Page 75 of Crown of Storm and Silence
His smile is as sharp as broken glass. "All of them. Every single creature who participated in your capture, who fed from your pain, who dared to violate what belongs to me. They've all been given very personal attention."
The possessiveness in his voice should anger me, but instead, it sends an unwelcome thrill through my veins. Even now, even with gaps in my memory and trauma fresh in my mind, some deep part of me responds to his claim with recognition.
"You look different," I observe, studying the subtle changes in his appearance. The shadows beneath his skin seem more pronounced, and there's something in his eyes that wasn't there before—a wildness that speaks of barriers crossed and lines that can never be uncrossed.
"Justice has a way of clarifying one's priorities," he says with deliberate casualness, but I can see the darkness writhing just beneath his controlled facade.
I take an unconscious step backward, and the movement seems to snap whatever restraint he's been clinging to. Shadows explode outward from his skin, wrapping around us both before I can react. The world dissolves into darkness and rushing wind, and when it reforms around us, we're standing in the great throne room.
The space takes my breath away—obsidian pillars stretching toward a vaulted ceiling painted with constellations that shift and dance with their own inner light. Shadows pool in thecorners like living things, and at the far end of the hall, a throne carved from midnight stone rises like an altar to power itself.
"Enough," he snarls, his voice carrying harmonics that make the very air shiver. "Whatever game you're playing, whatever distance you're trying to maintain—stop it. Look at me, Nesilhan. Actually, look at me when I'm speaking to you."
The command in his voice makes something deep inside me respond despite my efforts to remain aloof. I turn to face him fully, and the devastation I see there nearly undoes my careful composure.
"Just tell me what's wrong," he says, and beneath the authority, I hear desperation. "Tell me what I've done now, what new way I've failed you."
The raw pain in his voice cracks something inside my chest. This man—this creature of shadows and power who can level mountains with his fury—stands before me like a lost child begging for understanding he's certain he doesn't deserve.
"I need to know the full truth," I say quietly, my hands clenched into fists at my sides. "About why I ran. The memory fragment I recovered—it's not complete. There's more, isn't there? Something you haven't told me about that conversation, about why the thought of children terrified you so completely."
He goes very still, shadows freezing mid-writhe as understanding dawns in his dark eyes. "You remember that night."
"Pieces of it. Enough to know that your reaction wasn't just about not wanting a child." I step closer, studying his face for tells, for the micro-expressions that might reveal what he's still hiding. "You looked at me like I was asking you to embrace your own destruction. But it wasn't the baby you feared—it was something else entirely."
For a long moment, he doesn't respond. Just stands there in the shadow-wreathed throne room while something warsbehind his eyes—truth fighting against protective instinct, love battling with the desperate need to shield me from horrors I can't remember.
Finally, he speaks, his voice barely above a whisper. "You know about Isil."
"I know you loved her," I confirm, though the admission sends an unwelcome pang through my chest. "But I don't remember the details. I don't remember how she died, or what that has to do with my question about children."
He laughs, but the sound holds no humor—only bitter acknowledgment of fate's twisted sense of timing. "She was pregnant when she died. With my child."
The words steal the breath from my lungs. Of course. Of course, there was another child, another pregnancy that ended in tragedy. The pattern was there if I'd had the courage to see it—his terror at the thought of repeating history, of losing another love and another child to forces beyond his control.
"What happened to her?" I ask, though part of me dreads the answer.
His face crumbles slightly as centuries of carefully contained grief break through his controlled façade. "My brother discovered the pregnancy. Altan couldn't bear the thought that my child might carry enough power to challenge his position as heir. So he... acted."
The way he says 'acted' makes my blood run cold. "What did he do?"
"He breathed a poison into her—a curse designed specifically to corrupt shadow magic and turn it against itself. It didn't kill her outright. Instead, it drove her slowly mad, corrupting her thoughts, turning her own magic against her until she couldn't tell reality from nightmare." His hands clench into fists, shadows writhing around him with barely contained fury. "She would claw at her own skin, trying to tear the darkness out. She'dscream for hours about things that weren't there, about horrors only she could see."
Understanding begins to dawn, terrible and complete. "You tried to save her."
"I absorbed as much of the curse as I could through our bond," he confirms, his voice hollow with memory. "Shadow calling to shadow, darkness recognizing its own. But I couldn't take it all—the poison was designed to feed on itself, to grow stronger with each passing day."
"The poison that's in you now," I breathe, pieces of the puzzle finally clicking into place. "It's from her. From trying to save her and your child."
"Yes." The admission seems torn from somewhere deep in his chest. "For months, I fought to draw the poison out of her, to take it into myself where it couldn't hurt them. But with each transfer, something fundamental changed inside me. The poison rewrote my very essence, made me hunger for things that should have horrified me."
I can see the self-loathing in his eyes, the way he flinches from his own memories. "What kind of things?"
"Her pain," he whispers, and the words land between us like stones into still water.
The honesty in his confession steals my breath. I can see what it costs him to speak these truths, to admit to the very poison that's been eating away at his soul for centuries.
"She saw what I was becoming," he continues, his voice growing rougher with each word. "Saw the monster the curse was creating, and she knew that as long as she lived, the poison would keep spreading. So she..." He stops, his throat working as he struggles with words that refuse to come.
