Page 99 of A Legacy of Poison and Lies

“Sit by the fire,” she told him.

“We should check,” he began. He was watching her, his chest heaving, and she knew all the evanescing hadn’t been enough to burn away the lingering rage, knew he’d wanted to pull Raif apart back in the forest.

Zylah made a point of angling her head to listen. “There are only two heartbeats here, mine and yours. Sit.”

The fire was still built from the day she’d left, the rug she’d pulled down from one of the bedrooms still in front of it. Holt dropped a handful of embers onto the wood pile, flames bursting to life, casting shadows across the room.

“Your wounds,” Zylah said quietly, the firelight illuminating the gash at his neck, the way he pressed his hand to his ribs. He sank into the lounger in silence, the one she’d dragged from the other side of the room by herself after leaving Kerthen. She could feel every emotion rolling off him, a mirror to everything she felt inside herself. Resentment, sorrow, regret.

His eyes were fixed on her as she knelt on the lounger beside him, pressing a shaky hand to his neck where his injury still hadn’t clotted over. He’d focused so much of his power on evanescing them, he hadn’t spared any for healing himself, and that only made her anger flare hotter, wilder.

“Zylah,” he said roughly, catching her hand in his as she pushed her magic into him. She was exhausted too, but she wouldn’t rest. She would do this for him. For her mate.

His breath caught as if he’d heard her, and she looked up to meet his gaze as the wound knitted back together beneath her fingertips, saw the worry in his eyes, could hear the wild beating of his heart.

“You stopped me from accepting it, didn’t you? The bond.” Twice, she realised. “When Deyna removed the vanquicite. And the second time when we… were together. Why?”

“Because of what you’re feeling now. Because of your reaction to the idea of mates when we talked about it back in Virian. Because I didn’t want it to be another thing you hated yourself for after everything you’ve been through. And because I wanted you to understand that I’m in love with you before you accepted the bond when you had no idea that was what you were doing.” His words were sure, steady, but he held his hand over hers tentatively, as if he were expecting her to pull away.

She remembered their conversation in Virian so clearly.Cruel fatewere the words she’d used when they’d spoken about the concept of mates for the first time. And he’d tried to tell her what they were to each other, she realised. Several times. When he’d left her alone with Rin, and when she’d knocked on his door. Before the tomb.I can’t look at you like I’m just a friend and fine with that, no matter how hard I try to conceal this thing so that every person we meet, Fae or human doesn’t see it,he’d said.

“I tried to bury it. For as long as you needed, I would have.”

“I don’t want an apology, Holt. Not when you had to…”To watch.To have a front-row seat to her relationship with Raif. To her coming back to their room at the tavern night after night, Raif’s scent all over her.Gods. She pressed a hand to her stomach to calm her nausea, but she couldn’t sit still. She uncoiled to her feet, pacing in front of the fire.

Zylah understood why he’d done it. But it stillhurt, and that hurt mingled with the pain she’d caused him, the absolute fucking mess she’d made of everything. “Jesper’s been compelling you?” He didn’t reply, but she felt his confirmation in her mind. Not his words in her thoughts, just an affirmation brushing against her conscious. He didn’t move, just watched her closely as his breathing subsided. Despite everything, he’d been holding back when fighting Raif, but he’d likely lost a lot of blood and then evanesced a sizeable distance. Zylah shook her head as she noticed he was still clutching the wound across his ribs. Too stubborn for his own good.

She leaned over him, one hand healing the injury, the other bracing herself against the lounger. The wound was deeper than he’d let on, and her anger spiked again at the thought of him evanescing so far before healing. That he could have bled out before they’d even made it to safety. He didn’t reach for her, but she felt his eyes on hers, felt certain he could feel every last drop of her anger.

When she pulled her eyes up to meet his, the endless sadness in them quelled some of her rage. “Start from the beginning.” She moved to the fire again, offering him space, giving it to herself, because she needed to hear what he had to say. “Tell me everything you can.”

Panic flared in her mind. Not hers, his. But then it was gone, as if he’d snuffed it out, covered it up the moment he’d realised he’d let it slip.

“Marcus had me working for Arnir for years,” he said quietly, his words flat, tired.

He’d told her as much before. But now she understood. “He had Jesper compel you into doing it?”

Another silent confirmation. So he likely knew all along that she hadn’t killed Jesper, but how could she blame him for that if he’d been compelled to silence? Even back in Virian, she’d known he was stuck in something he felt he had no way out of. Only here was the truth of it: he didn’t.

“When Marcus realised you were Fae, he had Arnir send his men after you. The day before we met, I started to feel… I didn’t know what I was feeling. I feltyou, evanescing from the gallows, this burst of power reaching out for me, but I had no idea what it was. Who it was. Iwasbathing in the springs before I found you because I’d been trying to shake off the unease I’d felt. But then I felt something in the water.” He put a hand to his chest, a far-off look in his eyes as he stared at the fire. “A pull, a ripple of something like a thread, urging me to find the end of it.”

“I saw something in the water,” Zylah said softly, her brow scrunching. A face, forming in the blue, as if something inside her knew he was nearby and urged her to search for him, to seek him out if only for a moment.

“I followed the thread to you. A human, tired and afraid. Rope marks at your neck. I couldn’t work out how you’d escaped from the gallows, but I knew Arnir had the girl who, as far as he believed, had killed his son, so it didn’t take much to figure out who you were.” He was looking at her now, his eyes moving over her ears, her face, as if he were seeing her as she’d been that day.

She remembered the way he’d bitten into his brin fruit, head tilted to one side as he took her in. And then she’d evanesced away from him.

“And then you evanesced,” he said quietly, as if he’d heard her thoughts, a soft laugh of disbelief curling around his words. “I told myself I’d just get you to Virian. Get you to Rose and Saphi. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. To leave you. Arnir sent his instructions to me the next day, that I was to find the girl from the posters, and I knew they’d find you by the end of the week.”

Zylah pieced everything together as he spoke. “The job. At the gardens. You arranged it.”

Holt nodded.

“I did whatever I could to keep you hidden. Working with Jilah. Asking the Fae and the Black Veil to look out for you. Raif was like a brother to me, I didn’t think.” His anger flared, and she could do nothing to ease him.

Zylah recalled Holt’s words about Raif’s competitive streak and hated herself all over again.My scent all over you… it would have been like a challenge to him at first.

“Jesper left for months after…” His words trailed off as if he couldn’t finish the sentence, and Zylah knew it was the compulsion.

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