mother. My brother tried to run rather than help her. He didn’t get far. I watched my mother die… couldn’t muster enough strength to stop the male. I thought I was done for.” He looked from her to the sky, closed his eyes as rain fell on his face, and she knew why he was doing it. Like her, he didn’t want someone to see him crying. Her traitorous heart tried to soften again. She hardened it instead. Hartt sighed. “That’s when Fuery appeared. Crazy bastard fought the fallen angel and I ended up finding the courage to help him. Fuery saved me and with all of my ties to the elf kingdom gone, I left that land with him. My journey with Fuery led to me becoming an assassin.”
She nodded as she took all of that in, as she clung to her anger and her hurt, and boiled everything he had told her down and accidentally omitted the sad parts that had almost turned her heart to mush.
Iolanthe dumping him at the altar had brought him to a dark place in his life, and that had led to him making some equally dark life choices. She fudged over the fallen angel and losing his family, tried to shut it out of her head, even when a tiny voice somewhere in the deepest darkest depths of her heart quietly screamed at her that they were more alike than she had thought possible.
He had lost his family too.
It had been torn from him just as hers had been ripped from her.
“So… let me get this straight, because I want to be clear about it. You got your heart broken by the love of your life and turned into a murderous psychopath. That’s good to know.”
His face darkened.
“It did not happen overnight.” Regret crossed his features and she didn’t need to be psychic to know he wanted to take back what he had said. “I’m not a psycho—”
He doubled over and braced his hands against his knees, breathing hard.
“What’s wrong?” She lifted her hand to reach for him but he raised his head. Black eyes locked with hers. Fear skittered through her and she backed off a step. “Are you going murderous psychopath on me again?”
He growled at her, ratcheting that fear up another notch as her mind supplied a horrific replay of how he had turned on her.
How he had tried to kill her the last time his eyes had been like that.
Teleporting was probably the wisest thing to do, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave him as he panted and gasped for air, as he visibly trembled and she sensed pain in him, and fear.
“No,” he gritted and his fingers tightened against his knees. “Fuery is having a bad day.”
“Fuery is having a bad day? What’s that got to do with your condition?” She eased back another step when he unleashed an unholy snarl and his nails became short claws.
He sucked down a breath and then another, panting as he closed his eyes. “We’re bound. When the darkness takes him, I feel it too… and vice versa.”
“What possessed you to do such a stupid thing?” She had witnessed the darkness in him and the darkness in Fuery, could only imagine how they fed that corruption in each other.
“I owed him,” he bit out, wheezed in another breath and growled through clenched teeth. “It was the only way to save him.”
By sacrificing himself.
It dawned on her that Hartt hadn’t been tainted when he had bound himself to Fuery, but he had become corrupted in the years that bond had existed, had been slowly destroying himself in the hope it would save his friend. Reckless fool. Noble idiot.
Her heart softened towards him but only for a single beat, before something else dawned on her. If Hartt couldn’t let his friend go, then he would never let his feelings for Iolanthe go either.
Those feelings had remained alive inside him for centuries without her by the sounds of things.
A love that just wouldn’t die.
He lifted his head, his gaze bleak. In it, she saw a hollow sort of yearning, a festering and eternal need for the woman who had left him at the altar, who had built a life without him and now had a mate.
None of which had stopped him from loving her.
“This thing you have isn’t healthy,” she said.
His jaw clenched. “It was the only way to save him. I would gladly sacrifice my life for his… after all he did