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 toreview 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 clothes and 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.
He should leave. He should kill her for what she did. He should yell.He should scream. He should punch the walls. He should turn around and never, ever come back.
Everything he had left—his family and his job—pulled at him to go out those doors without a second glance. A smarter fae would’ve done just that.
But he couldn’t get his mind off those words. He couldn’t ignore them and let his anger win.
If there was even the slightest chance that Ryker hadn’t been wrong, that he hadn’t married a cold-blooded, merciless killer, that the woman he loved somehow had existed, then he couldn’t leave.
Seeing her here, broken and bleeding, hurt more than her betrayal. More than her deceit. More than watching her bleed out on the carpet in their hotel room. More than the anger burning a hole in his chest.
He couldn’t turn and walk away, abandoning her to die.
A risky, stupid plan formed in Ryker’s mind. It was foolish, could potentially cost him the job he loved, and was likely something he’d regret in the future, but it was the path he needed to take.
His stupid heart, with its stupid need to protect those he loved, wouldn’t let him do anything else.
Consequences be damned. He’d deal with those later.