“Forget about it,” she whispered. “It doesn’t matter.”
He stared at her, his heart racing as he tried to process her words.
Not matter? How could she say that?
Nothing matteredmorethan this. She had wanted to killhim, for the gods’ sake.
Never, in all his years, had he been this hurt. This angry. This fucking destroyed.
By Brynleigh’s own admission, she had spent years crafting a meticulous plan designed to end Ryker’s life. Shewasa killer.
Not in the way that all vampires had blackness in their hearts. That would have been one thing.
But no.
She truly was a bringer of death. She’d sought to bring about hisdeath.
And yet…
I wasn’t going to…
Her words echoed in Ryker’s head, and despite everything he knew, despite everything he’d learned, he couldn’t stop thinking about them.
It took everything he had not to scream his frustrations to the heavens.
Over the past three hellish weeks, Ryker had steadily ignored thoughts about his treacherous wife and instead conducted a deep dive into her Maker. The things he’d discovered had painted a clear picture of exactly who the vampire was, and it wasn’t pretty.
Ryker hadn’t even had time to train his sister River—not that he wanted to face his family right now—but he was keeping up with the updates Gabriel, another water fae in the army, was sending him. Thank the gods, Gabriel had been willing to help train River. Ryker didn’t want his sister to suffer because his personal life was imploding.
Earlier, Ryker had been stepping out of the shower, preparing to review the tapes of the shifter’s interrogation for the tenth time that day, when his phone vibrated.
Nikhail
Get to The Pit, Ryker. She’s going to talk.
A stone had lodged itself in the captain’s stomach as he read his best friend’s message. His fingers had curled around the phone, and the metal cracked before he realized how tightly he was holding it.
Ryker hadn’t had time to consider why Brynleigh was in The Pit and not in a less dangerous prison. He threw on some clothesand raced over to the dungeon, breaking a dozen speeding laws to get there as quickly as possible.
He arrived just in time to hear his wife confess everything. He thought she’d admit her involvement with the rebels—after all, learning about her involvement with the Black Night was the reasonshe’d been subjected to this level of interrogation in the first place—but the words she’d spoken had been so much worse.
Brynleigh had wanted to kill him.
Her plan had been simple and terrifyingly dark. She’d make Ryker fall in love with her, and then she’d kill him on their wedding night.
Every word had curdled his stomach until he felt like he’d ingested a gallon of spoiled milk. He wanted to believe she was lying, but in his gut, he knew she was telling the truth. There were too many similarities between her story and the one Zanri Olyt, the shifter who’d attacked Ryker, had shared.
And that meant that Ryker’s wife truly had plotted against him in the worst possible ways.
Instead of stopping her, he had served her his unguarded heart on a silver platter.
A smarter fae would have heard her confession and walked away, content to let her die for her crimes. Up until a few months ago, Ryker would have said he was a smart fae.
It turned out that he was the biggest gods-damned idiot of them all.
I wasn’t going to…
Those four words echoed in his mind on a never-ending track.