Page 145 of The Golden Rose Of Valenul

“No,” he bit out and swung back at the woman. “You’re too blind to see the possibilities, and kidnapping an innocent woman has nothing to do with any of it.”

The dhemon laughed, parried, and lunged, missing his stomach by a breath. “You’re one to talk.”

Heat bubbled through his veins. Azriel smacked her swords to the side with all his strength, sending her reeling, and stabbed fast and hard. One moment she laughed. The next, blood splattered from her mouth.

As she collapsed to the ground, she glared up at him, unable to speak. He kicked the sword away and stepped over her. She didn’t deserve any more words from him.

From the estate grounds came the frantic shouts of guards gathering near the woods. Azriel stalked away from the dead and dying dhemons, keeping the lights from the manor in sight between the trees.

A handful of guards slowed as they reached the treeline. One shouted something about the dismembered head. Another about the dhemon sprawled a few paces farther back, Azriel’s dagger buried in the chest.

Well, fuck. That’d been a good blade, too.

“Report back to the Princeps,” ordered a guard, “that Lady Caldwell had been correct. Dhemons in the garden.”

Lady Caldwell. So Ariadne had sent the guards out there. Had she hoped they’d help him? Or kill him?

Though he hoped for the former, the latter was more likely true.

I hate you more than you hate yourself.

Try as she might, it’d take more than a half-dozen Caersan guards to kill him. Not when he had an entire list of things to accomplish now.

First and foremost, he had to keep her safe. If that meant sitting outside her rooms and killing anything that breathed wrong, he’d do it.

Next, find his brother. Madan had been gone for too long, and the dhemons were as tight-lipped about where they were keeping him as he’d been about his true identity.

Finally, and possibly the solution to the first two tasks, he needed to kill Ehrun.

Azriel slipped farther from the guards before easing closer to the manor. He kept within the trees as he gazed up at the massive house, scanning each window. She had to be there somewhere.

When he found her, his heart dropped.

Ariadne stood on the veranda of her old bedroom. The very same one he’d climbed the walls to breach. A single candle glowed from a table inside, lighting her from behind. She wore a simple nightgown and robe, not unlike what she’d been in when he took her away.

And she stared right at him.

While the commotion of the guards took place to his right, she shifted in his direction, wrapped her arms around herself, and gazed out at him.

Ice-cold guilt leeched through him. He swallowed hard but didn’t move. What she thought of him surviving, he didn’t want to know. All he could do was wait and see. Tomorrow night, they’d talk. He’d make sure of it.

After all, he couldn’t watch her attend a ball at the Gards’ manor without him.

Chapter 32

How Ariadne fit into one of Emillie’s ball gowns, she may never understand. It had been a dress from the previous Season made of a soft cream fabric and lavender lace. The back scooped lower than she liked, so she layered a diaphanous shawl beneath to hide her scars. As she did so, she refused to linger on the cause of the horrible name now etched into her flesh.

Because now, each stroke of that knife connected the pain to Azriel.

What would she do when she saw him again? Would she choose to forgive and forget? No. There would never be a chance to forget what he had put her through.

Still, when he led those three dhemons away from her that morning, she could not help the relief she felt. She had run from her room calling for Sul—the personal guard she did not care for but who had proven he could hold his own against a dhemon. He had come racing from a servant’s hall, and when she explained what she had seen—three dhemons in the woods beyond the garden—he had launched into action. Every floor-level door to the manor was locked, curtains drawn. Guards took off for the woods.

Three, she had told him. Only three dhemons.

The moment Sul disappeared, Ariadne had hurried back upstairs and went to the room she avoided for so long. The room she once begged to leave.

And that room had not been touched since her mad rush to abandon it. The books she had coveted on the bookshelves remained in their places. The one she had been reading that terrible night still sat on the chair where she had left it to investigate the sound on the veranda.

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