Page 74 of Vanquished Gods
I pushed the heavy door open, then stepped into the room and found it empty. I’d never been inside before. As I would have expected from his room, everything was tidy and controlled. But what I hadn’t expected was the warmth in there. His bed, neatly made with dark burgundy and gold, was tucked all the way up to the intricately carved mahogany headboard. It smelled like him, too—dark spice and warmth, making my pulse race. A fireplace crackled to the side, casting flickering light that washed the room in orange and gold. Everything was perfectly ordered, down to the placement of the neatly arranged books on his shelves. It was a stark contrast to Maelor’s utter chaos, his open books and half-written poems that littered his room.
But Maelor had grown up in wealth. Sion? He’d had to create order for himself from a chaotic world.
I turned as a wooden door opened and Sion stepped out, wearing only a pair of trousers. My breath hitched. A few droplets of water gleamed on his muscled shoulders, reflecting the moonlight, each one seeming to trace the hard lines of his body. His eyes met mine, and they flickered with shadows for a moment, dark and dangerous. I felt heat rush to my cheeks.
“We need to talk.”
I took him in as I started to move. He’d already healed from the vines that had pierced him. As I stared at him, the room suddenly felt warmer, the air charged between us.
I sat at the edge of his bed. “I take it you know about Bran.”
He stepped closer. “You could have mentioned it, perhaps, at some point during the past several weeks, seeing as I sent out valuable manpower to search for him.”
His voice had a low, dangerous calm, and it vibrated over my skin.
“I know. Well, I know that now. But I didn’t know that I could have told you when I first arrived. I only knew that you’d killed my father, and that you’d picked me up by the throat in Ruefield, and that you liked killing people.” I exhaled sharply. “I mean, I thought you killed my father. Maelor told me the truth.”
His muscles coiled tightly, his body going eerily still. Shadows licked at the air around him. But instead of addressing that, he said, “I have questions. Let’s start withwhyyou murdered one of my oldest friends.”
“He threatened Leo,” I said quickly. “He said—he said if I didn’t go with him to Gwethel, I could say goodbye to that little boy?—”
Sion let out a short, cold laugh. “He meantthe Orderwould capture you. That’s what he meant about saying goodbye to the little boy. That the Order would kill him. And then you spent all this time judging me for doing what a vampire does…”
“I’m sorry I killed him. In the moment, I really thought that I had to kill him to keep myself and Leo safe.”
His eyes darkened, but I read in them a flicker of something else—something like comprehension—as it passed through his gaze. “I always knew you understood the survival instinct.” He scrubbed a hand over his jaw, and he stared out at the sea through his window. “Well, it’s done. And we can’t let anyone else here know that it was you. He wasverywell liked.”
My fingers curled into his soft velvet blanket. “But I wasn’t the only one keeping secrets, was I? You took my memories from me.”
Shadows seeped into the air around him. Suddenly, he looked strangely lost. “So, Maelor told you.”
“And what, exactly, did you take from my memories? My father’s last moments? Maelor only told me that he was the onewho killed my father—he said the rest would need to come from you.”
He reached for me, wrapping his hand around mine. A look of agony shone in his eyes, and I felt, with a strange certainty, that no one else saw this side of him—not even Maelor.
“You wouldn’t have wanted to remember his last moments,” he said softly.
My chest ached. “You don’t know that. But let’s not focus on that right now. How did we evenmeet?”
“Long before I met you, I was captured by the Order. This was even before the Pater took over. Early on, they tortured me as they demanded names. I grew to know humans as utterly evil. Then, they forgot me. I lived, if that’s what you could call it, utterly forgotten, withering in a dungeon for decades by myself. I shriveled into nothing. I lost my mind, turned into an animal. I forgot how to speak. The guards changed over the years. They no longer knew who I was, or what I was. They only knew me as a weak, shriveled demon.
“When the Pater took control, they started arresting more and more witches. The dungeons grew crowded. And they no longer knew me, thinking I wasn’t much of a threat at all. They threw two witches into my cell with me. I killed them immediately, drained them of blood. By some innate, animal instinct, I arranged their bodies to look like they were sleeping, and I hid under my cloak until they opened my cell again. And once they did, I smashed through the iron door. I drank the blood of every guard I encountered until I broke free of the dungeon. It was still night. I crawled to a cave not far from the Baron’s manor house.”
“And I found you there?”
His fiery gaze seemed to devour me. “As I started to remember who I was, I strayed from the cave one night, stripped off my clothes, and bathed in the river. That was when you firstsaw me, out on a walk by yourself in the forest. And something stopped me from killing you. I remember thinking that you looked sad. We didn’t speak. You just stared at me. I moved closer to you, rushing at the speed of a vampire. You seemed…overwhelmed.”
A memory of him, naked and bathed in moonlight, flashed through my thoughts. Water had dripped down his muscled body, every hard line sculpted like a marble statue, defined with a perfection I could only describe asdivine. I remembered his broad, powerful shoulders caressed by silver moonlight.
My eyes widened, and heat ran over my skin at the memory rising to the surface. It felt uncanny, real and dreamlike at the same time, like something I could almost touch, but it slipped through my fingers like smoke. “It almost seems familiar.”
“The next day, you started bringing me things. Offerings. Fruit, trinkets. Even clothes. At first, you thought I was one of the old gods. And you remember that a little, don’t you? You later thought you were cursed because you left an offering for the old gods.”
“I thoughtyouwere an old god? Was I stupid back then or something?”
The corners of his mouth twitched in a faint smile. The sight of it sent an unexpected jolt of warmth through me. “No, I’d say you’re very wise. You recognize perfection when you see it. You thought I was a god.”
“Very convenient for you that I have no memory of this, so I can’t exactly argue.”