony through his injured shoulder, and Greyson stumbled, his vision blurring at the edges. He caught himself against the window, leaving a bloody handprint on the glass.

His legs gave out, and he slid down the glass to the floor, chest heaving, the rage finally beginning to ebb, leaving exhaustion in its wake. His shoulder throbbed in time with his heartbeat, the pain no longer possible to ignore now that the adrenaline was fading.

The apartment lay in ruins around him, a battlefield of broken possessions, a landscape of destruction that matched the devastation inside him. His ragged breathing sounded obscenely loud in the sudden quiet. Shame crept in at the seams of his awareness—shame at his loss of control, at the animal violence of his outburst, at the knowledge that Shadera had just witnessed him break.

Another weakness revealed, another vulnerability exposed.

He leaned his head back against the glass, closing his eyes as he sucked in a ragged breath. Time seemed to stretch and contract around him, reality bleeding at the edges. He was pulling away from his body. Inch by inch. Like a tide receding from shore.

A soft sound pulled him back—footsteps approaching, giving him plenty of warning.

Greyson forced himself to look at her, to acknowledge what he’d done. He expected to find contempt or satisfaction in her eyes—some vindication at seeing her captor brought low. Instead, she stood a few paces away, holding a first aid kit in her hands, her posture suggesting caution but not fear.

“Are you done?” she asked, her voice steady.

Greyson nodded.

She approached slowly, as if he were a wounded animal that might still be dangerous.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said, the words emerging rough and raw. “I would never—” He stopped, killing the lie before it could form. He didn’t have to lie to her, didn’t have to pretend this was something it wasn’t. They would both hurt each other if they had to, but at least, if nothing else, they were honest about that.

A corner of her lips tilted upward and she knelt in front of him, laying the kit on the floor beside her.

“I know.

She said it so matter-of-fact, as if she understood him on some fundamental level that others missed. As if the line between his controlled public persona and this private destruction made perfect sense to her.

“I’m going to clean that wound,” she said, nodding toward his shoulder. “And before you tell me not to bother, remember that if you bleed out, I’m the one who’ll be blamed.” She retrieved antiseptic and bandages without looking up at him. “Can you move your arm well enough to pull it from the sleeve?”

Greyson nodded, complying and wincing as he undid the buttons and pulled his left arm free. The bullet had passed through the meat of his shoulder, missing bone and major arteries—a warning shot, clean and not meant to kill. His father was too precise a marksman to miss at that range if he’d wanted Greyson dead.

Shadera worked in silence, cleaning the wound with clinical detachment. Her fingers were gentle despite the efficiency of her movements, a contradiction that seemed to define her more and more with each passing day.

“I’m sorry,” Greyson said after several minutes of quiet. “That you had to see that. My father. What he really is.”

Her eyes met his, green and steady and unafraid.

“I’ve known what he is for a long time,” she said quietly, then paused. Her mouth quirked upward. “Besides, what you really should be apologizing for, little heir, is stabbing me with that fucking fork. Hurt worse than an actual blade.”

A startled laugh escaped him, cut short by the pain it caused. “Fair enough.”

They fell silent again as she worked, and something in the air between them, the energy, shifted.

Her hands stilled on his skin, lingering. He swore he imagined it when her thumb traced a soft circle over a scar and his breath hitched.

“I didn’t know,” she finally whispered, so softly he almost missed it.

Greyson looked up, finding her eyes fixed on his face, her expression stripped of its usual defenses. The emotion they held, the pain that seemed to reflect him, made his heartbeat stutter.

“Know what?” His voice was so foreign, so soft, as it left his lips. He fixated on her eyes, those beautiful fucking eyes.

She swallowed.

“What it was like. What you . . .” Her fingers slid down his arm, never leaving his skin. Greyson’s heart rate began to accelerate. “I knew he was a monster. But I didn’t know . . . I never imagined what it was like for you. Living with him.”

He couldn’t have anticipated the severity of the impact those words would hit him with, unexpected and devastating in their simple honesty. He looked away, unable to bear the weight of her gaze.

“No one does,” he said after a moment of silence, forcing his eyes back to her face.

Her hand fell away from his skin, slipping into her lap, and the sudden absence of her touch, her warmth, made his throat constrict.

Greyson forced himself not to reach for her.

“He killed my parents,” Shadera said, her voice almost a whisper. “Twenty years ago, I watched him kill my parents on that platform because they were from different rings. Because they chose love over law.”

She lifted her eyes back to his, and the pain he saw raging there could have brought him to his knees.

“I-I’m sorry.” She forced the words out.

“For what?” Greyson asked, genuinely confused.

She cleared her throat, bringing her hands back to his shoulder. He sucked in a sharp breath at the contact, not from pain—but comfort.

“For assuming you were just like him.” She secured a bandage over the entrance wound. “For thinking that because you’re his son, the Executioner, this was a life you chose. That you wanted to kill innocents—that you enjoyed it.”

The statement from her lips was a blade sliding between his ribs, finding the heart of a truth he rarely acknowledged even to himself.

He hadn’t chosen any of this.

“That doesn’t excuse what I’ve done,” he said, the words thick in his throat. “The choices I’ve made, the people I’ve—” He cut himself off, unable to finish.

“No,” she agreed, and there was no absolution in her voice, no forgiveness. “It doesn’t. But it explains more than I understood before.”

Her eyes moved over his face, studying him openly now. He wondered what version of him she saw at that moment—the Executioner, the heir, the broken man? All of them at once? All equally true, equally false.

“Earlier,” she started, changing the subject, “you said something about my mask bearing your mark. What did you mean?”

The question was a lifeline, a shift away from the truth of what he’d done, and he was grateful for it. He exhaled slowly, considering his answer.

“All Executioners have a mark,” he explained. “A symbol that identifies them, that becomes associated with their . . . work, in the Veyra ranks. Mine is a skull.”

“A tattoo?” she asked, her eyes scanning what she could see of his chest, noting the scars but no visible mark.

“Yes.” He hesitated, then made a decision.

If she was going to understand—truly understand the man they were up against—she needed to see. All of it.

Slowly, he pulled his shirt fully from his body, letting it fall to the floor as he turned away from her, presenting his back. Her sharp intake of breath told him she saw it—the skull tattooed across his entire back, identical to the one on her mask. Black ink embedded in skin that was a roadmap of scars and burns and lash marks. Some surgical, most jagged and brutal. Evidence of years of “discipline” at his father’s hands.

“This is my mark,” he said quietly, still facing away from her. “My fucked up legacy.”

Her fingers brushed his skin, so light he might have imagined it if not for the warmth that followed the path of her touch as she traced one of the scars that crossed the skull.

“And these?” she asked, her voice reverent. “Are they your legacy too?”

Greyson closed his eyes, fighting the unexpected surge of emotion her touch evoked. “No. They’re my education.”

She reached for a pack of gauze and tape without speaking, quickly cleaning the exit wound before packing it and sealing it off. Her fingers took one last dance across his flesh, feeling the ridges of his pain before her hand stilled against his back, a point of warmth in the cold room. Then it withdrew, leaving him feeling strangely bereft.

“Greyson,” she said, and the sound of his name in her voice, without title or mockery or disdain, made something ache inside him. “Look at me.”

He turned, meeting her eyes. Shadera stared at him for a long moment, emotions raging in her gaze as she lifted her hands then hesitated. It only took a breath for her to make whatever decision she was deciding on as her hands came up to cup the sides of his face.

His breath caught in his lungs.

He’d never been touched like this. The mask prevented it. Even before he was required to wear one as a child, no hands had graced his bare cheeks.

Her thumbs swept over the surface in tandem, stilling on both sides of his nose. He didn’t breathe, didn’t blink for fear that she would pull away, that she would take this small intimacy away from him.

Shadera searched his face before her lips parted. “For this moment, I’m going to put aside my hate for you. I’m going to forget that you’re my enemy and speak to you survivor to survivor.”

Greyson swallowed then nodded, eyes never leaving hers.

Her hands flexed against his skin. “You deserved—deserve a better father. Love is not supposed to be cruel, and what he’s done to you . . . it’s not your fault. You’re a better man than him, Greyson. Now is the time to be that man.” She paused as his pulse pounded in his ears, ringing as if he were hearing for the first time. “Death doesn’t have to be your legacy.”

They stayed there, suspended in silence. Greyson didn’t know how long it had been when she removed her hands, when she stood in front of him and offered her hand.

“You need to sleep,” she said, her voice still gentle. “You’ve lost blood. You need rest.”

Greyson nodded. He didn’t dare speak, didn’t trust any of the words that were begging to be set free.

His fingers slid into hers, rising to his feet as he scanned the ruin around them. Tomorrow, he’d have to tell her the truth about the Vow, the core of the Heart. But tonight, he needed sleep. He needed distance. He needed clarity.

Shadera strode away from him without a word toward her room and as he watched her go, as those auburn curls swayed with every step she took, he realized the irony of it all.

The woman sent to kill him, was the only woman who had ever made him feel safe.