War of Hearts(108)
She was at full strength.
Thea had thought that very unwise of Ashforth, even if she’d said she’d play nice (a lie), until her captor pushed her into a chair at the dining table and said, “If you try to escape, I’ll destroy your mate’s pack. Every single one. I’m not bluffing, Thea. And you know I have the means to tear their world apart. There are certain people that would be happy to receive information that the owner of GlenTorr Whisky turns into a dog every full moon.”
She bared her teeth at him.
“God, he’s turning you into one of them.” Rage flashed in Ashforth’s eyes. “How dare he try to take what belongs to me.”
Thea shuddered. “No matter what you do to me, I will never belong to you.”
He harrumphed. “I assume you will not cause me trouble?”
If it meant protecting the pack, she’d let him think so. Just long enough to kill him. “No, I won’t cause any trouble.” She sneered at him. “All this because you want to open a fucking gate.”
Ashforth raised an eyebrow. “It appears you’ve learned some things in the six years we’ve been apart.”
“I know what you think I can do.”
He pulled out a chair and sat beside her, casual, as if they were sitting down to dine.
She wanted to rip off his head.
“As a child,” Ashforth said, his expression hard, “I was powerless. I had to watch as my father beat my mother daily. When I was ten years old, he accused her of sleeping with our neighbor, and then he raped her for it on the kitchen table, in front of me.”
Despite herself, horror filled Thea.
Ashforth studied her carefully. “As I got older, I started to fight him, but he was a big man, my father, and I never won. Not even having youth on my side. So, I decided that I would have to take him down another way. Find a different kind of strength and power. I studied hard, got a scholarship, and from there I used every opportunity put in front of me. None of it went to waste. My plan was to become wealthy and influential, give my mother a house of her own, give her freedom, and do everything I could to squash my father beneath my thousand-dollar shoes.
“But he killed her.” Ashforth’s eyes filled with tears. “He killed her before I could save her.” He blinked rapidly, that granite expression returning. “I made sure he died in prison. Yet I’d lost, hadn’t I? I’d never won that battle. I vowed to myself that it would never happen again. If I could become as invincible as any man could hope to be, nothing would ever make me feel weak or helpless like that again.”
He glared at her, his eyes filled with hate. “I admire you almost as much as I despise you for being born with gifts you’re not even grateful for. You’re almost impossible to kill and you’ll never die of old age, Thea.
“Immortality. I didn’t know it then, but it is everything I have ever wanted. And until I have it, this emptiness inside me will never abate. I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I hope that you can understand why I’m doing what I’m doing. Maybe if I’d explained all this years ago, things would have turned out differently.”
Thea sighed, her heart pounding at his confession. “It’s not going to work,” she told him, the words echoing around the great hall. “Instead of a hundred years of emptiness … it’ll be a goddamn eternity of it.”
“No.” He pushed back from the table. “You don’t understand. You don’t know enough about the world of the fae. They live forever there. They … wouldn’t live forever if their lives weren’t everything it could never be in this world.”
He was crazy.
Thea knew that.
But listening to him … talking about a place he had no concrete evidence even existed, Thea realized the utter depths of his insanity. And she feared that it had started long, long before she even knew him.
“Eirik killed three of the kids, you know that, right? You can’t open the gate.”
“One is not enough.” Ashforth shook his head. “My research is sure on that. But two will suffice. You’re not the only one I’ve been hunting for six years.”
Her heart lurched again. “Have you found one of them?”
He smirked. “I’m getting close.”
“And how does the gate open?”
“Well, that would be telling, wouldn’t it?”
Thea let her hatred for him show. “Is it worth it? Is this worth all the death … Amanda’s death?”
“Don’t you speak her name,” he spat, a rare moment of discomposure.
“She was afraid of you. The only reason she didn’t come with me was because of Devon.”
Ashforth abruptly nodded to someone behind her and two seconds later, she felt the hands around her neck, a quick burn, followed by the sound of a loud crack before the world went dark.
*
It couldn’t have been that much later when Thea woke up. She healed fast, even from someone breaking her goddamn neck.
As she sat up in the unfamiliar bedchamber, she rubbed at her nape even though it didn’t hurt. Still, she winced. A neck break was unpleasant. She’d forgotten just how unpleasant.
Suddenly she had the urge to apologize to Conall for that time she’d broken his.