Chapter 39 I Feel Betrayed
Brea's POV
Rayne's wound closed. I watched it happen from where I sat on the ground the dark stain at his side slowing, stopping, the skin beneath pulling itself back together. His breathing steadied.
The grey pallor in his face pulled back. He sat up and looked at me.
His eyes traveled from my face to his side to the stone beneath us where the circle still pulsed faintly with his blood.
"You stabbed me," he said.
"Rayne—"
"My blood opened that circle." His voice was very quiet. The specific quiet that meant the control was costing him.
"The witches came because of what you did."
"I wasn't myself—"
"You were standing right in front of me." He stood slowly. "You looked at me. And you did it."
Then, aloud moonlight shifted. It moved across the dry fountain basin
The fractures in the stone caught it first. Then the shapes inside the fractures emerged, pooling with pale light one by one like something being read aloud.
I watched it happen to his face. All at once — the way a structure fails when the wrong point gives. His eyes fixed on the runes and everything present in him receded. His jaw loosened. His hands dropped open at his sides.
I didn't know it then. I only understood it later — what the runes had unlocked in him in that moment. Every memory the death\-state had buried. The lap dance. The competition against his rival and the specific charged energy of what came after.
His hand pushed my chest. The impact sent me sideways. I hit the stone.
The grey world tilted violently. I heard the crack of it and felt absolutely nothing.
I pushed myself up. Saw Rayne standing over me. Reached for him instinctively not thinking, just reaching, the way you reach for something familiar when everything else has gone wrong.
I barely got to my feet before Drake was there.
His hand closed around my arm pulling me back and in the same motion one fluid unbroken movement his other hand drove the silver stake into Rayne's chest.
Rayne's breath left him. He looked down at it. Then at Drake. Then his legs went down the silver working through him immediately, dropping him to one knee, hand catching the fountain basin.
Drake stepped in front of me. Put himself between us.
"You don't get to do that," he said quietly to Rayne. "Not to her."
Rayne looked at him from one knee. Then at me. One long look that had everything in it and nothing I knew how to answer.
He reached up and pulled the stake free himself. Set it on the stone. He could have killed Drake for that. I think we both knew it.
He didn't, he just looked at me one final time and then he was gone and Seraphine too...both before I finished blinking.
The square was just me and Drake and the broken fountain.
Somewhere across the city nine people woke up at the same moment.
They sat up in their beds, looked at their hands, and adjusted to bodies that weren't quite theirs anymore. A woman smiled at her sleeping husband with an expression he wouldn't recognize until it was too late. A teenage boy stood in front of a mirror in a bakery back room and laughed at nothing.
None of them went back to sleep. I didn't know any of that yet. I was walking home.
The house looked worse in the morning light. I went inside my house and I stood in the front room.
The damage from the night was still there. The broken lamp, the glass scattered across the floor, the furniture pushed out of place.
I picked up the largest piece of the lamp first. Then the shade. Then I started on the glass, crouching down and gathering the fragments with my hands because I couldn't find anything else to use and moving felt better than standing still.
Drake came in quietly. He found a cloth and started on the far corner without being asked.
We worked in silence for a while. I was reaching for a larger fragment near the wall when the edge caught my palm, buy I didn't notice because I couldn't feel pain.
I kept reaching for the next piece.
"Brea." I looked up.
Drake was crouching across the room watching me. His eyes moved to my palm.
I looked down. Dark stains spreading across the lines of my hand. Running toward my wrist.
I watched it the way you watch something happening to someone else.
"You're bleeding," Drake said.
"I know." I looked at it for another second. "I can't feel it."
He crossed the room and crouched beside me. Took my hand in both of his and looked at the cut. His mouth tightened slightly.
He wrapped the cloth around it and applied pressure I couldn't feel him applying. I watched his hands work.
Drake was still holding my bandaged hand when I looked up at the walls around me.
"This house. My mother had painted that wall herself — I remembered watching her do it, standing on a chair because she wasn't tall enough to reach the top."
"My brother had scratched his name into the doorframe when he was seven and my father had been too proud of him to sand it out." I looked for the scratch, it was still there. Barely visible in the grey light but there.
"They should be here," I said quietly. "My parents. My brother." My throat tightened. "The Enclave took them and I ended up in a vampire palace and I came back to this house thinking—" I stopped.
"And instead I brought a royal vampire through the border ward and possession witches into the square and now there are nine people in this city who aren't themselves and my family is still out there and I can't...."
My voice broke on it. I pressed my free hand over my eyes. The sob came. "I don't know how to carry all of it at once."
Drake put his arms around me... My face finally buried against his chest. His heartbeat steady against my ear.
I cried on his shoulder and he let me and didn't say anything that would have made it worse.
Outside, at the narrow window beside the front door, Rayne stood in the early morning light.
He had come back for one reason. To apologize.
Three words he had never said to anyone in his life and the one person he owed them to was inside that house. He'd stood at the gate long enough to decide that the debt was real. Then he moved to the window.
Drake's arms around her. Her face against his chest. Rayne stood at the window.
The apology stayed where it was. Something in his expression closed over like a wound deciding not to heal.
Then, the next second he was gone.