Azriel gripped her arm and pulled her away, his face weeping no emotion but that of stone. Paneled walls passed, the sconces of faelight sending their shadows dancing across it in a way that almost made Eblis shiver.
She almost voiced her opposition before she sensed the full scale of his wrath. She had been caught eavesdropping.
Eblis’s felt as if her composure were crumbling, a panic setting in. She felt it in her chest like a noose being tightened around her throat.
She was led, like a pig to the slaughter, out of the hall and into the wide, sunny living room. But Azriel didn’t stop. Their feet treaded over rug and wood and stair until they reached the quiet darkness of another hall and her bedroom beyond. There, the male finally released her arm, and she rubbed the spot distractedly. She hadn’t realized it, but his grip had been hard enough to bruise.
Azriel didn’t pause, however, and instead made his way to the opposite side of her room, where he closed her window and then pulled the blinds shut. His shoulders rippled with muscle as he did so, hands dark and strong. Those tattoos across his chest taunted her as he turned and faced her.
His gaze was hot and burning with everything but passion or love or lust as he took her in. It was a look that sent shivers down her spine. Azriel stepped forward, and for all the intensity of his hazel eyes, she took a step back. He followed her until her back bumped against the wall, her heartbeat sharp and fast in her ribcage. Just moments earlier, it had been doing the same fast rhythm; but then, Azriel’s face was close, his lips warm and inviting.
His hands went to her waist, cupping her entirely until she realized she could not move. Her own hands went instinctively to his wrists that bracketed her, holding her still. The touch would’ve almost been sensual except for how impossible it was to make those fingers budge. A thumb swept across the plane of her stomach. Once, twice—it sent her skin burning despite the circumstances.
Azriel’s hazel eyes never left hers as he bent down and kissed her.
Surprise had her hands drifting to his shoulders as if to push him, but he was still an immovable mountain. She melted under him and his scent, and the male withdrew. Her breathing had shallowed, but so had his. Then his mouth was on hers once more with a burning fury, his teeth nipping at her bottom lip until she gasped and his tongue swept in with a cold lash. They seemed to groan simultaneously, even as Eblis was utterly swept away by his taste and the feel of his body pressing against hers suddenly. She groaned at the feel of it; at the feel of him and his glorious muscles making them fit so perfectly.
Her senses went taut with desire, and her hands were in his hair.
The emotion swept over her so fast, she didn’t have time to think about the last time she’d been touched like this—held like this. It was a breaking and a healing at once, because she knew this couldn’t last.
Azriel twisted them, lips never breaking contact, until she was being lifted onto a desk she’d never used in her room. He settled between her thighs, a hot nudge of demand there that left her moaning and breathing heavily. Their mouths separated for but a second before Azriel was placing kisses along her jaw and neck and her collarbone. His lips brushed over the many many scars there from nails and teeth of not-so-gentle thieves who’d stolen her innocence. The male’s breath hushed against her skin until she arched into him, and he pulled away.
The heat and desire warring through her paused to a deathly stand-still as Azriel pressed a knife to her throat.
“Azriel?” she breathed, chin raised high to avoid the piercing blade. Her chest heaved, hands stilling in his hair until they drifted down and away from him. The hands that had held her now held a blade against her neck and gripped her wrist where she’d been reaching for something—anything—to help herself. Not that she would ever use it on him.
“Is that what you wanted?” That knife twitched, and she felt a thin line of blood well up. Her breaths shook just as surely as her heart did. “Is that what you were waiting for? For me to break and come to you so that you could stab a knife in my back?” He released her wrist and instead spread his fingers along her lower back. With a move that made her gasp, their hips bumped together, and the full demand of him barely restrained in his pants was lined up with her. Despite the knife on her throat, the blood it already spilled, she found a heat in her gut that left her wanting for more.
“You see what you do to me?” Her eyes burned as she stared at the ceiling, as his voice hissed against her skin with sensual promise. “Too bad I beat you to the chase.” The knife slid along her throat and down to her collarbone in emphasis.
Finally, her chin dipped down to meet his gaze. “I wasn’t going to do that, Azriel. Never to you.”
His growl cut her to the quick. “I’m supposed to wait, unfortunately, to slice your head off. Rhysand wants to talk to you.” Her eyes pressed close as she swallowed hard. That guilt that had been stirring inside of her for the past several weeks welled up. A single tear escaped the corner of her eye.
“I said I was sorry,” she whispered, “I just needed more time to make sure.”
“Make sure of what?” A hard digging of steel into her neck and shoulder.
She didn’t even dare to try and lean away from it. “That I had control!” she gasped. “That when I finally decided to lose a little bit of that control, everything wouldn’t fall apart.”
“What did you do, Eblis?”
Her teeth gritted even as that tear was joined by more. Her chest hurt. She whispered, too cowardly to shout it loud enough for everyone to hear, “Hybern knows everything. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Five centuries was too long. I broke within fifty years and never looked back.” The shame threatened to swallow her whole. But she wanted Azriel; needed him. She refused to lose him because she was never strong enough back then. Gods, it hurt to sense how cold he was after that lightning that had been their kiss before.
“Fuck. You,” the male breathed, and the knife was sheathed. She slumped against the wall behind the desk as if her restraints had been untied. “Rhysand waits for you. And so does everyone else.”
Everyone. I betrayed all of them; and now they want retribution. Azriel left her reeling in her room, his shadows an icy press of darkness that watched her.
***
He wasn’t sure he felt much of anything. The kiss had obliterated him in more ways than one, but so had pressing the knife against her neck. Such fear and anguish had been in her eyes. Yet he couldn’t believe any of it to be true.
He should’ve trusted his instincts. They’d warned him from the very beginning and had kept him safe for his whole life through wars and spying trips and interrogations; but he’d been stupid and fell into her like a lost puppy, and she’d been the one to clip the leash on his neck.
The mating bond pulsed within him—the only source of distress he felt. The rest was frozen in place.
Rhysand glanced up as he stepped down the stairs, his face just as cold and emotionless as his. At his side, Nesta and Cassian stood shoulder to shoulder, their spines stiff as boards even as echoing murmurs of the Archeron’s silver flames danced in her eyes still. On Rhysand’s other side, Feyre watched him with a blue-gray gaze too hard for a female her age; too distrusting and angry. Mor and Amren were folded against a wall, both in mirrored positions of folded arms and lax postures that belied the glinting of blades on them. Elain was not to be there; not for what they might do in retribution.
He felt the full lashing of their anger and betrayal, and he joined his High Lady’s side without a single word. The sun brazened the room, coating them in heat despite their iciness. There was no noise as they all stared at the stairs and waited with a patience borne of battles and bloodletting. Eblis could wait up there for hundreds more years; but still they would stand.
His shadows alerted him the same time the soft sound of a scrape and a sigh as a door shut reached him. Then, Eblis was at the peak of the stairs, face wiped dry of tears and emotion as she descended with a swaggering arrogance that startled him. He didn’t know why. She was as two-faced as they came.
Her foot clicked against the floorboards as she reached the final step, sunlight setting her face in stark relief. No longer did her scars seem her burden to bear, her greatest terror to remember, but rather as if it were a coating of armor. She surveyed each of them with a sharp eye, mouth pinching closed. Those violet eyes he had stared into and wished upon flickered to the wide, open windows.
“Close them.”
Silence. Then: “We don’t follow your orders,” Cassian said, voice lethally soft. Rhysand didn’t even bother to speak in agreement. None of them did.
“Well,” Eblis said, “I would do it myself but I have a feeling that if I move from this spot I will be impaled on more than one blade.” His eyes glanced at the thin crust of blood along her throat as if in answer. The heartbeat that had fluttered there was calmed, and the heat of their rough joining had dissipated like a fog off her skin.
Amren only laughed quietly, the sound razor-sharp, “So this is your true colors, girl?”
“This is what Hybern made of me, yes.” Her finger tapped against her side. “Now the windows; if the army sees that I have lost the ruse, they will attack within moments.”
A quiet, lethal warning. Azriel stared at her long and hard, even as he felt Mor and Feyre share a glance at the words. He strode to the windows, and pulled the masterfully hidden blinds for them across it, the room suddenly bathed in a humid, dark heat. Eblis sighed and sat herself down on the lowest step of the stairs behind her.
“I will not move. If each of you wants to run me through once, then go ahead.” She said it with a dead seriousness as she stared blatantly at them. She truly expected them to do it.
Still, they did not move.
“Sorry,” Feyre began, a hand tight in a fist at her side, “we are not monsters like you.” Eblis only blinked once in surprise before it was hidden behind her cold gaze again. She shrugged.
“Alright, your loss.” She leaned back against the stairs, running a hand through her dark hair. “What do you want to hear first? The explanation, the apology, or the admittance of wrong-doings?” Eblis said, speaking to the ceiling. She couldn’t meet their gazes, it seemed.
Mor stepped forward before anyone could speak, her face scrunched in a snarl. “Admittance of wrong-doings.”
Eblis only nodded. “I never knew about your preferences. You were out with a female that first day I arrived; not in a meeting with one of the Palace’s governors. Well perhaps she was the Palace governor. I did not care enough to search farther than that.”
Morrigan’s face paled, and she said, “How did you know?” He watched as Feyre joined her side, a hand gripping her arm in warning. The female’s face was thus clouded with coldness once more, all emotion wiped away.
“If I answer that, then I’ll be getting into the explanation,” Eblis replied, though a shadow curled along her shoulders. Shadowsinger, he reminded himself. She was a Shadowsinger, and capable of just as much spying as he was. “Now, taking a small step backwards: the attors that attacked. They wanted confirmation of a smooth transition into the court. The knife Atlot stabbed me with was hollow, with a message inside. I wrote back in it, and sent it on it’s way down the Sidra.” And then Feyre had met her; thanked her. So had he, moments after his High Lady left as she had asked him.
I’m not asking you to trust her, just to sympathize a little, Azriel, please. Kind words from Feyre. Ones that had ultimately left him in Eblis’s grasp.
He didn’t even register the fact that the attor had a name.
Eblis sighed through her nose and seemed to contemplate the events. “This is...also slightly leaning into the explanation option, but I broke Eris’s mind while he was at the Hewn City and planted the idea that he needed Beron to be killed. The Queen never really contacted him; but I can tell you that the late High Lord of Autumn was planning on using the recent disruption of war as a reason to...expand his borders into the human lands.”
Rhysand’s face was hard, his lips thin with anger. They’d been masterfully maneuvered, and even Azriel felt that this wasn’t all Eblis had to offer. At Cassian’s side, Nesta asked, “How did you reach Eris’s mind?” An edge of curiosity to her anger.
Eblis only dipped a chin in acknowledgement. “That is the part that goes into explanation.” She had to have done it from Velaris, of course. Azriel was unsure if Rhysand, who had lived for several years longer than Eblis with his daemati ability, was even capable of grasping a mind of a person he couldn’t see and wasn’t in any close proximity to. The fact that she even knew Eris was in the Hewn City then was a dangerous question he already knew the answer to. Shadowsinger.
“Now you might be wondering why I wanted Beron dead,” she began.
Rhysand folded his arms. “To cause unrest. Destabilize Prythian just a little bit more.”
“That,” Eblis agreed, “and so I could check on my other spies.” My other spies. The words jarred in his head. “Patrasche managed to invade Tamlin’s land without even getting into his mind, the poor male was so broken and lonely because of Feyre.” His High Lady stiffened, and he growled a warning. “Calm down. I mean no offense.”
Her gaze turned to him. “I didn’t expect you would be the one to do it. I’m sorry.”
“I thought Mor asked for the wrong-doings, not the apology.” Eblis nodded to Feyre.
“Of course.” She leaned herself back again from where she’d slowly been pulling forward. “After the High Lord’s meeting...ah. Right. Keir.” Eblis tilted her head to the side. “Don’t you think it was odd that Keir so blatantly raided Velaris to get your attention? He was never a meek man, but he knew his place at the very least.”
Rhysand growled. “You, again?”
“Yes. I needed something to...extend the time I had. A ball in my honor was quite fitting. However, it backfired, as you know, because I was then attacked.”
“We found all the males you broke,” the High Lord then said. “I couldn't get anything useful out of their minds except for something I only just found. The image of you, blades drawn and fighting the other males until you sensed our search and just broke all of their minds. Were you even drugged?” he accused.
Eblis sighed deeply. “I was, I’m just skilled in mithridatism, and it took a long time for it to take effect. I did my job a little too well; Keir really wanted me to be wedded that night,” she said, and her legs stretched out across the floor. “I didn’t mean to break their minds, but just to wipe them of the memory. Unfortunately, I was both punched in the face and sliced across my arm, and with the drug on top of that—I scrambled all of their minds. Sloppy of me. Send Keir my regards.”
Morrigan shook her head, voice stern as she scolded, “Continue, Eblis.”
“Hmmmm. I think that brings me to the final, and most recent thing.” Nesta and Cassian straightened.
Cassian said, with a tone like knives, “You drugged me while I was at Rita’s with Mor and planted the letter to Nesta.” Azriel’s gaze shot to Eblis. The bottle. He cursed in his head as the female nodded.
“I came to cause unrest; and unrest I would cause.” His hand fisted at his side, the knuckles white as shadows hissed in his ears. “Between all of that were vague messages with the army above Velaris. Elain’s vision was quite on point.”
“That everything?” Amren asked with a dry humor despite her sharp silver eyes.
Eblis nodded. “Yep. Now do you want the apology, or the explanation?”
They shared glances. “We wouldn’t believe the apology without the explanation,” Feyre answered for them, voice firm.
“I’ll leave this one open ended, then. Ask away.” She rested her hands behind her head, seeming far too relaxed. The sight of her, lazing across the stairs as if it were nothing but a hot summer day and she were catching some shade, seared across his mind. Her gaze darted to his as he stepped forward impulsively.
“When did you know we were mates?”
***
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