Dark Skye (Immortals After Dark #15)(14)

His words didn’t hurt Lanthe. She’d been scorned by men before. Why would she care what a scarred, maddened Vrekener thought of her?

She didn’t care at all. He mattered not at all.

When she just blinked up at him, he seemed to rein in his fury. “What either of us wants is immaterial. I’ve taken you because that’s what fate decreed. You’re mine by the laws of the Lore, the laws I uphold.”

“And you always follow the laws? You act like Vrekeners are so righteous? I’ve seen more evil in your kind than in most Sorceri I’ve met.”

“Now I know you lie! You resided with Omort!”

With each Accession, a warrior for ultimate good, or ultimate evil, was born. Lanthe’s half brother had been that warrior a few Accessions ago, bringing evil to the Lore for centuries. After her mother, Elisabet, had given birth to him, she’d been cast out in shame by the noble family of Deie Sorceri. By the time Lanthe and Sabine’s father had come into the picture, Elisabet had been . . . troubled.

This Accession, twin girls had been born for ultimate good, daughters of Rydstrom’s brother, Cadeon, and Cadeon’s Valkyrie wife, Holly. Lanthe was a doting auntie to them.

“You remained with Omort,” Thronos grated, “during his reign of child sacrifices, orgies, and incest.”

Omort had hosted orgies and made a willing concubine of his half sister Hettiah, who’d died the same day he had. Toward the end of his reign, when Omort had demanded sacrifices, he’d yelled, “Something young!”

Until that one fantastical day when Lanthe had challenged Omort, she’d been helpless to stop him. She would be haunted forever by the things she’d seen him do. Take it up with management.

“I did remain with him,” Lanthe admitted. “For ages.”

“Then what evils do you think Vrekeners have perpetrated to measure up to that fiend’s?”

“Torture, murder, thievery. Even you know your kind steals Sorceri powers.” The fire scythe his father had wielded wasn’t good only for parent beheadings; it also drained powers from its victims, a process Sorceri derisively termed neutering.

It was rumored that some “benevolent” Vrekener had ordered the knights to siphon sorcery, instead of taking lives. Yet in the last century, the knights had begun doing both—so that those abilities could never be reincarnated. . . .

“We harvest and store them, preventing them from being used for evil.”

“To us, a root power is like a soul. You’re stealing souls!”

“Sorceri steal each other’s powers, like cannibals feeding! How many have you stolen?”

She didn’t answer, was guilty as charged. She’d had no choice, since hers kept getting poached by smooth-talking Sorceri males. How many times had she fallen for one’s seduction, only to discover he’d used sex to lower her guard?

But she never stole from decent-minded Sorceri, the ones who only wanted to be left alone to drink, fornicate, gamble, and worship any gold they’d swindled, swiped, or conjured.

“Yet you had to steal, didn’t you?” Thronos bit out. Fat drops of rain pummeled them, batting against his wings. “Since yours were continually robbed?”

She hadn’t known he was aware of that. No one would want her worst enemy to know she’d been a dupe.

“Was that how you got caught by the mortals?” He canted his head in that foreboding way. “Were you away from Rothkalina seeking another power?”

“I don’t think you really want to know the answer to that question.”

“Tell me, or I’ll toss you down the mountain myself.” He reached forward, his fingers making a cage over her throat, his expression promising pain.

He was a monster, a world away from the boy he’d been when he fed her and held her—and she’d sighed words she could never take back.

Oh, well, he’d asked for it. “I was seeking something else entirely. After losing a wager with my sister, I had to go without sex for a year. I was on the hunt for a new lover when I got nabbed.”

He gave a curt yell, lifting her by her jaw. She dug her gauntlets into his forearms, but he didn’t seem to feel them. “Wh-what are you doing?”

In the bobbing tree, he held her body aloft, so her gaze was level with his.

Mother of gold, he was going to toss her! She couldn’t stifle a whimper of fear.

His head rushed toward her body. She braced for a vicious strike of his horns. Instead of hitting her, he rubbed the base of one over her shoulder and neck, marking her with his scent.

As if by doing so, he could pry her out of some faceless male’s arms.

The behavior was blatantly demonic.

When he finally pulled back, his eyes gleamed with rage. “You crippled me. For centuries, you cuckolded me over and over again. The pain you gave me in the past wasn’t enough for you? You wish to deliver more?”

Right now? Desperately! She wanted to claw his eyes out, to rake her gauntlets down his scarred face! “Because you deserve it!”

He flung her back down to the limb. “Look what you wrought, Melanthe!”

As she scrambled toward the trunk, he ripped open the front of his shirt, revealing scars she hadn’t seen before, marks jagging along his rigid torso. He pounded a fist over the center of his chest, over the raised scar there. “Does this one look like it was deep? Half an inch closer, and it would have pierced my heart!”