A Court of Heart and Fealty | Rhysand

Chapter 35: Reaper

"I've got you," he breathed, though his voice had a distance to it, his mind someplace else. "Rhys is—" Galadriel cut him off with an abhorrent, strangled sound. She should have been able to move by now, but her legs felt like sacks of sand sewn to her hips. His handsome face, those harsh and lethal lines, were still blurry.

He picked up her hand, she just barely registered, which hung limply in his. The empty band on clear display, with no white gemstone that usually sat there. "Fuck!"

Suddenly, she was facing the ground, his arm bracing her weight. Two fingers pried her jaw open, slipping past her teeth, her tongue, hitting the back of her throat. On reflex, she gagged around them, her stomach seizing, her throat tightening. Bile, a horrid mix of acid and spit and the still bubbling white froth came from her. Galadriel, struggling for lost air, heaved at the same time, throwing her body into a conflicted fit.

Azriel pulled her back up once her stomach had given everything it had, pinching her jaw in his hand, fervently searching her face, her eyes. The burn on her tongue was as hot as ever, her ribcage feeling as though it was trapping fire instead of her heart.

Over his shoulder, a form rose. Not the male that had been choking her, but the other. Azriel caught the horror on her face, his head whipping around. The male guard extracted a small blade from his hip sheath, bracing it over his head.

Shadows lashed around them.

It felt like being everywhere and nowhere, not truly belonging to one form.

Then, there was red. And brown, green, yellow, velvet blue.

Violet.

With a violent sob, Galadriel launched herself at Rhysand, barely able to claw at him before arms pulled her away. Rhysand, from the crouch he fell to at their appearance, threw a scathing glare at his spymaster but Azriel only demanded, "Water."

A waterskin appeared in the High Lord's hands. Azriel snatched it, forcing her head back against his shoulder and put the opening to her mouth, pouring it down her throat.

"What happened?" Helion stood just behind Rhys. Everything about him was dampened in the darkness, as if the night choked his being as terribly as the hands around her neck had.

Azriel seemed reluctant to speak as Galadriel heaved water down, soothing the ache in her throat, which was no doubt bruising already. "They had her in the dungeons," he muttered, looking nowhere but her face as he tipped the waterskin higher. "She took the poison."

Rhysand's eyes cut down to the hand she'd let slip to the side, unneeded and unthought of. "I told you to order it off her!" There was a venom laced in those words that didn't fit the male she'd come to know. A hint of the beast he kept at bay.

He leant forward—to take her and the waterskin—but Azriel threw the water to the side and turned her around once again. It wasn't so much a surprise this time when those two fingers jutted against the fleshy end of her mouth, but it was just as horrid a sensation as the first. She gagged and heaved, spilling all the water she'd just down back onto the grass next to his thigh. Instead of pulling her back up, Azriel let her slump across him, holding her weight, rubbing her back in encouragement. Only when she showed signs of wanting to rise did he help her, examining her face through the darkness again, finding confidence in whatever he saw.

"I'm sorry," she sobbed. It hurt to talk. 

"Why did you do it?" The question hadn't come from him.

Galadriel's eyes shifted across to Rhysand, the pain in her chest intensifying. She didn't know which part, exactly, he was asking about but answered anyway. "They had me," she croaked. "I-I couldn't...They wou—would have made me talk."