Unmade (Unborn #4) - Amber Lynn Natusch Page 0,11
Hallowed Gates. There was nothing to greet me but charred timber and ash and skeletons buried in the remains of the house with Azriel’s stony corpse adorning the front lawn.” He was silent for a moment, absorbing all I had said. “I thought my brothers had been slain—that it was their bodies I found in the wreckage,” I said, my voice cracking.
“So you rushed to the Underworld to see if they were dead.” His words were not a question.
I nodded anyway. “They are alive and well, which begs the question: who burned in the fire that consumed the house? Because I dug through the devastation myself until I found what I had hoped not to. Saw the bones with my own eyes…”
I turned away from him, not wanting him to see the pain their assumed deaths had caused me. I knew I could not keep it from my face. Even though I now knew the truth, the memory still pained me.
“It could be anyone,” he replied. “The better question is, who did it?”
“The Dark Ones, or the gods, or he whose name we dare not speak, or any number of unknown enemies I have yet to face,” I said, my tone sharp to cover my residual sorrow. “It could have been anyone, Oz. Throwing out speculations does nothing to change our circumstances.” His arm fell to his side as he slowly pushed away from the counter. “We cannot do anything about this until you are well enough to fight, so I am going to leave you here to heal while I get word to my brothers in the Underworld—”
“The fuck you are,” he said, his voice little more than a growl.
“We do not have time to argue—”
“All we have is time until I’m healed, new girl, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend it lying in that bed while you run off into God knows what without me.”
For some inexplicable reason, his anger made me smile. “Scared to be alone, Dark One?”
He stared at me as though he wished he could set me ablaze—but that was not a trick he possessed. “I’m not letting you out of my sight again. Bad things happen.”
“Like being captured and tortured by Kaine and the others?” I asked. “Tell me, how did you come to be their prisoner?”
“I tried to buy you time,” he said, staring at me with a ferocity I did not understand. “It didn’t go quite as planned.”
“My brothers said the Dark Ones came to the Underworld—”
“Oh, they did. The battle would have been epic, but Kaine seemed to realize quickly that you weren’t there. He turned and ran, like he could feel you escaping. He looked too confident in what he was doing for my liking, so I distracted him—”
“You mean you sacrificed yourself?”
He shrugged in the most infuriating way. “If he’d caught your trail, he could have intercepted you on your way to the Hallowed Gates.”
“And I would have ended him—”
“Maybe,” Oz replied, “but I wasn’t certain that Celia would have let that happen.”
My brow furrowed. “And why would she not?”
“Because she loved him once. It was that love that broke her—that Ares capitalized on.”
“My mother loved Kaine?”
“Yes. And he loved her, too—once upon a time.”
“Then what does he want with me?” I asked.
“I think he wants to use you to leverage Celia back to him—or maybe something much worse.”
“Always a pawn…” The bitterness in my tone drew Oz nearer.
“Not always, new girl.”
I dismissed him with a wave of my hand. “I did not mean you—though I still do not understand what you are to me, or what I am to you.”
“I am the one who is always at your side,” he said, tone low and full of violence.
“Until you send me away to the Hallowed Gates or are shackled to the underside of a mountain.”
“Like I said, I distracted Kaine. It worked for you. Less so for me.”
I swallowed back my guilt. Oz had fallen on his sword for me, and instead of resenting me for it, he looked pleased with himself—proud, even. Whether that was for thwarting Kaine’s plan or for saving me, I could not be certain.
“But you are…you,” I said, eloquence escaping me in that moment. “You never fail.”
“I knew the consequences of my actions before I went after Kaine and the others. It was a calculated risk, but a risk nonetheless.”
I stared at him in disbelief, his fading bruises and wounds a reminder of all he had endured to secure my safety.