Chapter 18

Some scars never heal.

Devlyn gazed wonderingly into Bane’s eyes. How could he look at her like that? As though he could see down to the very core of her soul, and what he found there was the most incredible thing in the world to him. She leaned up and kissed him, putting everything into that one act that she wanted him to know: how much she cared for him, how much she was willing to let that feeling grow.

She raked her hands up his shoulders, into his hair to tousle it with her finger tips. It was so soft, so thick, she wanted to bury her hands in it and pull. Back down those big, powerful arms, arms that she knew could rip a human apart in a blink of an eye and yet hold her so tenderly, curving down his neck, down his shoulders. She arched up as his hands explored every inch of her soft skin.

She traced her fingers across his back, felt an odd ripple in his skin at perfectly spaced intervals. “What’s this?” she asked him softly. It wasn’t there before, not last time, when she had seen and touched every inch of his hard, velvety bronze skin.

She crawled around over him, felt an electric ripple from his skin as she maneuvered, and raised herself to stand on her knees to see. His back was perfectly formed, not a flaw or imperfection to be found across the large expanse. “What are you hiding from me, Bane?” she asked carefully.

It was the “Bane” that did it. He was her husband, d****t, her mate. At least intimately she should call him by his given name, not her childish moniker for him. He roared up off the bed, away from her as much as possible before he hurt her in his anger. She was too young, didn’t understand that eventually there would be a limit to how far she could push him.

He dropped all glamour, every illusion he kept firmly in place so that she could still roam around in her perfect little world. All his permanent abrasions so that she could stay flawless, untouched. Unmarred.

“Is this what you want to see, Devlynaria?” he asked harshly, looking into her eyes with a glare that was both severely cold and intensely heated.

Devlyn wasn’t sure what she had been expecting exactly, but it wasn’t the horrific beauty that appeared before her. Yes, his body was covered with old battle scars that he chose to ordinarily hide. He was War. Of course he would be scarred. But as her eyes feasted upon his back, she felt a trimmer start in her spine.

It was as beautiful as it was grotesque. Thousands of welt marks covered his back to form an elaborately designed circle. “Who…who did this?” she asked breathlessly as she tried as best she could to cover her shock,

Damn her, she still hadn’t learned how to hide her emotions. Ironic, that his scarred back was the reason she still had that naivety. “Your father. My father. My brothers, several of your sisters. Every god on the Council had a turn at some point, even your mother.”

“But…there are thousands.” She couldn’t meet his eyes, his face; she could only stare at that design, transfixed.

“I know exactly how many there are, Devlynaria. Two thousand, seven hundred and forty-three. All to form that damn symbol.”

She shook her head and finally looked him in the eyes. . “What symbol is this? It’s nothing I’ve ever seen.”

Those eyes were cold staring back at her. “No, you wouldn’t know what a Cynthonian death symbol looks like. You haven’t trained or studied our culture in, oh, what is now? Two thousand, seven hundred and forty-three years?”

Her eyes widened and a fear she had never experienced spilled down her spine. She didn’t know what frightened her more: the cold look in his eyes or the perfectly flat tone of his voice. She looked back at his breath-taking, scarred skin, and the fear evaporated as a new emotion too strong to contain took its place. Her eyes filled with tears as guilt consumed her.

“I did that,” she whispered, too horrified to look at the effects of her stubbornness, but she never let her gaze waver, forcing herself to look at what he had endured for her.

“Why?” she asked.

“You were meant to be with me, Aria. Not only was I meant to love you, and trust me, I did fight that with everything I had, but we were meant to be an alliance. There was a war escalating when you were born, but your birth and our arrangement cooled the fires.”

“But why hurt you?”

“You needed time. Had I known how much time you were going to take, I might not have let you do it. But the Council demanded payment for your time on earth. As payment for them having to do everything they could to battle the demons and fausts threatening to consume everything.”

So it was him that had allowed her to stay. It was he who had given her freedom. The one she ran from was the one who let her run. “That doesn’t explain the symbol.”

He gave a slight shrug to his shoulders. “The Council expected you to be difficult. One mark for each year, to be in the shape of the death symbol. When inflicted upon the recipient with the correct weapon, it is deadly.”

His back was covered. “What’s missing?”

He met her eyes for the span of a heartbeat. “The very center.”

One more lash. He had only one more lash left before she killed him. “And how long did you wait until you came here to reclaim me? How long until we reach the last year’s mark?”

“One month, fourteen days and ten hours, I believe. Not really sure what time it is, or if they’re going to split hairs on eastern or pacific time.”

She let that sink in for a full minute before she exploded, charging toward him and pushing him back. “You let it get that far? You insufferable idiot! If I’d have known what was at stake, I wouldn’t have let it come to this!”

“What, Devlyn? You had to know the consequences? Did you think that you’re time here was without cost?”

“Well I damn sure didn’t expect you to be the one to pay it!”

It broke something inside him to see the tears running unchecked down her cheeks, but it only strengthened his resolve. “You know how much your parents love you, how little they could ever deny you. Did you honestly never question why they would not grant you the choice in your marriage?”

She turned indignant, despite that gnawing guilt, despite that she was so close to really killing him without ever knowing. “Of course I questioned it! The only answer I ever received was that it had to be. They never told me why. It seemed like any other arranged marriage.”

“You mean where one noble is pre-arranged to marry another to form an alliance, such as your darling Marie Antoinette to her husband, Ferdinand and Isabella, any other of the countless aristocratic marriages that came to be to end a war or to prevent a war?”

Her eyes rounded. She had never looked at it from that angle. To prevent a war. “But…why? What is this war?”

“The war in the underworld, demons and fausts uniting to create a hell like we’ve never seen, a rise of the horrendous, and our fathers are virtually powerless to stop it.”

“But you and I can?”

“No. But our children can.”