by Lyra Evans
And that was it.
“I remember,” Oliver said quietly, his every word careful. “Our first time. I’d wanted you so badly. And then you were there, with me, in me, and everything was simple.” Oliver turned away, fighting the bile in his throat. “I wish we could go back that. To when things were easy. To before the mess of my life happened.”
Sky crowded in, his chest to Oliver’s back as it had been in the cave. He wrapped his arms around Oliver’s waist. “We can,” Sky said, words whispered into his ear.
Oliver lingered in the hold a moment, then stretched out of it, pulling away slowly, his face still away from Sky. “No,” he said. “There’s no going back. Not after everything. Not even now, when we can’t really be honest with one another.”
“We are being honest, though, aren’t we?” Sky asked, his hand reaching out to Oliver’s shoulder. He pulled Oliver into a turn, forcing him to face Sky again.
“How can I be sure with you?” Oliver asked, tears welling at the corners of his eyes. His desperation edged his words, and Oliver caught Sky’s gaze, steady and shining emerald even in the grey light of the storm. “How can I be sure, when you lie so easily. You hurt me…”
Sky’s palm found Oliver’s jaw, his thumb running over Oliver’s cheek again, his fingers in Oliver’s wet hair. “Leaving you was the biggest mistake of my life, Oli,” he said. “I’ll do whatever it takes to prove that to you.” He paused, then, with a small smile. “We could make a deal.”
Oliver barked a short laugh and shook his head, heart in his throat. “I won’t fall for that.”
Sky shook his head and grasped Oliver’s arms. “No, really,” Sky said. “You word it. However you want. And I’ll shake.”
Eyes wide and bright and almost earnest, Sky seemed full of hope, shining the kind of light he always did. But Oliver realized now it wasn’t sunlight in a tunnel—it was a lighthouse above a rocky cliff.
He hesitated a moment, biting his lip. “Okay,” Oliver said. “I’ll answer three questions honestly, to the best of my ability, and in return, you have to answer my three questions in full honesty.”
Sky smiled and nodded. “Deal,” he said, offering his hand. Oliver inhaled a slow, quiet breath and took Sky’s hand, shaking it three times. He felt the magic swarm him, spreading through his fingertips to race toward his heart and throat and tongue. It tingled and lifted him, binding away impulses that flew in the face of the deal. Oliver chewed his tongue a moment, getting used to the feel of it.
“You first,” Oliver said, and Sky nodded.
“Do you still love me?” Sky asked, and Oliver felt it as a punch to the gut. Only this time, he was prepared for the hit, and the blow was absorbed wide, over his whole torso. Oliver studied Sky’s face, the magic on his tongue adjusting his words.
“You were my first, Sky,” he said slowly. “I’ll always love you.”
The smirk on Sky’s face grew, lopsided and victorious. He took Oliver’s hands in his, holding them as though they were reciting marriage vows, not exchanging truths. “Am I the best you’ve ever had?”
This one was harder, the impulse stronger, but Oliver wrangled his words, and bowing his head slightly, as though blushing, he said, “There’s no one like you.”
When Oli looked up, Sky’s whole face broke into the kind of unrestrained pleasure of a vengeful child. Tilting his head back, his stance relaxed and confident, Sky asked the question he couldn’t help himself to. “Who’s the greater lover, the greatest love of your life, me or Connor?”
There was only one answer to that, and Oliver smiled, the expression cracking at his face as it spread wide across his lips, to his eyes. He held Sky’s hands steadily, smoothing his thumb over the back of Sky’s knuckles. This was the final question. There was nothing to do but answer.
“Come on, Sky,” Oliver said. “It’s obviously Connor.”
Chapter 17
For a moment there was only the rain. It fell in sheets around the copse of trees, as though the sky was crashing down in slates of glass. Everything was muted, everything was deafening, and all Oliver knew was the furious hatred written on Sky’s face. It was an anger and loathing such as he had never seen on another person, so deep and violent was the lash of it, but instead he felt it reflected in his own heart.
“Surprised, I see,” Oliver said, unable to keep the smirk from his own mouth. Sky wrenched his hands away. The slash of his mouth drawn down in a grimace, Sky looked much less beautiful than before. His every feature was wrought with the truth of him, finally revealed. Oliver was only disappointed in himself it took this long to see it. “I guess you’re not used to being outwitted.”
The hatred intensified, but Sky forced his face into another expression, one of disgusted haughtiness. He snorted once. “How exactly have you outwitted me?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest. “You’ve only proven you’re more deluded than I thought. That you believe Connor is your greatest love is just sad. But I suppose a publicly shamed detective and a cheating, second-rate Alpha deserve each other.” Sky turned to leave.
“I don’t think so,” Oliver said, careful to avoid asking any questions, and he watched, smirk still pulling at his lips, as Sky was forced to stop at the edge of the copse. He waited until Sky turned back to face him. “You’re still bound by the magic of your own deal. You owe me three honest answers.”
Every line of Sky’s body screamed his tension, his discomfort. He was still and stalk straight, his face an impenetrable mask devoid of expression. Oliver wanted to lean back against a tree trunk, to affect the leisurely confidence Sky so often portrayed, but Oliver’s heart was still beating hard in his neck, throbbing as though he was being squeezed through a funnel.
“Why did you kill Malcolm Ryan, Jamie Grace, and have Will Sumpter kill himself?” Oliver asked, crafting the question as directly as possible to deny Sky the possibility of squirming his way out of answering it. He watched Sky struggle for a moment, his mouth distorting as he chewed on his own tongue, fighting the answer that demanded to be spoken.
And then he turned again, arms up to do something, cast some kind of spell, make some kind of exchange with nature to nullify the deal he made with Oliver. Oliver jerked to motion to stop him, a hand out in mid-air to halt his progress, but he needn’t have done. Sky fell back immediately, staring into the darkness beyond the edge of the circle of trees.
Slowly, out of the downpour and gloom, came a multitude of shining lights. They advanced, bit by bit, in twos, until they breached the edge of the copse and the pack was revealed. Wolves arranged in a tight, intimidating circle, advanced on Sky until he stood in the centre of the copse, not two feet from Oliver, his shoulders heaving at the sight of the Werewolves.
“They’re here to witness your confession,” Oliver said, his tone betraying his pleasure at Sky’s trapped state. “And to keep you from running off. I’m waiting for my answer.”
Sky shot Oliver a withering, horrible look. His green eyes were no longer emerald but a poisonous, acid green, full of loathing and venom. Oliver was unmoved.
“I killed them to get back at you,” Sky spat after a moment, unable to deny the rules of the exchange any longer. “To get you to call me, to prove you still loved me. And to send Connor a message: you’re still mine. You belong to me.”
Oliver shuddered visibly, his own smile fading to a grimace at the sight of Sky. The words cut through him, chilling him to the core, but he ignored them.
“How did you commit the crimes to which you just confessed?” Oliver asked, needing the evidence, for good measure. Sky glared at him.
“I read the article about you in the Daily Spell and knew I had to act right away. That you were destroying yourself by fucking around, turning yourself into a slut, was evidence of how much influence I had over you. It was proof that you were ruined because of me. But your relationship with the Wolf—that I couldn’t allow. So I crossed over the border and stripped the guards of their memories by giving up my own
. I went to stalk you, to see if it was true. And I saw you in Black Moon, bound and blindfolded and vulnerable to him. It was sickening. So I lured each Wolf with the Ember app, picking the ones who looked most like you, then planning to meet them. Malcolm Ryan was easy because there was no threat yet. He wanted to get over his ex, so he was ready and willing to meet a pretty young thing who did nothing but listen to him. He barely got a chance to see me before I shot him, stripped him, and strung him up.”
The creeping cold of Sky’s story spread over Oliver’s body. There was no remorse whatsoever in Sky’s tone, in his words. In fact, as he spoke, his face shifted from the grimace to a kind of distorted smirk. As though he was proud of himself, of his work. There was a low rumble around Oliver now, one he mistook for thunder. It was the deep, steady growling of an entire pack of Wolves.
“I gave up some of my senses to wipe the sense information from the scene. The spot on my neck you always touched, the smell of your soap that always drove me mad, the taste of your come, from when I sucked you off and made you scream my name,” he continued, and Oliver struggled to breathe slowly and steadily, to stop himself vomiting and showing Sky just how much he was revolted. “That sort of thing. Then I waited. And I watched. I watched you summoned to the scene, watched you and the Wolf deciding what to do. And I watched you during the fucking sham of a wake. Getting onto the grounds without detection was trickier than I expected. I had to stop time to manage it. Gave up some of my own time. Only a second of my life, and that just to see you—getting fucked. I watched as he pushed you down and made you beg for him, in front of his entire pack. And I watched you take it and want more, and I couldn’t fucking stand it. So I lured another one. Jamie Grace was a bit harder, a bit more cautious than Malcolm Ryan, but still he came. He wanted to be wanted, and wanted it quiet. So he came to Black Moon, and I did the same thing. Shot him, laid him down just like you’d been, just the way you laid yourself out for him. And I found Will Sumpter, just for good measure. I needed another kill for after I joined you.
“He was a pathetic puppy. So in love with his betrothed he was willing to die for her rather than take over her pack alone.” Sky made a derisive sound, and Oliver remembered the naked, agonizing grief on Kyrie’s face when they told her about Will. She’d been ready to die, Oliver thought. And now she would have to live without him. “It took a bit of convincing that the magic would hold, that she’d really be saved. But I’m more powerful than any other Fae. I can make myths reality.” Sky’s smug pleasure wrote itself across his face as he ran his tongue over the edge of his teeth. “I gave him the gun and the collar and the dildo. Told him exactly what to do. He hated betraying his own pack that way, the fucking bitch. But he did it. Used his own fucking collar, in the end, but he killed himself.
“After I met him, I crossed back over the border and waited for your call. I made sure I was the closest agent so they wouldn’t even consider sending someone else. Then all I had to do was give you the kind of attention you so desperately crave while planting the seeds of doubt in your mind about Connor. Telling him he wasn’t protecting his pack, making him snap in front of you, at you, showing you just how dangerous and unstable he is. That and plant the Ember app and conversations on his phone. It wasn’t difficult to fake. Not after I’d listened to him speak for a few days. And heard the way he talked to you, the way he coaxed you into wanting him, into begging him. It was child’s play to mimic that in text messages.”
Oliver had known it was coming, had known how much Sky had done and what. But hearing it described in painful, glorifying detail was more than he could bear. The thought of Sky watching and listening as Connor took him in the basement, as Oliver begged Connor and delighted in the ecstasy Connor gave him, made Oliver sick. He wanted to vomit, tension and sickness rising in his throat until he nearly gagged, just imagining Sky writing out messages in Connor’s voice, planning to destroy Oliver’s image of him. He wanted to destroy Oliver again, just as he had the first time. But now Oliver was going to destroy Sky.
The Wolves around them began to inch closer, hackles raised, maws drawn back in full, violent snarls. Sky showed no particular inclination to notice them at all. Instead, his eyes were trained, as ever, on Oliver. The most important question still remained.
“How do I find Connor?” Oliver asked, and Sky’s imitation of calm turned to real smugness. Oliver swallowed hard.
“Go to the cave on the northern crest of the old woods, back where we found shelter, back where you let me into you for the first time,” Sky said, his voice flat and emotionless. “There is magic binding the mouth of the cave, blocking out scents and sound. You’ll have to give up a secret, something you hide inside yourself, in order to take down the magic. Connor’s unconscious and bound inside.” Then Sky glanced at his watch, the smirk on his mouth spreading. “But you’ll have to hurry. The cave’s floor is different than it was. It’s low ground now, and with all this rain and cold… I hope he wasn’t lying face down in it.”
Every one of Oliver’s impulses told him to throw himself at Sky, to beat him down with his fists and any magic he could summon to his aid. He wanted to level the forest and watch the trees fall onto Sky. He wanted to flay him alive with cutting spells and watch him bleed out. But instead he steeled his muscles against movement.
Instead, Oliver shook his head slowly, his disgust with Sky plain on his face. A question escaped him unbidden. “Did you ever really love me?” he asked, and Sky’s vile, unchanging face suddenly triggered something in Oliver. He sighed and shrugged, shaking his head again. “No. Never mind. I just realized,” he said, throwing his full meaning behind every word, “I don’t care.”
The magic had worn off anyway, liberating Sky of the deal for honesty. But he was no threat to Oliver anymore. Not really. Oliver turned to walk out the circle into the downpour. A distant flash in the corner of his eye and a muted click made him turn.
Sky’s face was drawn in fury again, his teeth bared in a more animal expression than Oliver had ever seen on Connor’s face. In his hands was a gun, cocked and pointed straight at Oliver.
Oliver reacted in the same instant that Sky pulled the trigger. As though the world moved in slow motion, spinning through cement rather than air, Oliver saw the beveled shield spell appear out of his obsidian collar, his hands up to support the magic. The bullet—a silver missile directed at him—punctured the air as it travelled leaving rippling shockwaves behind. Heart stopped, Oliver waited, hoping, as the bullet hit the shield, unsure it would hold.
Then time sped up again, and the bullet ricocheted off and upward into a tree. In the same moment, a grey Wolf had launched itself at Sky’s arms, long fangs sinking deep into Sky’s wrists and wrenching them down. He dropped the gun into the mud. A scream tore through the night, and Oliver stumbled backward. A surge of Wolves converged on Sky, every pack member pouncing on him until he disappeared beneath a mass of fur and teeth.
Feet carrying him unevenly backward into the rain, Oliver watched, wide-eyed and mouth agape, as the Wolves of Connor’s pack tore a shrieking Sky to pieces in the mud and the rain. Then Oliver closed his mouth, took a deep breath, and turned his back to the pack. A black Wolf appeared at his side, large and poised with silken fur. Oliver nodded to Donna. They had an Alpha to save.
Chapter 18
It took them hours to slog through the mud and flooded lowlands of the old wood. Donna moved with more ease than Oliver, more comfortable and agile on four feet, but the heavy rain and muddled scents slowed her pace more than he would have thought. The snow long-melted in the storm, muck and leaves splattered her shiny coat, matting the fur together in places at her belly as they struggled through underbrush and unexpectedly deep puddles. Oliver was coated in mud up to his waist, having fallen to a tree root or a slippery patch more than once. His muscles ached and screamed with pain, burning raw as he pushed his body harder and harder.
His umbrella spells kept giving way, and after a while, soaked as he was to t
he bone, he stopped casting them. The drain on his magic wasn’t worth the exhaustion it added, and he needed to conserve whatever energy he could—for Connor. With every desperate step and stumble, Oliver felt his panic rising. Soon he was drowning in it as he was drowning in the onslaught of rain. There wasn’t a break in the clouds that they could see, and Sky’s last warning replayed on continuous loop in Oliver’s mind.
“I hope he wasn’t lying face down in it.”
Sky had phrased it differently than the rest of his confession. It wasn’t a statement of fact, just a distorted ploy to mess with Oliver’s mind. Which meant it was possible Connor wasn’t face down in a steadily filling pit. But the use of past tense was worrisome. Even if Connor wasn’t face down, it was possible he was already gone. Sky had said he wanted to draw it out, to make it last—but that could have been misdirection. It could have been a lie, just like everything else Sky told Oliver when he needed comfort or help. He lied. He lied.
Oliver shut down the thought, forcing it from his mind as he clung to a low-hanging tree-limb to hoist himself over a particularly deep puddle of muck. Donna ran ahead and found the safest route, waiting just at the edge of Oliver’s vision for him to catch up. He couldn’t think of the possibility that Connor was—no. Connor wasn’t dead. He wasn’t. There was no way.
Oliver would have felt it, wouldn’t he? Wasn’t that how people in love stories always knew? They felt it. And Oliver and Connor were Fated. They were Fated.
Weren’t they?
Wiping the back of his hand across his cheek, forcing away the wetness and stinging, Oliver gasped and struggled through a set of tree roots to find the relatively solid land on which Donna had stopped. He was heaving, breathless, and more drained than he believed he could be. But when she continued on, he did too. He had to find Connor. He had to find him and save him.