Falling Ashes

by Annie Anderson

  “Leave this house and this fight if you have to, but… please don’t leave without me. I’ll go with you. I’ll make sure you’re safe,” he murmurs against my temple, his fingers burrow under my hair, and that sobers me.

  He can’t go with me.

  He shouldn’t be anywhere near me. How long can I possibly go without hurting him? Without killing him? Sure, he seems immune now, but what happens when I lose it again? I know I’m just a time bomb ticking down to my eventual end. The best I can hope for is to reduce the collateral damage.

  No, he can’t come, but I nod anyway. Lying with my body so I don’t have to with my mouth, praying that when I leave this world, he forgives me for my dishonesty.

  When I return to the safety of my room, I pull off my clothes for another shower. The fear and bitter stain at the thought of Iva making me itch. I need to wash her away. I step under the still warming spray, and my mind drifts away to my time in that cell.

  * * *

  “Mena,” I hear my voice whispered in the blackness. I have been here so long, hearing my name when no one is there isn’t new. I hear lots of things in the dark.

  None of the things I hear are good.

  But this voice is louder than my thoughts and the whispers of the dead that scream in my ears for vengeance. Louder than the echoes of Iva’s taunts and my mother’s screams of agony.

  “Mena. I need you to listen to me. I need you to understand,” the voice says. “I have done horrible things. I have neglected you, and for that I am sorry. But I will do anything to save this Legion. I will manipulate, and sacrifice, and I will kill to save them. I will sacrifice a few to save many. I will do horrible things for the greater good. And you can hate me for that. I hate me for that. And after all I’ve done, I will probably go straight to hell once this life is finished. And I will accept it because in this life I was given, I did not choose my path, but I accept my destiny. So, you can dislike me, even hate me, all you want. I accept that. But I will save them. I will make sure that they are on the right path. I will bring them back from the darkness. But I need your help. I need you to stay here. I need you to endure this hell, and I will help you when I can. Your sister is coming. Not for a while, but she is. I need you to stay here until she gets you out. And when you get out, I need you to leave her and hide. People will come for you. They will try and steal you and make you a slave to feed their thirst for power. I need you to hide until Evangeline Marie Black has been made the Wraith Queen. When she’s made Queen, go to her and help her. She will make sure Iva dies and stays dead. Do whatever you can to help her. And once Iva is gone, make sure you live. Live for all the time we stole from you and all the pain we caused. Stay strong, cousin.”

  I don’t realize it at first, but that voice isn’t mine, and it isn’t the tortured screams of my parents. This voice is real. Someone is in this barren room with me, and it is from the one person who I thought of as neutral, if a little evil.

  I guess my cousin, Nicola, isn’t as bad as I thought.

  * * *

  I need to leave. I have to leave them all. I have to. I shouldn’t have stayed this long. As these thoughts roll unbidden through my head, I allow myself just these few minutes to grieve.

  12

  Kidnapping Is a Felony

  ASHER

  She’s going to leave me.

  That thought runs on a loop through my head, and I want to rip the house apart in my unmitigated rage. I should go back to John and Olivia and see how I can help, but losing time with her rips apart my chest worse than anything I can imagine. I want to do my duty, but I need her more than my next breath.

  She’s going to leave me.

  And I can’t remove myself from this hallway. Even when Aidan comes in behind me, I don’t move my eyes from the door separating me from the only woman I could ever want.

  “John wants you to get back to the house, Ash,” Aidan says gently from behind me, and I close my eyes to the battle waging in my head, and rest my forehead on her door.

  She’s going to leave me. One way or another. She’s going to leave.

  “I’ll make sure she stays here, but you have to go,” he says, and it takes a moment to realize I spoke my thoughts aloud. When I finally open my eyes and look at the man I’ve called a friend for so many years, he winces at the look in my eyes.

  “I swear it, Ash,” he promises, and I believe he’ll try, but nothing and no one can hold Mena if she doesn’t want to be held.

  I can only nod.

  “John needs you, Ash.”

  I stare at the door a moment longer before traveling to my King, dreading every moment I’m away from Mena. It only takes a few seconds, but it kills me, and I can’t believe John has been away from Olivia for even a minute without losing his fucking mind. How can he stand this? This clawing, gouging ache. It rips at my chest, and I have to focus all my energy on not traveling back to her. I knock on the chamber door, and I cannot fathom what I can do to help when I feel so torn in two.

  “Enter,” John’s grave voice calls, and I open the carved tree of life doors for what feels like the last time.

  “Sir,” I say with a slight bow of my head when I reach the edge of the bed. Olivia is sleeping in John’s arms, and her pallor is much better than when I saw her last – a faint rose in her cheeks that has been missing for these last few weeks. Her hair is still white, though, and I know she’s still dying before John says a word.

  “Bixbite. Fucking Bixbite,” he tells me, tears coating his lashes, running in rivulets down his face.

  When Aurelia said poison, she wasn’t kidding. Bixbite or Red Beryl is one of the few poisons that can kill a Wraith. Sure, many substances could harm us, but never kill. A gemstone in the beryl family, it can only be found in large enough quantities in one place – the Wah Wah Mountains in Utah. Bixbite is so rare, the practical usage of it is almost nil. In fact, I’ve never actually heard of it being used except in cautionary tales told to children to get them to straighten up and act right.

  I don’t know how to respond, so I don’t. I’ve never been a man to fill the silence when I have nothing to say. I’m guessing a ‘gee, that sucks,’ won’t be received well.

  “I release you,” he whispers.

  Uh, what?

  “I will not sentence you to die when you have found your mate. That goes against everything in me, everything I stand for as a leader to betray our most fundamental law. I release you,” he tells me wearily.

  If he’s releasing me, there is no hope for Olivia, no hope for him, and the pain is like losing a limb – blotting out all my questions of what is going to happen next. My composure breaks and my knees give out on the unforgiving hardwood. John is a better father than the one I had, and Olivia is… she is the best Queen I could have asked for. These two souls are irreplaceable, and if I weren’t mated, I would gladly honor my post and die with them. As it stands, I don't know who could fill their shoes. Evan isn’t allowed to succeed to the throne without a husband – archaic, I know – and West has all but refused the mantle.

  “How much time?” I choke out, the tears I’m hanging onto clogging my throat.

  “A few weeks. Maybe a month. Aurelia wasn’t certain, but it’s not going to be today. We have some time to figure it out.”

  A month. So little time? I’ve lived five lifetimes, and it isn’t long enough. Now that I have a mate, a hundred wouldn’t cut it, and it angers me that he’s so calm.

  “Get your mate, Asher. She needs you more than I do. All this mess can’t be helping her, and now that we can guess Iva’s involved... she needs you more,” he says and even though he is giving me something I need, it stings that he doesn’t want me there. I give him what he asks for anyway, despite the pain it causes me.

  Old habits die hard.

  I stand and then bow to my King before traveling out of that room and that house to the door I just left. Aidan looks up from his book from his perch on a barstool that he must have stolen from the kitchen
island.

  “Back so soon?”

  “I’ve been released,” I murmur, and Aidan flinches as if he’s in pain – he knows that means our King doesn’t have much time, and he’s eliminating collateral damage.

  “How long?” he says, his voice breaking.

  “A month at most.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Trouble’s coming. Can you feel it?”

  “Yeah. West isn’t going to step up, is he?”

  “I don’t know. But we need to be prepared for anything. I’m going to take a few days and see if I can get Mena to stay with me. I won’t be any good to anyone if I can’t get her to do that.”

  “Do what you have to, man. Just remember that kidnapping is a felony,” he says as he stands. He gives me a backslapping hug and smokes out with his chair leaving my way clear.

  I knock on Mena’s door, and after a few moments of no answer, I try the doorknob. It turns smoothly in my hand, and I poke my head in to see if she’s okay. When I see the bed empty, I lose it. I slap the door open hard enough to have it hit the wall and bounce back to hit me in the shoulder. I don’t hesitate, busting through the bathroom door.

  When I see her in a heap on the floor of the shower through the foggy glass door, my mind goes blank, and my body moves on its own. As I open the door, I don’t process that she’s naked. I don’t think about the deep scars gouged into her back. My hands find her shoulders, and I turn her so that I can see her face. It doesn’t matter that I’m soaked to the skin, my dark blue button-up plastered to my arms and chest. She’s breathing. And conscious. And sobbing so hard her body bucks and shudders with them. I pull her into my lap and just hold her for a moment.

  She’s alive. She’s breathing. She’s okay.

  But then my brain finally catches up, and I realize she’s bleeding from a gash on her brow bone.

  “What happened, Princess?” I ask as I cup her cheek, inspecting the cut.

  “I-I…can’t deal with all of this. I can’t…be… here,” she says through gritted teeth, trying to stem the flow of her tears. But she’s failing. She can’t get ahold of herself and her body bucks again. Right now, I don’t even consider the fact that she’s naked. It doesn’t even register. I just want to protect her. I want her to feel safe.

  “Then we’ll go. We’ll pack a bag and just go. I’ll take you to my place. It’s private, and we can get away from everything for a couple of days. What do you say?”

  She thinks about it for a moment, searching my eyes for an answer before closing her eyes, squeezing fresh tears from her lashes.

  “Okay,” she nods, her lips pressed so hard between her teeth the edges turn white. I pull on her bottom lip with my thumb until she releases the soft skin from the punishment of her teeth.

  “But first, we need to take care of this cut,” I say as I manage to get to my feet with her still in my arms, refusing to put her down for even a second. She slips her slender arms around my shoulders, and I realize she may be scared of everything else, she may want to escape, but she’ll escape with me instead of from me.

  Progress.

  I reach for a towel hanging from a brushed bronze hook, wrapping her up as much as I can before setting her on the granite vanity.

  “You never did tell me what happened.”

  “I slipped,” she mutters with a shrug.

  “That much I gathered. What made you slip, Princess?” I ask as I pull a first aid kit from the bottom drawer. I unzip the kit and pick a few sterile gauze pads from their wrappings and start cleaning the blood from her face. The cut is already beginning to close, and I wait patiently while she fidgets with the towel to avoid answering me.

  “I couldn’t breathe,” she admits, her lip trembling, “I was trying to figure out a plan. I was going to leave, but every time I thought about going, I couldn’t breathe.”

  Her eyes plead with me, torn between an apology and begging for help. I can’t fault her because she couldn’t leave. She feels the same pull I do.

  “And how do you feel about leaving with me?”

  “Like it’s something I need to do.”

  “Good,” I whisper, relieved. “How does your head feel?” I ask looking at a freshly closed cut as I wipe the last of the blood from her face. I have a small mountain of gauze beside her thigh on the vanity and the sight of so much blood on the rough white pads makes my stomach drop.

  “I’ve had worse.”

  I’ll bet she has, I think as a take in the exposed skin of her shoulders and arms, the creamy softness interrupted so frequently by the rough rivulets of her scars. I don’t want to think about what she’s gone through in that hell. If I do, I can’t promise I won’t stash her in a safe place and then find every person who lived in that house who didn’t save her and torture them until they wish they were never born.

  “Are your eyes going to turn black every time you look at my scars? Because I’m pretty sure that will put a damper on our relationship.”

  I feel like an asshole. My innate sense of justice is fucking things up all over the place. I’d hate it if she felt self-conscious about them, so I go about distracting her in the only way I know that has a chance in hell of working.

  “My eyes are tied to my emotions just like yours,” I say as my hands find their way to her knees, parting them to situate myself in between her bare legs. I can feel her answering gasp in my dick. “They change when I’m angry or frustrated,” I murmur in her ear, “Or aroused. My eyes turning black doesn’t always have to mean bad things.”

  When I run my lips along the soft skin at the column of her throat, she grips my wet shirt in her fingers and pulls me closer. At this point, I’m cursing the godforsaken towel covering her and the roughness of my wet jeans against my stiff dick. But then her warmth filters in through the denim, and I’m finding it hard to think about anything but getting her mouth on mine. When our tongues finally collide, my fingers find that fucking towel, ripping it from her wet skin. Her moan in response is almost more than I can take.

  The rip off my shirt in her greedy fingers barely registers in my ears, but when the warm skin of her breasts hit my cool flesh, the very last drop of my control goes up in smoke. Our hands tangle at my belt, and I’m so fucking turned on, I let her work the leather while I run my hands up her legs to find her slick wet heat with the pads of my thumbs.

  Jesus fucking Christ on a saltine cracker.

  I want to taste her so bad I drop to my knees right there, grab her ass in my palms and drag her to the edge of the vanity. Her hands smack the granite just before my mouth makes contact and the smell of her, the taste of her… fucking hell. Her sweet cream on my tongue, the moans vibrating from her throat. All I want is to make her scream, make her lose herself, make her fucking come. I slip a single finger into her hot little hole and her back bows hard enough to snap a vertebra.

  Nibbling at the lips of her sex, I work my finger in and out of her clenching pussy before giving her a long slow lick. Fuck, she tastes good. I slip in another finger, curling them as I concentrate the efforts of my tongue on her swollen clit. It doesn’t take another second before she comes, wet and screaming all over my face.

  After I work her through all her aftershocks, she is the consistency of wet spaghetti. Her wet hair is matted against her face and the mirror behind her head, clinging to the glass like a frog on a leaf. Her chest flushed from her neck, past her tits all the way to her stomach. Her perfect pert tits jiggle with every shuddering breath, the dark pink nipples contracted into sharp points.

  I have never seen a woman as beautiful as Mena in my whole fucking life.

  I want to ask her if she’s okay, but I’m not sure she’s capable of coherent speech at this point, not to mention I hear the heavy thud of footsteps in the hallway doing their damnedest to kill my hard on. It doesn’t quite work because I just watched the love of my life come for the first time and I have plans for her for the foreseeable future. And most of them require zero clothes and whatever sweet
condiment I have in the fridge.

  Hmm… I wonder if I have strawberry preserves in my refrigerator.

  “I’d ask what that smile is for, but I have a feeling you’ll show me when we don’t have a herd of freaking elephants stomping outside our door,” she rasps, and I realize she must have screamed loud enough to wake the whole house. Good thing a vast majority of the residents aren’t here.

  Shit.

  My mind focuses on where everyone else is, and the bitter sadness comes rushing back, choking me. I rest my forehead on her thigh and force it to the back of my mind. My mission is to make sure Mena is okay. Screw everything else.

  I stand, plucking her from the counter and carry her back to the bedroom. I give her a swift kiss on her rosy lips and sit her on the bed. I cup her cheeks and dive in for another quick kiss.

  “Get dressed and pack a bag. We’re going on a trip,” I murmur against her lips and promptly travel from the room.

  No more interruptions, no more drama. Just me and Mena and a chance for her to heal.

  13

  Some Things You Can’t Take Back

  MENA

  It takes a few minutes to get myself together before I can A – stand up and B – focus enough to pack a bag. I’ve heard women talking about orgasms but holy shit… I’ve obviously never had one. My sexual experience is limited to fade to black romance novels from the 1950’s and 60’s and some naughty translations of Shakespeare. Well, that, and my first week under Iva’s care.